Project Gutenberg's The Cavern of the Shining Ones, by Hal K. Wells

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Title: The Cavern of the Shining Ones

Author: Hal K. Wells

Release Date: November 3, 2008 [EBook #27143]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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The Cavern
of the
Shining Ones

By Hal K. Wells

Layroh's hiring of husky down-and-outers
for his expedition is part of a plan
made ages past.

It was shortly after midnight when a persistent nightmare aroused Don
Foster from sleep. For a moment he lay drowsily in his blankets there on
the sand, with memory of the nightmare still vivid.

It had been a monstrous flying thing like a giant blue-bottle fly that
he had been battling in his sleep. Memory of the thing's high-pitched,
droning buzz still rang in his ears. Then abruptly he realized that the
peculiar buzzing was no mere echo of a nightmare. It was an actual
sound that still vibrated from somewhere within the camp.

[Illustration: _... Yet that thread held._]

Startled into full awakening, Foster propped himself up on one elbow.
The sound was penetrating, but not particularly loud. He was apparently
the only one whom it had awakened. In the gray gloom of the desert
starlight he saw the blanket-shrouded figures of the rest of the men
still deep in slumber.

He realized the source of the sound now. It came from inside the black
walls of Layroh's tent, pitched there in its usual isolation on a slight
rise fifty yards from the sleeping group. Foster grunted disgustedly to
himself. More of Layroh's scientific hocus-pocus! The man seemed to go
out of his way to add new phases of mystery to this crazy expedition of
his through the barren wastelands of the Mojave.

For a solid week now they had been working their way back and forth over
a thirty-mile stretch of desert, while Layroh labored with his intricate
instruments searching for something known only to himself. Whatever
reason Layroh had for recruiting a party of fifteen to accompany him was