ed to Caspakian life and ignorant of all
that lay before him. Yet I could not give up hope entirely. My duty
lay clear before me; I must follow it while life remained to me, and so
I set forth toward the north.

The country through which I took my way was as lovely as it was
unusual--I had almost said unearthly, for the plants, the trees, the
blooms were not of the earth that I knew. They were larger, the colors
more brilliant and the shapes startling, some almost to grotesqueness,
though even such added to the charm and romance of the landscape as the
giant cacti render weirdly beautiful the waste spots of the sad Mohave.
And over all the sun shone huge and round and red, a monster sun above
a monstrous world, its light dispersed by the humid air of Caspak--the
warm, moist air which lies sluggish upon the breast of this great
mother of life, Nature's mightiest incubator.

All about me, in every direction, was life. It moved through the
tree-tops and among the boles; it displayed itself in widening and
intermingling circles upon the bosom of the sea; it leaped from the
depths; I could hear it in a dense wood at my right, the murmur of it
rising and falling in ceaseless volumes of sound, riven at intervals by
a horrid scream or a thunderous roar which shook the earth; and always
I was haunted by that inexplicable sensation that unseen eyes were
watching me, that soundless feet dogged my trail. I am neither nervous
nor highstrung; but the burden of responsibility upon me weighed
heavily, so that I was more cautious than is my wont. I turned often
to right and left and rear lest I be surprised, and I carried my rifle
at the ready in my hand. Once I could have sworn that among the many
creatures dimly perceived amidst the shadows of the wood I saw a human
figure dart from one cover to another, but I could not be sure.

For the most part I skirted the wood, making occasional detours rather
than enter those forbidding depths of gloom, though many times I was
forced to pass through arms of the forest which extended to the very
shore of the inland sea. There was so sinister a suggestion in the
uncouth sounds and the vague glimpses of moving things within the
forest, of the menace of strange beasts and possibly still stranger
men, that I always breathed more freely when I had passed once more
into open country.

I had traveled northward for perhaps an hour, still haunted by the
conviction that I was being stalked by