I did indeed. We were waiting now for this pit to expand further. The sides were too steep, too smooth now for descent. But the pit was widening; the walls were every moment becoming rougher. We had been quite near, but the expanding ground moved us away. I walked over to the lip again. "The idea is to get down as soon as we can," I said. "Yes," he agreed. "Shall we try it now?" It seemed that there were places rough enough now to climb down. I had seen the bottom; it had not been very deep, though dark with shadow. But it was several hundred feet down now. We picked our way, sliding perilously at times. We came at last to the bottom--a level, rocky floor, strewn with bowlders. The place seemed now a great circular valley, with towering mountainous sides. A haze of blue distance was overhead for a sky. A pseudo-sunlight was up there; but here on the valley floor shadows made a queer, unnatural twilight. I noticed too, a different quality of air. It was dryer, with a vague metallic sharpness. "Which way?" I demanded. The drug we had taken had reached the limit of its effect while we were descending to the valley pit. The landscape was no longer changing. A new world already. A barren desolation of rock. I added: "Do we take more of the drug now?" Alt stood a moment considering. "There is another descent which I think we can almost make in a leap. This way--it is not far." We walked along the valley floor. The heights from which we had come were beside us. A wildly tumbled volcanic region. There were narrow rifts, cracks in the bowlder-strewn floor; pits, and tiny craters, some with upstanding rims, as though lava had welled up and congealed. Corrugations; ridges; little buttes, and peaks like spires of needle-point sharpness. I got the sudden impression that I was very large, and that this was a landscape all in miniature. I was walking beside Alt. "How do you know where we should go?" "Not far from here there is a place like a crescent. It should be--for our size now--quite small and not very deep. You understand? Easier for us to jump down into it now, than to make a long climb when we are smaller." We rounded the corner of a fallen mass of bowlders, as though here an avalanche had come tumbling down the valley wall. "Over there," said Alt. I saw, down a short slope, a small, crescent-shaped pit, with a span of a few feet. We were some two or three hundred yards from it. I was suddenly stricken motionless. I stood gasping, with the shock of surprise and fear. From the pit, the head and shoulders of a man rose up. A giant face, malevolently staring. His body filled the pit. His hands appeared, caught at the rim, and he scrambled out. And, with a shout, Alt turned and ran at me! CHAPTER XII _The Meeting_ For that instant, I was convinced that I was trapped, lured here by Alt to this giant lying in ambush. But Alt shouted: "Run--that is a Togaro man!"