Tad left us a note. They would be back in a few hours--three or four at most. Tad was worried over us. But he tried to persuade himself that in a little while we would be in. The note did not say where they had gone, some Gian might come upon it who could read it. He ended in his whimsical fashion: “Go to sleep--it will do you good for what is coming.” Nereid had said nothing. She sat in a shadowed corner. Her face was solemn, fear-stricken. She sat thinking--calling intensely to us. We were both unconscious at this time. She thought once she had reached Arturo. She leaped to her feet; sank back. “No, it is nothing! He is gone.” Bhool arrived at the street doorway with the _arras_. Sleek black animals, large as a horse, with long narrow faces and bulging eyes. They moved with a panther tread, soundless on padded feet. * * * * * The couriers were already gone. Bhool said: “I will carry her.” He indicated Nereid. “You ride with me,” Tad declared, “if you go at all. I don’t see why you should.” But the fellow seemed too frightened to stay in the house. Nereid mounted behind her father. Entt rode alone. Tad put Bhool in front of him on the broad saddle. Like giant leopards the three arras loped off down the narrow street. They reached the open country, where the road was a waving gray ribbon over the rocks. Occasionally they were challenged by Middge guards. Then on again. A ride infernal. The glare grew. The air was steadily hotter, as a sulphurous quality came to it. Down, as though into a legendary inferno. The passage broadened. Its walls spread; its rocky, shaggy ceiling lifted until Tad no longer could see it. Bhool whimpered: “I do not like it here.” But Tad did not answer. If Tad had only known what was in that fellow’s mind! Ahead, the red glare now was solid. The passage was gone. They ascended a gentle rising slope, came to the brink of a crest and stopped. The caldron of fire lay before them. * * * * * Tad had never been here before. He gazed, awe-struck. He was on the lip of a huge circular caldron which lay perhaps a thousand feet beneath this upper rim. A round, shallow bowl. The ceiling over it was too high to be visible; behind the rim, rocky walls rose up into the black void. The whole area was a dull glare of red; but soon Tad’s eyes grew accustomed to it, and he refused the glasses which Entt proffered. This upper lip of the bowl was bent in a huge circle; it stretched in both directions as far as Tad could see--a small segment of the whole--a caldron here a hundred miles across, at least. There were boiling pits of red molten fire down there. One was quite close--a mile or so away. It boiled sluggishly, a viscous mass in a giant pot. Its surface bubbled; moved and crawled. Red, with a purple-green sheen on it. A hundred such pits showed; the distance merged them into a solid red glare.