menagerie of weird people from many worlds that already stuffed his brain and made him rather a cosmopolitan with regard to alien cultures. He had already spent several weeks on Mars; most of it in Parthena, the chief spaceport of southern Mars, where he haunted the bars of the native district, asking, seeking, wheedling, bribing, until he found what he sought—a man who could lead him to one of the old cities that lay hidden back in the hills.

So it came about that he landed himself and his guide in a rented 'copter on a certain, uncharted mountainside to the south and west of Parthena.

Through the field glasses, the minarets of the city were just visible, but it was impossible to get any closer for there was no place to land. The old Martians had been averse to flat roofs, a circumstance which led Seeling to doubt, audibly, that they could have had the sense of an addled eel.

After loading himself down with the paraphernalia that explorers are supposed to carry, he went on alone, the guide declining an invitation to accompany him.

It was almost dark when he stumbled over the first bit of masonry—some prehistoric curbstone, perhaps. He had walked for hours in a tangled forest of giant reeds, and the suddenness of his discovery startled him.

He had wandered right into the midst of the abandoned city without even knowing it. Such was the customary luck of George Seeling. He could see shadowy outlines of some of the eroding old towers from where he stood, but he knew it was too late in the evening to explore them safely. He had waited this long; it wouldn't hurt to wait through one more short, Martian night.

He found a clearing near a roofless columnar tower and spread his sleeping bag beneath its wall. He went to sleep elated with his good fortune, and slept dreamlessly, and without disturbance.

But then, it took a great deal to disturb George Seeling when he slept.

In the morning the ghels were there. There were about a dozen of them, silently squatting in a semi-circle about his camp, contemplating him at a respectful distance with their soulful, gazelle eyes.

There is something disconcerting about waking up and finding that one has acquired uninvited guests, but Seeling never turned a hair. He reached over and grabbed his rifle, but the ghels never moved. They looked, for all the world, like purple-brown graven images 

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