"And, above all, get it down solid that you're not nutty--it's just that everything else around here is. It's like that wild one Sir Eustace pulled on me that time, remember? 'I say, Seaton, old chap, the chaps hereabout seem to regard me as a foreigner. Now really, you know, they should realize that I am simply alone in a nation of foreigners.'" Margaret laughed, recovering a measure of her customary poise at Seaton's matter-of-fact explanations and reassurance, and the seemingly endless journey went on. Indeed, so long did it seem that the high-strung and apprehensive Seaton was every moment expecting the instantaneous hypernight again to extinguish all illumination long before they came within sight of the little island, with its unmistakably identifying obelisk of reddish stone. "Woof, but that's a relief!" he exploded at sight of the marker. "We'll be there in a few minutes more--here's hoping it holds off for those few minutes!" "It will," Margaret said confidently. "It'll have to, now that we're so close. How are you going to get a line on those three peaks? We cannot possibly see over or through that jungle." "Easy--just like shooting fish down a well. That's one reason I was so glad to see that tall obelisk thing over there--it's big enough to hold my weight and high enough so that I can see the peaks from its top. I'm going to climb up it and wigwag you onto the line we want. Then we'll set a pole on that line and crash through the jungle, setting up back-sights as we go along. We'll be able to see the peaks in a mile or so, and once we see them it'll be easy enough to find _Two_." "But climbing Cleopatra's Needle comes first, and it's straight up and down," Margaret objected practically. "How are you going to do that?" "With a couple of hypergrab-hooks--watch me!" He wrenched off three of the bars of his cell grating and twisted them together, to form a heavy rod. One end of this rod he bent back upon itself, sharpening the end by squeezing it in his two hands. It required all of his prodigious strength, but in his grasp the metal at last, slowly, flowed together in a perfect weld and he waved in the air a sharply pointed hook some seven feet in length. In the same way he made another, and, with a word to the girl, he shot away through the almost intangible water toward the island. He soon reached the base of the obelisk, and into its rounded surface he drove one of his hyperhooks. But he struck too hard. Though the hook was constructed of the most stubborn metal known to the denizens of that strange world, the obelisk was of hyperstone and the improvised tool rebounded, bent out of all semblance and useless.