For the first time I got plenty scared. I knew about the rainbow gardens, all right. On most of the surface of Venus the direct rays of Sol never penetrated the numerous layers of poisonous clouds that shielded and sheltered the livable atmosphere and the mild, though dreary climate underneath. But in certain areas curious updrafts allowed small shafts of sunlight to reach the surface. The areas were never large, but wherever the light struck, the effect upon a drab, colorless world was like magic.

For a reason that science had never been able to learn, objects on Venus, whenever exposed to direct sunlight, instead of giving off white light, diffracted it into its spectral components, and showed up in gorgeous, blinding hues. Also, the vegetation within these charmed areas was subtly changed. The constant, radiant mist caused the trees and plants to take on warped, nightmarish shapes.

The natives worshipped the rainbow gardens, and bathed in the colored mists that eternally swept up into the blackness of space from the surface.

I didn't want to upset Harry, but I had spent enough years on Venus to hear a lot of curious stories that had circulated through the north about those strange regions.

"Come on," I said, "we'd better not waste any time."

We had been able to charter an old-fashioned flutter-plane, which could land more or less vertically, and Harry had the approximate longitude of the place from Marjud.

We could see it a long way off, fortunately, and it was like a big waterspout, except for its preternatural straightness, reaching up in a silvery, swirling column through the gray cloud layer twelve miles overhead.

He didn't swing the flutter-plane too near to it. The updrafts around it, at this altitude, were supposed to move at terrific speed, and could shatter even a rocketship.

There was some kind of gray stone building rising out of the gray-green forest at the foot of the column, and we landed a quarter of a mile away, so as not to attract attention. We walked in, and in a few minutes were able to make out the domes of the temple rising over the tops of the trees.

The masonry was of a rough, dark basalt, crude and unbeautiful. The work of the primitive tribes that lived in the area. I had heard of giant towers and spired old cities which were supposed to have been the work of an ancient, long-dead, and highly evolved 

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