The Country of the Gorts! To Allen, as he stared down through the turret window of the spaceship, those terraces of grey metal rock were as grim and forbidding as the Gort people themselves. In the glowing night-sheen, the barren wastes near the shore seemed utterly without life. And then Allen saw weird vegetation in little patches; and occasionally roaming wild things with round eyes which stared up at the ship. Some of them incuriously stared; others, frightened, scuttled away. The ship now was following a broad, gleaming inlet of the iridescent sea. Ten Earth-miles or so, to its head where lights gleamed on a terraced hillside. It was Tollgamo's little city. Allen had only a brief glimpse as the ship swooped down and settled into the rack of a metal landing stage. Rows of blue and green lights were strung in half a dozen rows on the terraces, one above the other to mark the streets, with metal ladders vertically connecting them. Metal and stone little houses, polished, grey-blue, lined the streets. At one end of the lower street, close by a promontory bluff where beyond a bridge-like metal ladder a smaller kiosk overlooked the inlet, there was a larger, square building, terraced into three stories. Round spots of dull purple light marked its four corners. On its roof, metal-garbed figures paced back and forth. "Tollgamo the Master--that is his house," the woman Garga murmured to Allen. Green-yellow, turgid smoke belched from a chimney-like opening in the cliff, where doubtless, partly underground, a factory was in operation. Figures moved in the grim weird glow of the bleak streets; apparatus was being dragged along one of them. Men and women working; and in the doors and windows of the cubical houses, the figures of children stood peering. As the ship settled lower, Allen realized that both above and below ground it was a beehive of activity now. And presently he could hear sounds; the clank of metal machinery; the grind of gears; the voices of the workers. Beside him Allen was suddenly aware of the grotesque, hunched form of Nereid's brother, Leh. Neither of them spoke; and then Leh, with a surreptitious gesture, indicated the shining inlet. Down on the opposite shore of it, a tunnel mouth showed, with a red-yellow glare back under the opposite cliff. A crowd of metal-clad workers, goggled against the glare so that they looked like huge beetle-eyed insects, were struggling with apparatus which they were pulling out. Leh was tense. Then a moment came where he was able to whisper furtively to Allen. "I will try later to get us to that cliff. Do you see that Kiosk? If we can get there, we will dive to the water. From there I have a way of escaping."