At last I saw the crystal walls on the west side, and, beyond them, the phosphorescence of the glow buildings. I stood in hesitancy. On my right stood the thickets; on my left the crystal ended in a stone wall. There was no egress except through the Palace itself. Lembken left nothing to surprise. As I turned I heard the rustle of stealthy footsteps near me. A red spark drew my eyes along the vista of the orange trees, whose perfumed flowers dispelled the cloying odor of the scented night. I saw a Mænad’s face, framed in a leopard skin, peering at me above a bank of hibiscus. I thought I recognized the girl Amaranth; but it vanished with the dying of the spark, and subdued laughter followed it. All that was evil in the world seemed to have its focus there. I felt it, breathed it, once more its psychic dominance oppressed me heavily. I saw with sudden intuition why, in a world less stable, witches were burned, how passionately the souls of simple men fought for their heritage of truth and law. This was the negation of life, of all that struggling life that aspired upward, and set its heel upon the serpent’s head. Old myths, made real in this new light, flashed into memory. I hurried back to the close and fastened the gate behind me. The sweat was dripping from my forehead when I regained the safety of the little house. I burst from the first room into the second. Elizabeth was not there. I ran into the third room. She was not there, either. Terror gripped me. Had she been lured away during the few minutes of my absence? It seemed impossible. She would have died there. Then my eyes fell on something that hung outside the window, dangling, as it seemed, from a fixed point above. It was a rope ladder, and moving outward. As I watched, I saw it begin to rise in a succession of short jerks. I grasped it with my hands. It pulled me from the floor. I clung to it, striving to get my feet upon the rungs. It drew me to the level of the window, but I would not let go. It pulled me through the window-gap, and I swung far out above the Airscouts’ Fortress. Over me I saw the dark outlines of an unshielded scoutplane, high in the air. I swung by my hands at the rope’s end, like the weight of a pendulum, making great transverse sweeps that carried me high above the bridge, from end to end of the fortress roof. I saw the courts revolve beneath me. I swept from the crystal wall out into nothingness, and London was a reeling dance of phosphorescent maze. Then the ladder began to descend. I felt the roof of the fortress touch my feet, wrenched my numbed hands away, and fell. A moment later the airplane dropped beside me as noiselessly as an alighting bird, and two men sprang from it and seized me. One was the airscout Jones. He caught me by both arms and forced me backward. But the other leaped at my throat. It was David; and he would have strangled me, had not Jones pulled him away.