at here was the one who had first seen him and
who had returned to save him, a stranger, bent low above that hand,
held in his own so rough and burned, and pressed his lips to the
slender fingers in a quick caress.

When he raised his head she was looking at him oddly; her eyes were
deep, serious and unsmiling. He wondered if, blunderingly, he had
offended her. He could not know; he did not know their customs.

Again the slim girlish figure turned; her jeweled breast-plates
flashed as she led the others on where always the way led upward and
the wind pressed against them unceasingly.

* * * * *

The White Ones wore sandals that seemed woven of glass. Rawson's bare
feet were bruised and sore, for those narrower clefts had been paved
only with broken fragments of the red walls. He moved less easily now.
The heavy, beating air tired him; the lightness of his body made it
all the more difficult to fight the steady wind. Still he followed the
white figure of the girl where her light was flashing on endless walls
of red.

In his ears a new sound was registering. Above the rush of the air,
that now was soft and warm, a new note had risen to a hollow,
unremitting roar. He knew that for some time he had been hearing it
faintly. It grew louder, one long, steady, unchanging note, as they
advanced. It was a deafening reverberation that seemed shaking the
whole earth when they came at last to an open room.

It beat upon him thunderously. As deep as the deepest tone of a mighty
organ, like a thousand gigantic organs welded in one, it roared and
shook him through and through with its single note.

Exhausted by his wild flight, surrounded by this maelstrom of sound,
he sank to the floor and let his laboring lungs have their way. But
his eyes were searching the big room.

* * * * *

The great cave was too regularly formed to have had a natural origin.
The light that the girl had carried gave only feeble illumination in
so great a space that had so evidently been hollowed out of the solid
red matter.

The light flashed here and there as the girl and her companions moved
away. They were circling the room. Rawson saw the irregular outlines
of entrances to many dark passages like the one through which they had
come. The red rock-mass seemingly had been riven and torn, and
apparently in front of each opening the white figures fought against
the rush of outgoing air. R