On my left hand, not distant, sank the ravine, black and terrible. Beyond it was the distant forest of the nameless things. But before me, to the reach of sight, the ground sloped downward, and was covered with a level-surfaced growth, so close that I could only guess its depth, but showing only a sea of leaves, not larger than a man’s hand, and of a bright green, as though varnished; and these leaves the dawn-light altered to reflected gold, so that my dazzled sight recoiled from a splendour beyond endurance. It was as though one should look straight at the noonday sun, to find a glory not of one small-seeming orb, but of stretched leagues, and myriad facets, of an equal brilliance. But at length, as the sun rose, the light changed and faded. A thin mist moved over the surface of the unending field of green, but was not dense enough to hide it. The green growth came to the very edge of the opal path, and looking down I saw a tangle of sinuous macaroni-like stalks that twisted restlessly, having leaves only at the top, on the close and level surface; and as I watched, tongues like pink worms pushed upward, and licked and wavered in the air, and drew backward. As the day advanced, thousands of these pink tongues were thrust upward and withdrawn continually, giving a wavering pinkness to the glossy green. It might have had beauty to familiar eyes, but to mine it had a loathsome strangeness, so that I was reluctant to walk beside it, and for some time I sat at the cave-mouth and pondered. I was half tempted to descend once more and face what might be in the depths below. Certainly, there I had found water and something akin to human food, and evidence was in that mighty tunnel itself of such work as no brute creatures could contrive or fashion. I reflected, was it not reasonable that there should be a less highly cultured life on a planet’s surface, subject to wind and rain and all inclemencies, than in the sheltered security of its vast interior? Was it not an amazing thing that the men of my own time, fatuously imagining communication with incredibly distant worlds, had been contentedly ignorant of their own, ten miles below the surface; had made facile and contradictory theories of its interior, none of which the few known facts supported; and because they found some increase in the temperature for a trivial distance downward, had been content to conclude, without attempt at verification, that this heat increased indefinitely. How diligently they searched the secrets of the most distant stars, while they had scarcely scratched the surface of the one on which their lives depended!