The one thing which saved him from exhaustion was the fact that travel at night was impractical. In the starless jet blackness of the Porovian night, it was difficult to keep on the concrete road, and even more difficult for him to find his way on detours through the tangled tropical forests. Thus, for six out of the twelve parths that make up one revolution of the planet about its axis, he was forced against his will to rest, regardless of how eager he was to reach his journey’s end. Every night, as the western sky turned pink from the unseen setting sun, Cabot would penetrate into the woods at the side of the road, seek out some thicket, crawl into the midst of it, lie down, cover his weary body with leaves, and sink into a troubled sleep. In detouring, except in the early morning or the late afternoon, when the pink light on the one hand or on the other served to show him which was east and which was west, it was very difficult to keep himself properly oriented; and accordingly he frequently lost his way. On one such occasion, after wandering aimlessly through the woods for some time, he finally came out upon a grassy hill, overlooking a small sandy plain. He sat down for a while on the crest, and surveyed the scene below him. It was by far the most peculiar expanse of sand which he had ever seen. Its entire surface was pitted with large cup-shaped depressions. But almost every one of these craters here was approached by a long, winding furrow, as though a huge snow-plow had got lost for quite a distance, in trying to make its way out of the crater. Myles Cabot was primarily an inquisitive scientist, so for the present he forgot his troubles, forgot even his quest, engrossed in the problem presented by the scene on the plain below. As he intently scanned the view, his eye caught a slight movement of the sand at the bottom of one of the depressions. He watched this particular hole for some time, but nothing further happened; so he studied one of the others for similar phenomena, and at last was rewarded by the sight of a slight spurt of sand. “These holes are probably of a volcanic nature,” he mused, “but apparently their eruptions are not powerful enough to be dangerous. This is the first evidence of volcanic action which I have ever seen on the continent of Poros. Accordingly a study of these holes may furnish some valuable information, bearing upon the nature of the boiling seas which surround the continent.”