oms of copper, instantaneously
liberated, heated to incandescence and beyond all the atmosphere within
a radius of hundreds of feet. The monster disappeared utterly, and
Seaton, with unerring hand, reversed the bar and darted back down toward
the fleet of airships. He reached them in time to focus the attractor
upon the wrecked and helpless plane in the middle of its
five-thousand-foot fall and lowered it gently to the ground, surrounded
by the fleet.

The Skylark landed easily beside the wrecked machine, and the wanderers
saw that their vessel was completely surrounded by a crowd of
people--men and women identical in form and feature with themselves.
They were a superbly molded race, the men fully as large as Seaton and
DuQuesne; the women, while smaller than the men, were noticeably taller
than the two women in the car. The men wore broad collars of metal,
numerous metallic ornaments, and heavily-jeweled leather belts and
shoulder-straps which were hung with weapons of peculiar patterns. The
women carried no weapons, but were even more highly decorated than were
the men--each slender, perfectly-formed body scintillated with the
brilliance of hundreds of strange gems, flashing points of fire. Jeweled
bands of metal and leather restrained their carefully-groomed hair;
jeweled collars encircled their throats; jeweled belts, jeweled
bracelets, jeweled anklets, each added its quota of brilliance to the
glittering whole. The strangers wore no clothing, and their smooth skins
shone a dark, livid, utterly indescribable color in the peculiar,
unearthly, yellowish-bluish-green glare of the light. Green their skins
undoubtedly were, but not any shade of green visible in the Earthly
spectrum. The "whites" of their eyes were a light yellowish-green. The
heavy hair of the women and the close-cropped locks of the men were
green as well--a green so dark as to be almost black, as were also their
eyes.

"Well, what d'you know about that?" pondered Seaton, dazedly. "They're
human, right enough, but ye gods, what a color!"

"It is hard to tell how much of that color is real, and how much of it
is due to this light," answered Crane. "Wait until you get outside, away
from our daylight lamps, and you will probably look like a Chinese
puzzle. As to the form, it is logical to suppose that wherever
conditions are similar to those upon the Earth, and the age is anywhere
nearly the same, development would be along the same lines as with us."