sitting around it."

Somebody mentioned the possibility of finding a cave.

"I doubt it," Llewellyn said. "I was on an exploring expedition down
here, once. This is all igneous rock, mostly granite. There aren't
many caves. But there may be some sort of natural shelter, or
something we can make into a shelter, not too far away. We have two
half-ton lifters; we could use them to pile up rocks and build
something. Let's make up two parties. I'll take one; Abe, you take the
other. One of us can go up and the other can go down."

We picked parties, trying to get men who had enough clothing and
hadn't been too badly banged around in the landing. Tom wanted to go
along, but Abdullah insisted that he stay and help with the inspection
of the boat's engines. Finally six of us--Llewellyn, myself, Glenn
Murell, Abe Clifford, old Piet Dumont, and another man--went out
through the broken stern of the boat. We had two portable
floodlights--a scout boat carries a lot of equipment--and Llewellyn
took the one and Clifford the other. It had begun to snow already, and
the wind was coming straight up the narrow ravine into which we had
landed, driving it at us. There was a stream between the two walls of
rock, swollen by the rains that had come just before the darkness, and
the rocks in and beside it were coated with ice. We took one look at
it and shook our heads. Any exploring we did would be done without
trying to cross that. We stood for a few minutes trying to see through
the driving snow, and then we separated, Abe Clifford, Dumont and the
other man going up the stream and Ramon Llewellyn, Glenn Murell and I
going down.

A few hundred yards below the boat, the stream went over a fifty-foot
waterfall. We climbed down beside it, and found the ravine widening.
It was a level beach, now, or what had been a beach thousands of years
ago. The whole coast of Hermann Reuch's land is sinking in the Eastern
Hemisphere and rising in the Western. We turned away from the stream
and found that the wind was increasing in strength and coming at us
from the left instead of in front. The next thing we knew, we were at
the point of the mountain on our right and we could hear the sea
roaring ahead and on both sides of us. Tom had been right about that
V-shaped fjord, I thought.

We began running into scattered trees now, and when we got around the
point of the mountain we entered another valley.

Trees, like everything else on Fenris, are consider