My watch showed 1 A.M. I had slept a good part of the previous night, and dozed all day. I was keenly alert, sitting tense, searching the moonlit ocean. I saw at last, a mile or so away, something black bobbing at the surface. And then a tiny beam of light, waving like a signal. I got to my feet. I had pasted a device across my flash, crudely cut from memory of the one Arturo had used. I stood and held it level, shining it out over the water. The light out there presently was gone; the bobbing thing vanished. But after a time it showed again. Close inshore. A shadow of the rocks was there; I could not see it plainly. It landed. And then I saw figures clambering up the rocks in the moonlight. Three of them--and another stayed back by the round thing from which they had come. Three figures, coming up toward me. Two men, and a girl, white-limbed, with tossing hair. I stood in a patch of moonlight. There was just an instant when the thought swept me that I was a fool--this was an enemy come to trap me. But I called, quaveringly, “Arturo! Arturo, is that you?” There was a brief silence. The climbing figures stopped, gazed up and saw me. And a voice called up--a familiar voice. It was Tad Megan--not dead, nothing weird or eerie. A great relief swept me. Tad’s voice: “There he is--I see him!” Tad Megan, and Arturo and Nereid. I could recognize them now. The relief of it! If I had not realized what a strain I had been under. But there was nothing uncanny about this. I shouted: “Here I am!” They came running up. Nereid, familiar as I remembered her; Arturo, strangely garbed, grown strangely older. Tad wrung my hand. “No--of course I’m not dead! You, Jeff--by the little gods of the airways, it’s good to see you again.” CHAPTER X. INTO THE ABYSS. It was a round, gleaming metallic globe some thirty feet in diameter. We entered its tiny doorway; a thick, complicated affair, it reminded me of the door to some great round safe in a bank vault. Tad swung it closed. The click and queer whir of it, in spite of these friends around me, struck at me with awe. We were going down into the unknown. They were very businesslike, Arturo and Tad. And Nereid, with her timorous, flashing smile at me, stood aside and watched them. Ah, never before had I so fully realized Nereid’s beauty! It so queerly stirred me; against all reason of friendship I could not treat her casually. Tad noticed it. He grinned at me, and whispered: “You get used to it. She’s human--she’s not a ghost, you know.” They had had little to say to me; the business of getting us embarked and started occupied them. “We thought you’d never come, Jeff. Nereid has been calling you for months. We need you. You, of every one, we’ve wanted. We only got your answer a short time ago. Nereid had almost given up trying to reach you.”