h to touch one of the cells.
His advance aroused Layroh to swift action. The bronze-faced giant
whirled and swung the nozzles of the black ray projector into line with
the man.

"Back, _yaharigan_, back!" he ordered imperiously. "The Shining Ones
have slumbered, undisturbed for a thousand centuries. They shall not
awake from their long sleep to find the filthy fingers of a _yaharigan_
defiling their crystal cells. Back!"

Panic-stricken at the threat of the black ray, the man stumbled backward
to join his fellows. Layroh's startling statement of the incredible age
of the shining things in the cases erased all thought of the
expedition's code of rules from Foster's mind.

"You mean that those--those _things_--moved and lived in the outside
world a hundred thousand years ago?" he asked dazedly. "But there is no
indication of there ever having been any such creatures among Earth's
early forms of life."

* * * * *

"Fool!" There was angry disdain in Layroh's resonant voice. "They who
slumber here are a race born far from this planet. They are the Shining
Ones of Rikor. Rikor is a tiny planet circling a wandering sun whose
orbit is an ellipse so vast that only once in a hundred thousand years
does it approach your solar system. Rikor's sun was nearly dead and the
Shining Ones had to find a new home soon or else perish. Then their
planet swung near the Earth, and their scouts returned with the news
that Earth was ideally suited for their purpose. There were barely five
hundred of the Shining Ones all told, and they migrated to Earth in a
body."

"And they've been in this cavern ever since, sealed up like tadpoles in
fish bowls?" The question came from Garrigan, a strapping sandy-haired
Irishman whose first blind panic at the black ray's menace was swiftly
giving way to curiosity.

"It was your ancestors who drove the Shining Ones into their retreat
here," Layroh answered grimly. "When the Shining Ones arrived upon Earth
they found the planet already in the possession of a race of human
beings whose science was so far advanced that it compared favorably even
with the science of Rikor. This race was comparatively few in numbers,
and was concentrated upon a small island-continent known as Atlantis.
Shining Ones and Atlanteans met in a war of titans, with a planet as the
stake. The Shining Ones were vanquished in that first battle. They lost
a fifth of their number and barely half a dozen o