At the end of perhaps two hours, the tutors would leave for the day; but they would always provide us with ample work in the shape of simple exercises to be written or of passages to be deciphered in textbooks of the kind evidently used for six-year-olds. This “home-work” (as Rawson designated it) would keep us busy until late in the afternoon, when a native would arrive with a tray containing various savory viands: a gray bread made from a grain with a flavor like walnuts; a succulent vegetable like French toast well browned; a spiced, starchy food reminding me vaguely of baked potatoes; cakes of a hundred varieties, and fruits shaped like tomatoes and tasting like muscat grapes, or elongated like cucumbers and flavored as oranges, or round and large as cantaloupes and substantial as bananas. But while we were of course delighted at the abundance of these appetizing unfamiliar foods, we were not a little surprised--and not a little disappointed--at the absence of much that we would once have considered essential; and we constantly wondered why it was that no meat nor fish nor any other animal product found its place on the bill of fare. After this meal (the second and last for the day) we were once more free to do as we wished; and we would ordinarily spend the time until dark in strolling around the city, or in sitting about in a little circle exchanging anecdotes, or in propounding theories as to where we were and how we had arrived, or in playing cards or any other little game that we could devise. Except for our tutors, we came into contact with none of the natives; we were too ignorant of the language to speak with the occasional few whom we passed on the streets; and as yet we knew virtually nothing of how they lived. But we were much less concerned about the natives than about our comrades of the X-111. We were still restrained in the city by the mysterious, irresistible power of compulsion exercised by our hosts; and though the days were lengthening into weeks, no word of Captain Gavison and our absent shipmates had reached us. For all that we could say, they might have perished of starvation or fallen through a black hole in the ground--or, more plausibly, they might have been discovered by the natives, and led as captives to lodgings miles away. Should we see them soon, or at least have news of them? or should we never learn what had befallen them? There was no way to decide except to wait--and the process of waiting was distressingly slow. * * * * *