t and found the sun.

Not the sun that he had known, but a flaming ball nevertheless.
Straight above it hung, in the center of the heavens, a gleaming disk
of pale-green gold, magnificently brilliant. He saw it through lids
half closed against its glare. Then his gaze swept back down the blue
vault of the heavens, back to a world of impossible beauty.

Directly ahead was a land of desolation, radiant in its barrenness.
For every rock, every foot of ground, was made of crystal. Nearby
hills were visions of loveliness where the colors of a million
rainbows quivered and flashed. Veins of metal showed the rich blues
and greens of peacock coloring. Others were scarlet, topaz, green, and
all of them took the strange sunlight that flooded them and threw it
back in blendings radiant and delicate.

The little hills began a short distance off, two low ranges running
directly away. One on either side, they made brilliant walls for the
flat valley between, whose foreground was barren rock of rose and
white. But beyond the glistening barren stretch were green fields of
luxuriant vegetation and in the distance, nestled in the green were
clustered masses that might have been a city of men. Still farther on,
a single mountain peak, white beyond belief, reared its graceful
sweeping sides to a shining apex against the heavens of clear blue.

* * * * *

Slowly Rawson turned. A hundred yards away, at his left, there was
water, a sea whose smooth rollers might have been undulating liquid
emeralds that broke to infinite flashing gems upon the shore. He
swung sharply to the right and found the same expanse of water,
perhaps the same distance away.

Then he turned toward the shell, which had been behind him and the
shaft from which it had emerged, and into which the air was driving
with a ceaseless rushing sound. Now, looking beyond them, he found the
same ocean; he was standing on a blunt point of rock projecting into
the sea. The rest of this world was one vast expanse of water.

Suddenly Rawson knew that it was unlike any ocean of earth. Instead of
finishing on a sharply-cut horizon, that sea of emerald green reached
out and still out, and _up_! It did not fall away. It curved upward,
until it lost itself in the distance and merged with the blue of the
sky. It was the same on all sides.

He swung slowly back to face the land that perhaps was only an island.
The kneeling ones had raised their bowed hea