I'm
crazy to believe it, but up in that crater is where I'll find the
answer to a lot of questions. Lord knows what that answer will be.
I've quit trying to guess. I'm just going up there to find out."

He was gone, the rear wheels of the car throwing a spray of sand as he
started heedless of Smithy's protests against the plan. Rawson was in
no mood to argue. He must climb the mountain while it was night; under
the sun he would never reach the top alive. He would go alone and
unseen.

He swung wide of the deserted town at the mountain's base. The
spectral walls of Little Rhyolite still showed their empty windows
that stared like dead eyes, and the man guided his car without lights
along a hidden stretch of hard, salt-crusted desert. He felt certain
that other eyes were watching.

* * * * *

He began his climb at a point five miles away. The slopes that seemed
smooth and hard from a distance became, at closer range, a place of
wind-heaped, sandy ash, carved and scoured into fantastic forms. But
its very roughness offered protection, and Rawson fought the dragging
sand, and the gray, choking ash that dried his throat and cut it like
emery, without fear of being observed.

He fought against time, too. Above Little Rhyolite, whatever
mysterious men were making the ascent would find the going easy. There
were windswept areas, long fields of pumice; a man could make good
time there. Rawson had none of these to aid him. He cast anxious
glances toward the eastern sky as he struggled on, till he saw gray
light change to rose and gold--but he stood in the titanic cleft in
the crater's rim as the first straight rays of the sun struck across.

The volcano's top had been stripped clean by the winds of countless
years. Rocks, black, brown, even blood-red, were naked to the pitiless
glare of the sun. Their colors were mingled in a weird fantasy of
twisted lines that told of the inferno of heat in which they had been
formed.

They towered high above the head of Dean Rawson as he stood, panting
and trembling with exhaustion. The cleft before him had become
enormous: it was a canyon, half filled with pumice and coarse ash.

* * * * *

Rawson stood for long minutes in quiet listening. At the canyon's end
would lie the crater, and in that crater he would find.... But there
was no slightest picture in his mind of what he might see. He knew
only that he himself must r