itself, and toppled again as the weight of another denar's vast bulk bludgeoned it. The ragged outer fringe of the great herd had reached them even as they came into the shadow of the trees!

With a crash the thirty-foot wheel and its inner cabin went over. The two occupants were unhurt save for a few bruises, and they wasted no time in racing to the shattered port between the two huge tires. Nard Rost led the way, a knobby metal wrench in his fist to clear away the broken shards yet remaining in the frame.

Five feet away the thick bole of a forest giant lifted. They had come that close to its shelter. Without a moment's hesitation the two men raced up the knotty protuberances of the trunk to the lower branches. There, twenty feet above the ground, they paused momentarily.

Well that they had quitted the wheel when they did. The solid secondary flood of the denar tide swept over the vehicle, churned, eddied, and pounded onward again unchecked over the flattened scraps of metal and resilient durnb.

And now the other wheels suffered a like fate. They too pulped and disappeared. Besan Wur's square face brightened. He shouted something against the all-pervading din of the stampeding lizard horde.

"Relsa Dav!" he shouted into Nard Rost's elongated ear cup.

He had glimpsed the trembling slim form of the girl clinging to a massive horizontal branch a scant three feet above the tossing green crests of the lizards. Now he hurried along a higher branch interlacing with those of the other three where the girl had found refuge.

A moment later he had pulled her to the safety of a higher limb and the girl was sobbing against his tunic's soft brown cloth, her arms about his neck.

He caught a suggestion of moisture in the violet eyes of the older man as he joined them. Nard Rost's mate, Ilva, had perished up ahead there. And with her had died the twenty-four other students and their three instructors bound for a four month's course of practical study in the tin and copper mines of the Durlu Hills.

Only they three had escaped because of the temporary check of the hill and now the sheltering trees. How long the battered lower boles, massive though they were, would remain upright, was doubtful. And the unending flow of squealing whistling denars might continue unchecked for more than two or three days!

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