that of a normal telescope. Tommy instantly
put his eye to the eyepiece again.

* * * * *

He saw more tree-ferns, practically the duplicates of the background
beyond the globe. Nothing moved save small, fugitive creatures among
their fronds. He swung the telescope still farther. The landscape
swept by before his eyes. The tree-fern forest drew back. He saw the
beginning of a vast and noisome morass, over which lay a thick haze as
of a stream raised by the sun. He saw something move in that morass;
something huge and horrible with a long and snake-like neck and the
tiniest of heads at the end of it. But he could not see the thing
clearly.

He swung the telescope yet again. And he looked over miles and miles
of level, haze-blanketed marsh. Here and there were clumps of taller
vegetation. Here and there were steaming, desolate pools. And three or
four times he saw monstrous objects moving about clumsily in the
marsh-land.

But then a glitter at the skyline caught his eye. He tilted the
telescope to see more clearly, and suddenly he caught his breath.
There, far away at the very horizon, was a city. It was tall and
gleaming and very strange. No earthly city ever flung its towers so
splendidly high and soaring. No city ever built by man gave off the
fiery gleam of gold from all its walls and pinnacles. It looked like
an artist's dream, hammered out in precious metal, with its outlines
softened by the haze of distance.

And something was moving in the air near the city. Staring, tense,
again incredulous, Tommy Reames strained his eyes and saw that it was
a machine. An air-craft; a flying-machine of a type wholly unlike
anything ever built upon the planet Earth. It swept steadily and
swiftly toward the city, dwindling as it went. It swooped downward
toward one of the mighty spires of the city of golden gleams, and
vanished.

* * * * *

It was with a sense of shock, of almost physical shock, that Tommy
came back to realization of his surroundings to feel Von Holtz's hand
upon his shoulder and to hear the lean young man saying harshly:

"Well, Herr Reames? Are you convinced that I did not lie to you? Are
you convinced that the Herr Professor Denham is in need of help?"

Tommy blinked dazedly as he looked around the laboratory again. Brick
walls, an oil-spattered crude-oil engine in one corner, a concrete
floor and an electric furnace and a casting-box...