The Very Young Man stopped--panting for breath. He could just turn about between the enclosing walls. Behind him, outside in the gully, the lizard lay baffled. And then, seemingly without further interest, it moved away. The Very Young Man rested. The danger was past. He could get out of the rift, doubtless, further ahead, without reentering the gully. And, if he kept well away from the reptile, probably it would not bother him. Exultation filled the Very Young Man. And then again he remembered his situation--lost in size, helpless, without the power to rejoin his friends. He had escaped death in one form only to confront it again in another--worse perhaps, since it was the more lingering. Ahead of him, the rift seemed ascending and opening up. He followed it, and in a few hundred yards was again on the broken plateau above, level now with the top of the gully. The winding gully itself, the Very Young Man could see plainly. Its nearest point to him was some six hundred feet away; and in its bottom he knew that hideous reptile lurked. He shuddered and turned away, instinctively walking quietly, fearing to make some noise that might again attract its attention to him. And then came a sound that drove the blood from his face and turned him cold all over. From the depths of the gully, in another of its bends nearby, the sound of an anxious girl's voice floated upward. "Jack! Oh Jack!" And again: "Jack--my friend Jack!" It was Aura, his own size perhaps, in the gully searching for him! With frantic, horrified haste, the Very Young Man ran towards the top of the gully. He shouted warningly, as he ran. Aura must have heard him, for her voice changed from anxiety to a glad cry of relief. He reached the top of the gully; at its bottom--forty feet below down its precipitous side--stood Aura, looking up, radiant, to greet him. "I took the drug," she cried. "I took it before they could forbid me. They are waiting--up there for us. There is no danger now, Jack." The Very Young Man tried to silence her. A noise down the gully made him turn. The gigantic reptile appeared round the nearby bend. It saw the girl and scuttled forward, rattling the loose bowlders beneath its feet as it came. Aura saw it the same instant. She looked up helplessly to the Very Young Man above her; then she turned and ran down the gully. The Very Young Man stood transfixed. It was a sheer drop of forty feet or more to the gully floor beneath him. There was seemingly nothing that he could do in those few terrible seconds, and yet with subconscious, instinctive reasoning, he did the one and only thing possible. A loose mass of the jagged, gold quartz hung over the gully wall. Frantically he tore at it--pried loose with feet and hands a bowlder that hung poised. As the lizard approached, the loosened rock slid forward, and dropped squarely upon the reptile's broad back.