"Then suddenly, out of the blue, I received a letter from Hekki. It came from a small village far to the west of Taboor. A gift accompanied it. Hekki informed me that in a valley far out in the unexplored Taraal desert he had run across a ruined city built by the Melbar kings some seventy-five thousand years ago. He hoped to make an enormous fortune from the art treasures he had found there. "The gift and the small photograph he sent me, I shall show you at the first opportunity. They are packed away now. The former is a dagger with a flexible blade of a shiny black substance unknown to me. It does not seem to be metal. The hilt is a lump of platinum. It is carved to represent some strange animal with scores of coiling tentacles. Hekki says that the object is one of his treasures, found on the site of the ancient city. But I have doubted this. I know something of the art of the Melbar kings, and certainly the dagger does not resemble the products of their craftsmen. The same is true of those wares of Hekki's which my friends have bought. They are strange--belonging neither to Earth nor Mars. "The picture too is equally puzzling. It depicts a night scene in a desert valley. Jagged hills in the distance and the nearer moon of Mars in the sky. The floor of the valley is in shadow and things there are indistinct. There are shapes there--vast shapes, odd and grotesque. And there is something in the foreground which might be almost human! "In his letter Hekki asked if he might see me again, and I immediately wrote and told him that I would. To you, Austin, this probably seems a crazy thing to do, but like most everyone who is young, I had a genuine love for intrigue and mystery, even though they might be dangerous things to meddle with. "Hekalu came to Taboor, but I saw comparatively little of him. He seemed always to be tremendously busy. Sometimes he would be extravagantly jubilant, as though he had met with some tremendous success, or again he would apparently be worried almost to the point of madness. What these emotional changes meant, he would never tell me. "Several times old Alka, his favorite slave, spoke to me. 'The Master is not as he used to be, Miss Darell,' he would say. 'He works feverishly with odd mechanisms, and every night when he is at home he stares out into space toward the farther planets with his new super-telescope. Always, what he sees makes his face turn white and hard; sometimes, he smiles and sometimes his features look like a devil's mask.' "And still Hekki's weird treasures continued, and still continue to come from the Taraal. "A group of men was sent by the heads of the Place of Knowledge out into the desert to investigate. They disappeared. The officials of the Planetary Patrol made only a hasty and unsuccessful investigation.