were located in the center of
a hollow bowl perhaps a hundred and fifty or two hundred feet across and
that an horizon of upsurging vegetation cut off our view of anything
except the sky itself. I could have sworn we had landed on a flat
plateau, if indeed the contour had not sloped upward to a cap. How,
then, did we come to find ourselves in a depression? Did the grass shift
like the sea it resembled? Or--incredible thought--had our weight caused
us to sink imperceptibly into a soft and treacherous bed?

I felt my happiness oozing away. What is man, I thought, but a pigmy
trapped in a bowl, bounded by an unknown beginning and headed for a
concealed destination? It was sweet to be, but whether good or evil lay
in the unseen, who knew? Uneasiness, which did not quite displace my
earlier buoyancy, took hold of me.

The animals, in contrast, gave no signals of disquiet. They cropped at
the grass without nervousness, perhaps more from habit than hunger. They
did not seem to be obtaining much sustenance; clearly they found it hard
to bite off mouthfuls of forage. Rather, they chewed sidewise, like a
cat, at the tough rubbery tendrils.

"I tank I want to go home--anyways I tank I want to get out of dis
haole," remarked Gootes. Slafe had unpacked another camera and attached
various gadgets to it, pursing his lips and running his hands lovingly
over the assembled product before thrusting it downward into the stolons
where queer shocks of radiance seemed to indicate he was taking
flashlight pictures of the subsurface.

But the sheep and the cameraman could not distract my attention from the
appearance of a trap which the basin of grass was assuming, while Gootes
was so volatile he couldnt even put on a simulated stoicism. In a panic
I started to climb frantically, all the elation of my first encounter
with the mound completely evaporated. The goat raised her head to note
my undignified scrambling, but the sheep kept up their determined
nibbling.

The trough, as I said, could not have been more than a couple of hundred
feet across and though the loose runners impeded my progress I must have
covered twice the distance to the edge of the rim before I realized it
was as far from me as when I had started. Gootes, going in a direction
oblique to mine, had no better success. His waving arms and struggling
body indicated his awareness of his predicament. Only Slafe was
undisturbed, perhaps unconscious of our efforts, for he had tak