They fell silent. Now and again Margaret dozed, only to start awake at the coughing grunt of some near-by prowling hyperdenizen of that unknown jungle, but Seaton did not sleep. He did not even half believe in his own hypothesis of their automatic return to their space ship; and his vivid imagination insisted upon dwelling lingeringly upon every hideous possibility of their return to three-dimensional space outside their vessel's sheltering walls. And that same imagination continually conjured up visions of what might be happening to Dorothy--to the beloved bride who, since their marriage upon far distant Osnome, had never before been separated from him for so long a time. He had to struggle against an insane urge to do something, anything; even to dash madly about in the absolute blackness of hyperspace in a mad attempt--doomed to certain failure before it was begun--to reach _Skylark Two_ before she should vanish from four-dimensional space. Thus, while Seaton grew more and more tense momently, more and ever more desperately frustrate, the abysmally oppressive hypernight wore illimitably on. Creeping--plodding--d-r-a-g-g-i-n-g endlessly along; extending itself fantastically into the infinite reaches of all eternity. XIII. As suddenly as the hyperland had become dark it at last became light. There was no gradual lightening, no dawning, no warning--in an instant, blindingly to eyes which had for so long been straining in vain to detect even the faintest ray of visible light in the platinum-black darkness of the hypervoid, the entire countryside burst into its lividly glowing luminescence. As the light appeared Seaton leaped to his feet with a yell. "Yowp! I was never so glad to see a light before in all my life, even if it is blue! Didn't sleep much either, did you, Peg?" "Sleep? I don't believe that I'll _ever_ be able to sleep again! It seemed as though I was lying there for weeks!" "It did seem long, but time is meaningless to us here, you know." The two set out at a rapid pace, down the narrow beach beside the hyperstream. For a long time nothing was said, then Margaret broke out, half hysterically: "Dick, this is simply driving me mad! I think probably I _am_ mad, already. We seem to be walking, yet we aren't, really; we're going altogether too fast, and yet we don't seem to be getting anywhere. Besides, it's taking forever and ever--" "Steady, Peg! Keep a stiff upper lip! Of course we really aren't walking, in a three-dimensional sense, but we're getting there, just the same. I'd say that we were traveling almost half as fast as that airship was, which is a distinctly cheerful thought. And don't try to think of anything in detail, because equally of course we can't understand it. "And as for time, forget it. Just remember that, as far as we are concerned, this whole episode is occupying only a thousandth of a second of our own real time, even if it seems to last a thousand years.