en and women--not their shadows. The big water outside stops us
for a space, but," he added, laughing gruffly and taking a draught of a
strong beer he had been heating by the fire, "King Ar-hap has their
pretty noses between his fingers; he takes tribute and girls while he
gets ready--they say he is nearly ready this summer, and if he is, it
will not be much of an excuse he will need to lick up the last of those
triflers, those pretences of manhood."

Then we fell to talking of Ar-hap, his subjects and town, and I learned
the tides had swept me a long way to the northward of the proper route
between the capitals of the two races, that day they carried me into
the Dead-Men's Ice, as these entertainers of mine called the northern
snows. To get back to the place previously aimed at, where the woodmen
road came out on the seashore, it was necessary to go either by boat, a
roundabout way through a maze of channels, "as tangled as the grass
roots in autumn"; or, secondly, by a couple of days' marching due
southward across the base of the great peninsula we were on, and so
strike blue water again at the long-sought-for harbour.

As I lay dozing and dreaming on a pile of strange furs in the corner of
the hut that evening I made up my mind for the land journey tomorrow,
having had enough for the moment of nautical Martian adventures; and
this point settled, fell again to wondering what made me follow so
reckless a quest in the way I was doing; asking myself again and again
what was gazelle-eyed Heru to me after all, and why should it matter
even as much as the value of a brass waist-coat button whether Hath had
her or Ar-hap? What a fool I was to risk myself day by day in quaint
and dangerous adventures, wearing out good Government shoe-leather in
other men's quarrels, all for a silly slip of royal girlhood who, by
this time, was probably making herself comfortable and forgetting both
Hath and me in the arms of her rough new lord.

And from Heru my mind drifted back dreamily to poor An, and Seth, the
city of fallen magnificence, where the spent masters of a strange
planet now lived on sufferance--the ghosts of their former selves.
Where was An, where the revellers on the morning--so long ago it
seemed!--when first that infernal rug of mine translated a chance wish
into a horrible reality and shot me down here, a stranger and an
outcast? Where was the magic rug itself? Where my steak and tomato
supper? Who had eaten it? Who was