ce any slip would hang
him summarily.

He would of course be on his way to the surface, some 250 feet below the
orchid gardens, shortly after dawn in any event. But not even the
arch-doubter of them all wanted to begin the trip--not even at the
merciful snap-spine end of a tether--a moment before the law said, Go.

The looping, interwoven network of vines beneath them, each cable as
thick through as a man's body, bellied out and down sharply as the
leapers reached the edge of the fern-tree forest which surrounded the
copse of fan-palms. The whole party stopped before beginning the descent
and looked eastward, across the dim bowl. The stars were paling more and
more rapidly; only the bright constellation of the Parrot could still he
picked out without doubt.

"A fine day," one of the guards said, conversationally. "Better to go
below on a sunny day than in the rain, pursemaker."

Honath shuddered and said nothing. Of course it was always raining down
below in Hell, that much could be seen by a child. Even on sunny days,
the endless pinpoint rain of transpiration, from the hundred million
leaves of the eternal trees, hazed the forest air and soaked the black
bog forever.

He looked around in the brightening, misty morning. The eastern horizon
was black against the limb of the great red sun, which had already risen
about a third of its diameter; it was almost time for the small,
blue-white, furiously hot consort to follow. All the way to that brink,
as to every other horizon, the woven ocean of the treetops flowed gently
in long, unbreaking waves, featureless as some smooth oil. Only nearby
could the eye break that ocean into its details, into the world as it
was: a great, many-tiered network, thickly overgrown with small ferns,
with air-drinking orchids, with a thousand varieties of fungi sprouting
wherever vine crossed vine and collected a little humus for them, with
the vivid parasites sucking sap from the vines, the trees, and even each
other. In the ponds of rain-water collected by the closely fitting
leaves of the bromelaids tree-toads and peepers stopped down their
hoarse songs dubiously as the light grew and fell silent one by one. In
the trees below the world, the tentative morning screeches of the
lizard-birds--the souls of the damned, or the devils who hunted them, no
one was quite sure which--took up the concert.

A small gust of wind whipped out of the hollow above the glade of
fan-palms, making the net