o shadows here. The grayness swallowed
everything up, leaving the landscape oddly flat, like a badly drawn
picture. He looked about helplessly, quite lost now and not sure in what
direction he should be facing, for there was nothing here by which to
know directions. The trees and shrubs and the starry grass still
stretched about him, uncertainly outlined in that changeless dusk. They
seemed to go on for ever.

But he plodded ahead, unwilling to stop because of a queer tension in
the air, somehow as if all the blurred trees and shrubs were waiting in
breathless anticipation, centering upon his stumbling figure. But all
trace of animate life had vanished with the disappearance of the
priestess' white-glowing figure. Head down, paying little heed to where
he was going, he went on over the flowery sward.

An odd sense of voids about him startled Smith at last out of his
lethargic plodding. He lifted his head. He stood just at the edge of a
line of trees, dim and indistinct in the unchanging twilight. Beyond
them--he came to himself with a jerk and stared incredulously. Beyond
them the grass ran down to nothingness, merging by imperceptible degrees
into a streaked and arching void--not the sort of emptiness into which a
material body could fall, but a solid _nothing_, curving up toward the
dark zenith as the inside of a sphere curves. No physical thing could
have entered there. It was too utterly void, an inviolable emptiness
which no force could invade.

He stared up along the inward arch of that curving, impassable wall.
Here, then, was the edge of the queer land Illar had wrested out of
space itself. This arch must be the curving of solid space which had
been bent awry to enclose the magical land. There was no escape this
way. He could not even bring himself to approach any nearer to that
streaked and arching blank. He could not have said why, but it woke in
him an inner disquiet so strong that after a moment's staring he turned
his eyes away.

Presently he shrugged and set off along the inside of the line of trees
which parted him from the space-wall. Perhaps there might be a break
somewhere. It was a forlorn hope, but the best that offered. Wearily he
stumbled on over the flowery grass.

How long he had gone on along that almost imperceptibly curving line of
border he could not have said, but after a timeless interval of gray
solitude he gradually became aware that a tiny rustling and whispering
among the leaves h