s, walked Imee. Oh, it was a triumphal procession, and had I
been less weary, I presume I would have felt quite the hero.

* * * * *

Imee pictured for us, as we went along, the happiness, the
gratefulness of her people. Already, she informed us, great numbers of
young men were clearing away the bodies of the dead Rorn. She was so
happy she could hardly restrain herself.

A dim skeleton shape bulked up at my left. I turned to look at it, and
Imee, watching me through the lights of my head-piece, nodded and
smiled.

Yes, this was the very hulk by which she had been swimming when the
shark had attacked her, the shark which had been the cause of the
accident. She darted on to show me the very rib upon which her head
had struck, stunning her so that she had drifted, unconscious and
storm-tossed, to the shore of Mercer's estate.

I studied the wreck. It was battered and tilted on its beam ends, but
I could still make out the high poop that marked it as a very old
ship.

"A Spanish galleon, Mercer," I conjectured.

"I believe so." And then, in pictured form, for Imee's benefit, "It
has been here while much time passed?"

"Yes." Imee came darting back to us, smiling. "Since before the
Teemorn, my people were here. A Rorn we made prisoner once told us his
people discovered it first. They went into this strange skeleton, and
inside were many blocks of very bright stone." She pictured quite
clearly bars of dully-glinting bullion. Evidently the captive had told
his story well.

* * * * *

"These stones, which were so bright, the Rorn took to their city,
which is three swims distant." How far that might be, I could not even
guess. A swim, it seemed, was the distance a Teemorn could travel
before the need for rest became imperative. "There were many Rorn, and
they each took one stone. And of them, they made a house for their
leader." The leader, as she pictured him, being the most hideous
travesty of a thing in semi-human form that the mind could imagine:
incredibly old and wrinkled and ugly and gray, his noseless face
seamed with cunning, his eyes red rimmed and terrible, his teeth
gleaming, white and sharp, like fangs.

"A whole house, except the roof," she went on. "It is there now, and
it is gazed at with much admiration by all the Rorn. All this our
prisoner told us before we took him, with a rock made fast to him, out
over the Place of Darkness. He, t