in advance of him, guiding him through the streets, which
in this part of the city were more broken up and irregular.

They had not gone more than a hundred yards when the pavement began to
move unsteadily under them, as the deck of a plunging ship feels to one
who runs its length, and the houses they were swiftly passing began
visibly to decrease in size. The Very Young Man felt the girl falter in
her stride. He dropped her hand and slipped his arm about her waist,
holding her other hand against it. She smiled up into his eyes, and thus
they ran on, side by side.

A few moments more and they were in the open country, running on a road
that wound through the hills, between cultivated fields dotted here and
there with houses. The landscape dwindled beneath them steadily, until
they seemed to be running along a narrow, curving path, bordered by
little patches of different-colored ground, like a checkerboard. The
houses they passed now hardly reached as high as their knees. Sometimes
peasants stood in the doorways of these houses watching them in terror.
Occasionally they passed a farmer ploughing his field, who stopped his
work, stricken dumb, and stared at them as they went swiftly by.

When they were well out into the country, perhaps a quarter of the way
to Orlog--for to beings so huge as they the distance was not great--the
Very Young Man slowed down to a walk.

"How far have we gone?" he asked.

Aura stopped abruptly and looked around her. They seemed now to be at
the bottom of a huge, circular, shallow bowl. In every direction from
where they stood the land curved upward towards the rim of the bowl that
was the horizon--a line, not sharp and well defined, but dim and hazy,
melting away into the blackness of the star-studded sky. Behind them,
hardly more than a mile away, according to their present stature--they
had stopped growing entirely now--lay the city of Arite. They could see
completely across it and out into the country beyond.

The lake, with whose shore they had been running parallel, was much
closer to them. Ahead, up near the rim of the horizon, lay a black
smudge. Aura pointed. "Orlog is there," she said. "You see it?"

To the Very Young Man suddenly came the realization that already he was
facing the problem of how to get into Orlog unheralded. If they remained
in their present size they could easily walk there in an hour or less.
But long before that they would be seen and recognized.

The Ver