utheast of Great New
York. I could do a good normal three-ninety in this fleet little Wasp,
especially if I kept in the rarer air-pressures over the zero-height.
The thousand-foot lane had a southward drift, this night. I was making
now well over four hundred; I would reach Nareda soon after midnight.

The Continental Shelf slid beneath me, dropping away as my course took
me further from the Highland borders. The Lowlands lay patched with inky
shadows and splashes of moonlight. Domes with upstanding, rounded heads;
plateaus of naked black rock, ten thousand feet below the zero-height;
trenches, like valleys, ridged and pitted, naked in places like a
pockmarked lunar landscape. Or again, a pall of black mist would
shroud it all, dark curtain of sluggish cloud with moonlight tinging its
edges pallid green.

To my left, eastward toward the great basin of the mid-Atlantic
Lowlands, there was always a steady downward slope. To the right, it
came up over the continental shelf to the Highlands of the United
States.

There was often water to be seen in these Lowlands. A spring-fed lake
far down in a caldron pit, spilling into a trench; low-lying,
land-locked little seas; canyons, some of them dry, others filled with
tumultuous flowing water. Or great gashes with water sluggishly flowing,
or standing with a heavy slime, and a pall of uprising vapor in the heat
of the night.

At 37 deg.N. and 70 deg.W., I passed over the newly named Atlas Sea. A
lake of water here, more than a hundred miles in extent. Its surface
lay fifteen thousand feet below the zero-height; its depth in places was
a full three thousand. It was clear of mist to-night. The moonlight
shimmered on its rippled surface, like pictures my father had often
shown me of the former oceans.

I passed, a little later, well to the westward of the verdured mountain
top of the Bermudas.

There was nothing of this flight novel to me. I had frequently flown
over the Lowlands; I had descended into them many times. But never upon
such a mission as was taking me there now.

I was headed for Nareda, capital village of the tiny Lowland Republic of
Nareda, which only five years ago came into national being as a
protectorate of the United States. Its territory lies just north of the
mountain Highlands of Haiti, Santo Domingo and Porto Rico. A few hundred
miles of tumbled Lowlands, embracing the turgid Nares Sea, whose bottom
is the lowest point of all the Western Hemisphere--