was sticky and suffocating.

He went on into hell.

Days and nights merged into a fantastic pattern of dull torture. Some distantly sane portion of his brain held back and watched, but could not help. Days and nights. There was no food. There was water, for as Vanning splashed through shallow pools he would bend his head to drink of the foul liquid. Once his feet crunched on the green-moulded bones of a human skeleton. Others had taken this way before him....

Toward the end, a fleshless, gaunt thing that had once been a man dragged itself laboriously toward a range of mountains that lifted from the swamp toward the north. They extended to left and right as far as he could see, and seemed unscalable. But they were V-shaped, and Vanning headed toward the point of the V—the inner point. The terrible drive within him drove him on relentlessly.

That night a sulphurous crimson glow lit the sky beyond the mountains. Vanning did not see it. He slept.

By morning he was on his way again, staggering into the funnel of the peaks. They were bare rock, eroded by eons of trickling water from the clouds. He could not climb them, even had he possessed the strength. He went on, instead, into the narrowing valley....

It ended in a sheer cliff of weathered stone. Vanning reeled toward the barrier. He could not return. The North-Fever drove him on remorselessly. He had to climb that wall of rock, or die. And he could not climb.

He fell, rose, and fell again. In the end he crawled. He crawled to the foot of the cliff and dragged himself upright. He fell forward, as though trying to press his body against the towering wall that lifted to the writhing grey clouds—

Fell—through the stone!

He toppled through the rock curtain as though it were non-existent! Instantly intense blackness closed around him. Hard stone was under him.

His mind was too dulled to wonder. He knew only that the way north was still open. He crept on through darkness, leaving a trail of blood behind him....

The ground dropped from under him. He crashed down on a mound of moulded vegetation.

Before the shock had passed, the living dead man was moving again. He crawled forward until his way was blocked by a perpendicular wall. Gasping dry-throated sobs, he clawed at 

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