painfully, for every fiber of him ached, and stared
round on a scene of the wildest destruction. He lay in the midst of a
wide, rough circle which held nothing but powdered stone. About it,
rising raggedly in the moving moonlight, the blocks of time-forgotten
Illar loomed.

But they were no longer piled one upon another in a rough travesty of
the city they once had shaped. Some force mightier than any of man's
explosives seemed to have hurled them with such violence from their beds
that their very atoms had been disrupted by the force of it, crumbling
them into dust. And in the very center of the havoc lay Smith, unhurt.

He stared in bewilderment about the moonlight ruins. In the silence it
seemed to him that the very air still quivered in shocked vibrations.
And as he stared he realized that no force save one could have wrought
such destruction upon the ancient stones. Nor was there any explosive
known to man which would have wrought this strange, pulverizing havoc
upon the blocks of Illar. That force had hummed unbearably through the
living dynamo of Thag, a force so powerful that space itself had bent to
enclose it. Suddenly he realized what must have happened.

Not Illar, but Thag himself had warped the walls of space to enfold the
twilit world, and nothing but Thag's living power could have held it so
bent to segregate the little, terror-ridden land inviolate.

Then when the Tree's roots parted, Thag's anchorage in the material
world failed and in one great gust of unthinkable energy the warped
space-walls had ceased to bend. Those arches of solid space had snapped
back into their original pattern, hurling the land and all its dwellers
into--into----His mind balked in the effort to picture what must have
happened, into what ultimate dimension those denizens must have
vanished.

Only himself, enfolded deep in Thag's very essence, the intolerable
power of the explosion had not touched. So when the warped space-curve
ceased to be, and Thag's hold upon reality failed, he must have been
dropped back out of the dissolving folds upon the spot where the Tree
had stood in the space-circled world, through that vanished world-floor
into the spot he had been snatched from in the instant of the dim land's
dissolution. It must have happened after the terrible force of the
explosion had spent itself, before Thag dared move even himself through
the walls of changing energy into his own far land again.

Smith sighed and lift