Mara took a nearby jungle trail. After some time, she paused and studied the matted footing. "Tracks," she pronounced. "Certain Skygors, and two pairs of feet shod like yours." Planter looked at the muddled marks thus diagnosed by the skilled trail-eye of Mara. "My friends and their captors?" "Aye, that. They went this way. Come." She slipped aside through the close-set stems. Planter did likewise. Mara slung her crossbow behind her, and climbed a trunk as a beetle scales a flower-stalk. "'Tis safer from Skygors up here," she told him over her shoulder "Follow me carefully." Planter did so, with difficulty. He was a vigorous climber, and the lesser gravity of Venus made him more agile. But Mara, some forty feet overhead, swung through the criss-cross of limbs and vines like a squirrel. "Wait!" he called, striving to catch up. She paused, finger to lips. As he came near, she said softly: "Not so loud! We come close. Feel you the spell?" Hanging quietly, Planter did feel it. Uneasiness came, chilling his back despite the steamy warmth. His hair stirred on his head, his teeth gritted, and he could not reason himself out of the mood. Mara moved ahead, and he followed. Growing accustomed to the climbing, he made progress. But the uncomfortable sense of peril grew rather than diminished. Once in their strange journey Mara paused, and from a belt-pouch produced food. It consisted of fire-dried fruits, strange to Planter but tasty and substantial; also two meat-dumplings, made by wrapping a nut-flavored dough around morsels of flesh. For drink she plucked long spear-like leaves from a vine, and Planter found them full of pungent juice. While they munched, he heard boomings in the distance, which Mara identified as Skygor speech. "We are almost there," she whispered. "Look well." She rose, and again they took up the journey. After a time she paused again, and pointed. Just beyond them the branches thinned out over a great open space in the jungle. Under a far-flung canopy of white vapors lay the swamp-city of the Skygors. * * * * * Planter, gazing in wonder at the strange city, thought of old Venice, or of a beaver colony in a diked pond. Before and beneath him was a quiet greeny-clear body of water. Around its rim grew shrubs, bushes and huge reeds, their roots clasping the great facing of white rock which apparently paved the banks and bottom of the pool. In the water itself, poking above the surface in little pointed clusters and plainly visible where they extended beneath, were the houses of the Skygors. They were of some kind of soil or clay that had been processed to a concrete hardness, and were tinted in various colors. Some of the smaller dwellings were roughly spherical, and crowned with cone-shaped roofs. Others, larger, protruded well above the water in cylindrical form. Here and there travel-ways connected the clustered groups.