d, though he knew the words were lost on the other. He nodded his
head toward the distant peak, and his question was plainly in regard to
the island. And for the first time since their coming to this wild
world, he saw, flashing across the features of one of these men, a trace
of emotion that could only be construed as fear.

The slitted cat eyes lost their look of complacent superiority. They
widened involuntarily, and the face was drained of its blotched color.
There was fear, terror unmistakable, though it showed for but an
instant. He had control of his features almost at once, but the flyer
had read their story.

Here was something that gave pause to this race of conquering vermin; a
place in the expanse of this vast sea that brought panic to their
hearts. And there came to him, as he stowed the remembrance away in his
mind, the first glow of hope. These things could fear a mountain; it
might be that they could be brought to fear a man.

* * * * *

The sky was clearing rapidly of traffic and the mountain of his
speculations was lost astern, when another island came slanting swiftly
up to meet them as their ship swept down from the heights. It was a tiny
speck in the ocean's expanse, a speck that resolved itself into the
squared fields of colored growth, orchards whose brilliant, strange
fruits glowed crimson in the last light of day, and enormous trees,
beyond which appeared a house.

A palace, McGuire concluded, when he saw clearly the many-storied pile.
Like the buildings they had seen, this also constructed of opalescent
quartz. There were windows that glowed warmly in the dusk. A sudden wave
of loneliness, almost unbearable, swept over the man.

Windows and gleaming lights, the good sounds of Earth; home!... And his
ears, as he stepped out into the cool air, were assailed with the
strange cackle and calling of weird folk; the air brought him scents,
from the open ground beyond, of fruits and vegetation like none he had
ever known; and the earth, the homeland of his vain imaginings, was
millions of empty miles away....

The leader stopped, and McGuire looked dispiritedly at the unfamiliar
landscape under dusky lowering skies. Trees towered high in the
air--trees grotesque and weird by all Earth standards--whose limbs were
pale green shadows in the last light of day. The foliage, too, seemed
bleached and drained of color, but among the leaves were flashes of
brilliance where