Good old Tad! His spirits never flagged. There were moments when his cheering voice to the Middge--the laugh which they could understand though his words were foreign--helped many a despairing family to get up and plod on farther. Nereid did not know what the Middge weapon was. They did not care to talk about it now. But in the times of rest there was much talk of our food and water supply. If it would only last us to the surface. Ah, when we reached the blessed surface! * * * * * I think I shall never forget that moment when we struggled out into the dim light of the Lowlands. I stood with Tad and Arturo, half blinded. But of them all only we three had eyes that would adjust to the light. We stood in a cave-mouth, seemingly upon a mountainside. There were a score of ramifying caves beneath us. The Middge were crowding up into them. The light! The blessed, frightening daylight! We could hear the Middge babbling about it. Safety at last! We three stood, with our pupils contracting--and at last we could see. It must have been nearly noon; through a rift in the dark clouds the sun momentarily showed. Our blessed sun! Here again in our own world! But we stared, unbelieving. Foul mist hung about us, thick with the heavy, choking smell of ooze and slime. Beneath us, a thousand feet or more, a land surface lay in a tumbled mass of black crags. A river flowed tumultuous in a gorge. Behind us a great slimy plateau spread into the misty distance. Ooze caked by the daylight heat lay red and black upon it. Dark peaks, rounded and blurred, showed looming against the far horizon. Our world? It seemed perhaps a lunar landscape. No, for there were clouds and dank mist enshrouding everything. A strange world, an infernal landscape, not of this planet, nor even of the moon. Disappointment, such as I had never known before, flooded me. Not a living being to be seen here in all this desolation! Why, I could seem to see out over this tumbled waste for hundreds of miles! Safety here, with our food and water nearly gone? Why, we were as far from safety as any ancient explorer of the Polar icefields, standing lost upon a berg, surveying the desolation around him! In a chain of dank slimy grottos close under the surface of this plateau-like elevation, the Middge clustered to await our communication with earth civilization. In a score of dim caves, the families grouped together, setting up small shelters of garments and robes, like tents, for privacy. The night came. Small glowing hand torches sprang with points of dim light. Strange encampment of struggling humans, here in the new world, waiting to be rescued!