exclamation.

He was staring at a point some hundred yards to his right. I followed
his gaze.

The towering cliffs were a scant half mile away. At some distant time
there had been an enormous fall of rock. This, disintegrating, had
formed a gently-curving breast which sloped down to merge with the
valley's floor. Willow and witch alder, stunted birch and poplar
had found roothold, clothed it, until only their crowding outposts,
thrusting forward in a wavering semicircle, held back seemingly by the
blue hordes, showed where it melted into the meadows.

In the center of this breast, beginning half way up its slopes and
stretching down into the flowered fields was a colossal imprint.

Gray and brown, it stood out against the green and blue of slope and
level; a rectangle all of thirty feet wide, two hundred long, the
heel faintly curved and from its hither end, like claws, four slender
triangles radiating from it like twenty-four points of a ten-rayed star.

Irresistibly was it like a footprint--but what thing was there whose
tread could leave such a print as this?

I ran up the slope--Drake already well in advance. I paused at the
base of the triangles where, were this thing indeed a footprint, the
spreading claws sprang from the flat of it.

The track was fresh. At its upper edges were clipped bushes and split
trees, the white wood of the latter showing where they had been sliced
as though by the stroke of a scimitar.

I stepped out upon the mark. It was as level as though planed; bent down
and stared in utter disbelief of what my own eyes beheld. For stone
and earth had been crushed, compressed, into a smooth, microscopically
grained, adamantine complex, and in this matrix poppies still bearing
traces of their coloring were imbedded like fossils. A cyclone can and
does grip straws and thrust them unbroken through an inch board--but
what force was there which could take the delicate petals of a flower
and set them like inlay within the surface of a stone?

Into my mind came recollection of the wailings, the crashings in the
night, of the weird glow that had flashed about us when the mist arose
to hide the chained aurora.

"It was what we heard," I said. "The sounds--it was then that this was
made."

"The foot of Shin-je!" Chiu-Ming's voice was tremulous. "The lord of
Hell has trodden here!"

I translated for Drake's benefit.

"Has the lord of Hell but one foot?" asked Dick, politely.

"He bestrides the