of this world. And if this was a sample of merely morning winds, by midday existence would be impossible.

Stan looked at the chrono. He had slept less than three hours. He made a loop of line from the abandon-ship kit and got it about the nearest pillar. He drew himself to that tall column. He tried to find a lee side, but there was none. The wind direction changed continually. He debated struggling farther under the shelter of the monstrous roof. He stared up, estimatingly—

He saw slabs tilt. In a giant section whose limits he could not determine, he saw the rectangular sections of the roof revolve in strict unison. From a position parallel to the ground, they turned until the light of the sky shone down unhindered. Vast masses of sand descended—deposited on the slabs by the wind, and now dumped down about the columns' bases. And then wind struck anew with a concentrated virulence, and the space between the columns became filled with a whirling giant eddy that blotted out everything.

It was a monster whirlwind that spun crazily in its place for minutes, and then roared out to the open again. In its violence it picked Stan up bodily, with the skid and abandon-ship kit still clamped to his space suit. But for the rope about the column he would have been ripped away and tossed insanely into the smother of sand that reached to the horizon.

After a long time, he managed to take up some of the slack of the rope; to bind himself and his possessions more closely to the column which rose into the smother overhead. Later still, he was able to take up more. In an hour, he was bound tightly to the pillar and was no longer flung to and fro by the wind. Then he dozed off again.

It was uneasy slumber. It gave him little rest. Once a swirling sand-devil gouged away the sand beneath him so that he and his gear hung an unguessable distance above solidity, perhaps no more than a yard or so, but perhaps much more. Later he woke to find the sand piling up swiftly about him, so that he had to loosen his rope and climb wearily as tons of fine, abrasive stuff—it would have been strangling had he needed to breathe it direct—were flung upon him. But he did sleep from time to time.

Then night fell. The winds died down from hurricane intensity to no more than gale force. Then to mere frantic gusts. And then—the sun had set on the farther side of the huge structure to which he had tied himself—then there was a period when a fine whitish mist seemed to obscure all the stars, and it 

 Prev. P 10/41 next