The guard motioned with his bayonet toward one of the red ships near us on the ground. "Hustle!" he said. "Get aboard. You are going up to see the Master." From what I later learned, there must have been several hundred white men in the conspiracy with Vars. In exchange for their services, he had offered freedom from the law (which was a great inducement to the class of men he gathered) and a chance to share in the spoils of world conquest. His recruits had numbered bandits and desperadoes of all descriptions, and even a few unscrupulous men of finely trained minds. In a few minutes we were in the fuselage compartment of the red machine. It was closed and made air-tight. We were seated upon comfortable chairs, and had a good view through circular windows in the sides. The pilot was forward, out of sight, and there was another closed space to the rear, but our compartment took up most of the hull. The guard refused to answer my questions concerning the ship's propulsion, but I later learned that it was lifted by the negative gravity gas. The motors utilized intra-atomic energy derived by the forced decomposition of thorium, and at high altitudes the propellers were supplemented by rocket guns. Besides my taciturn guard, there were two other men in the ship. One, a fat, red-faced fellow, who looked as if he had been drinking too much mescale, was boasting of his close association with Vars, "the Master," and of his promised part in the spoil of the earth conquest. The other was a lean, shrunken man, with red eyes. He stared apprehensively at the pilot's room forward, muttering to himself. I caught a few of his words, "The shining horrors! The shining horrors. Devils from the sky!" The machine left the crater floor and flew rapidly up on a steep spiral course. In a few minutes the rugged mountain panorama was spread out like a relief map below us. Presently the stars were visible, and still we climbed, comfortable enough in the heated, air-tight compartment. The propellers had been stopped, but the gravity-neutralizing gas continued to lift the vessel straight up. Then I noticed a faint purple veil coming over the stars above. Suddenly it seemed that we were plunging through a bank of thin purple mist. Abruptly we shot above a landscape weirder than the wildest dream! We had climbed above a vast plain! A flat purple desert stretched illimitably away below us. Far in the west rose a colossal range of sheer purple mountains. The weird plain was covered with strange and stunted violet plants. In the south was a patch of blazing blue that looked like a lake of heavy mist. Beyond rose a forest of fern-like violet plants. It was a new land above the air!