six-hundred feet to a bare two-hundred, though much of the nose had melted from the impact against the rocks. Gnarled oaks and junipers reached up from a riven seam of the shell. The metal had not rusted. It was merely tarnished to a slate gray. It was a mine of such metal as could have furnished all manner of implements for the Terrestrians—but they did not know how to exploit it.

Finally, Verrill was looking down into narrow, upland meadows where sheep grazed. There were barley patches. His eyes felt as though they were full of sand. The snow-white glare from cliffs, and the dust which rose in yellow puffs at every step, made the way a torment for one accustomed to the paradisiacal clime of the Venusian Domes.

Each day's march brought the donkey-caravan within sight of alternate trails, guarded by mud-brick towers, where armed men were stationed to watch the moves of hostile neighbors. The return, even without pursuit, would be dangerous.

At last they came to Ardelan's mud-walled houses, huddled on a rocky shelf which overhung a fertile valley. The settlement was surrounded by a wall of earth and stone, and had escaped contamination because no one would have bombed a 12,000 foot range of limestone peaks except by mistake.

When the trading convoy filed into the tangle of flat-roofed houses which surrounded a hard-packed central square, women, children, and dogs came out, each in full voice. The procession kept straight on toward the entrance of a two-storeyed building. Half the ground-level was a stable; the rest, a courtyard where Ardelan and a handful of armed companions lolled under an awning of black goat-hair.

Terrestrian faces were no novelty to Verrill; but this time, being a stranger among them—instead of merely a spectator seeing a handful of them, half defiant and half uneasy in the strangeness of a trading-post—he saw what he had never before noticed. They tended toward height and ranginess, prominence of nose, angularity of face; yet behind this likeness was a shadow-pattern of racial differentiation. There were differences of flavor, rather than of outright form. The flare of a nostril, the shape of an eye, the fullness or thinness of lip—a thick necked one, here and there, suggested that, generations back, there had been among his ancestors a blocky Mongol from Central Asia.

The guards, instead of presenting Verrill, explained him as though he had been some trade article. Ardelan, listening, studied his visitor with entire impersonality, as he might have scrutinized a basket of fresh ripe 

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