Probably most of us had read Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum" and enjoyed the spine-tingling horror of the walls closing in to crush the hapless victim. Just now it was far from thrilling. From all sides the wall closed in. We looked away to the south. The entire mountain there had become greenish, as if it, too, had turned to glass. "No one blast," said Haggerty grimly, "did that. Not even the best we have in A-bombs could have done so much. That mountain is ten, fifteen miles away, at least. There must have been more A-bombs...." "And maybe more domes," said Hoose. "How do we know that this whole desert isn't dotted with them?" "Each one with its bugs under it for scientific study," said Haggerty wryly. My mind went around and around. The Shadow Men ... Mangbetu ... the blast ... the desert ... the betrayal by the very sky itself ... the Japanese.... I had to turn it off or go crazy. Besides, the closing wall wasn't giving us much time. Faster and faster it advanced. It was clear that we were being pushed deliberately inward on the LCVP's. Within a few minutes we were practically on the LCVP ramps. "Grab all weapons!" I yelled. "Don't risk finding them on the pay roll!" Marines who lose weapons have to pay for them. That's what I meant, silly as it seems in the circumstances. Just as we were falling in at the sand-covered ramps of the three LCVP's, Krane cried out: "Where are the Japs?" It gave me a chill. There was no escaping a peculiar fact: that even while the invisible was herding us, assembling us before our LCVP's, something of it, or about it, had snatched away the Japanese. They had simply vanished. The walls were not circular now, but oval, roughly encompassing the LCVP's. Haggerty assembled his men before his LCVP. Hoose did the same. Mine assembled about me on the central ramp. Then, when we were inside, in position as he had been when we landed, with only one man missing--Yount--the wall ceased closing in. For ten minutes we wondered about this. Then I had a hunch. "Can we raise the ramps without the motors?" We couldn't, not all the way, but we could, with two men at each outer corner, raise them about four feet, catch and hold them with their rattling chains. When we figured this out we did it by the numbers-- And we almost left twelve men on the beach! No sooner had we raised the ramps than the Caribbean was tugging at our LCVP's, the waves trying to take them back to sea. Our ramp men jumped up on their ramps, rolled crazily into the LCVP's, and the ramps raised all the way, clicking into place to become the prows of the unwieldy landing craft. Cries of glee rose from our boat-handlers. Motors caught on the first try, exactly as if they had not been idle for two weeks, and the LCVP's were backing away from Yataritas Beach, turning, heading out to sea. I whirled and looked out into the deep blue. I think all of us expected to find the _Odyssey_ still standing off, waiting for us. But it wasn't there.