the wind and rain were lessening. And presently a rift came in the wheeling orange clouds—a rift with a pallid opalescent light breaking through. The Orana moon. As the clouds at last wheeled and swung away, the firmament of stars was spread overhead—pin-points of fire in the Orana night-sky, with the moon a huge crescent of opalescent shimmer. It bathed the glistening wet slope, strewn with the tiny dead figures. It edged with pallid silver the frowning ramparts of the distant mountains....

Presently the daylight came. There was a swift, brightening twilight of flat, pale glow; and then all in a few minutes there was full daylight as the sun mounted above the cliffs. Out here beyond Mars, it was a sun small and pale. Nixon's first Orana day. The sunlight had warmth, a grateful warmth that soon was drying him. In it the bound Nixon lay quiet. Momentarily the giant was ignored. The wet slope was steaming in the sunlight. Nona and the Orites whom he had sheltered had fled into the city as soon as the storm abated. The barrage glow had gone from the pyramids. Gorts were carrying in the dead and wounded.

A queer ironic feeling of his helplessness was in Nixon as he lay waiting, wondering what these strange little captors would try to do to him next. This world of civilized humans all in miniature, so tiny, made it seem absurd that he should have to lie here, patiently waiting for what would happen to him. But every moment as he gazed around at the busy little Orite world, revealed by the daylight, his respect for it grew. Quite evidently these were a scientific people. A totally different science from anything on Earth, so that he could never grasp it. A science, compared to his own Earth-world, which in many ways was probably less advanced, yet in other ways more so.

Beyond the three pyramid-cities he could see tilled fields in which tiny things were growing. Little furrows ridged them. Gorts were working there, with miniature machines that scurried like bugs along the ground. Now after the storm, Orites were trudging in from the hills, a rural population living out in the recesses of the cliffs, and in huts along the ground. A few of their little dwellings were visible in the nearer distance, mounds about a foot high. Some of the people living out there came carrying those who had been hurt in the storm—for medical attention in the pyramid-cities, Nixon surmised. Others evidently came out of curiosity to see the giant from Earth. At a respectful distance which to Nixon was five or six feet away, a crowd of them was gathering. Men and women, and the young some of which were hardly more than an inch high, clinging 

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