id, tripping
alongside, rolled her head over, and stared at me with stony, unseeing
eyes.

Well, I am no fine writer. I sat down to tell a plain, unvarnished
tale, and I will not let the weird horror of that ride get into my pen.
We careened forward, I and those lost Martians, until pretty near on
midnight, by which time the great light-giving planets were up, and
never a chance did Fate give me all that time of parting company with
them. About midnight we were right into the region of snow and ice, not
the actual polar region of the planet, as I afterwards guessed, but one
of those long outliers which follow the course of the broad waterways
almost into fertile regions, and the cold, though intense, was somewhat
modified by the complete stillness of the air.

It was just then that I began to be aware of a low, rumbling sound
ahead, increasing steadily until there could not be any doubt the
journey was nearly over and we were approaching those great falls An
had told me of, over which the dead tumble to perpetual oblivion.
There was no opportunity for action, and, luckily, little time for
thought. I remember clapping my hand to my heart as I muttered an
imperfect prayer, and laughing a little as I felt in my pocket, between
it and that organ, an envelope containing some corn-plaster and a
packet of unpaid tailors' bills. Then I pulled out that locket with
poor forgotten Polly's photograph, and while I was still kissing it
fervently, and the dead girl on my right was jealously nudging my canoe
with the corner of her raft, we plunged into a narrow gully as black as
hell, shot round a sharp corner at a tremendous pace, and the moment
afterwards entered a lake in the midst of an unbroken amphitheatre of
cliffs gleaming in soft light all round.

Even to this moment I can recall the blue shine of those terrible ice
crags framing the weird picture in on every hand, and the strange
effect upon my mind as we passed out of the darkness of the gully down
which we had come into the sepulchral radiance of that place. But
though it fixed with one instantaneous flash its impression on my mind
forever, there was no time to admire it. As we swept on to the lake's
surface, and a glance of light coming over a dip in the ice walls to
the left lit up the dead faces and half-withered flowers of my
fellow-travellers with startling distinctness, I noticed with a new
terror at the lower end of the lake towards which we were hurrying the