In general we flew, at first, to the north, I imagine at about three thousand feet below the Zero-level. Occasional rises lifted above us. The water was always far below--for a time there was an unbroken sea down there--one of the great mid-Pacific deeps. Or again, a tumbled land of black crags; ravines, gullies, with river torrents of water surging everywhere. We reached the fallen Polar Sea with its jammed masses of ice; the heights of the Aleutians loomed ahead of us and we turned back. There was a night when I fancied we were flying in a gigantic circle over the Central Pacific Basin. A broad, level stretch of water, far down--receding but still many hundreds of fathoms deep. I saw what might have been the sharp, jagged rise up to the Hawaiian Peaks. Verdured mountain-tops were up there, unreal, fairylike in the moonlight, towering above the Zero-level, above the dank, evil mists of the Lowlands; a purple sky up there, with the mountain peaks standing into it; the stars, and the white clouds of a world serene. We avoided the heights. I had even fancied I saw the lights of a plane up there. We stopped at the Gian encampment--I think about the time it was first discovered by the searching earth planes. None had seen us in our low, night flights; and in the daylight stops Rhana had always chosen places well obscured, far in the depths. * * * * * We made a second flight--the one to the Highlands of Australia--where first the earth saw us. Nereid and I were not aware of Rhana’s purpose then; not until afterward, in the Gian encampment, did we learn it. I had, that second flight, a clear view of the topography of the Lowlands in this section. We came from the south, that night of October 15. What had before been called the Coral Sea we saw as a great, irregularly circular valley, a giant caldron surrounded everywhere by the Highlands. It was empty of any expanse of water save a few mountain torrents tumbling down its slopes or an occasional shallow lagoon, trapped in the rocks, drying by evaporation. It was my studied policy now to win Rhana’s confidence. I told her always what I could of the geography of the regions through which we flew. The caldron of the Coral Sea barred us dangerously by its Highlands. I turned us northeast. At a depression of perhaps a thousand feet beneath the Zero-level we passed to the right of the Solomon rise and came again over the lower levels of an open abyss. We stayed high. I think now that what might be termed the “ocean level” was down fifteen or twenty thousand feet below Zero. Certainly I saw no evidence of the sea here. The Japan Trench might still be full. I did not doubt but that the great Nero Deep off Guam was still and probably always would be a great salt lake ten thousand feet or more in depth.