"More than likely, Mel," he said, "you wouldn't have recognized it, even if you had seen it clearly. You could hardly expect to find life here like that we know. The chances are that evolution has taken a widely different course in here. Even the tiny things in the sea were strange to me. And in a world like this, of hot and endless day, we're likely to find jungles with great insects and huge reptiles--a fauna and flora corresponding to that of the Carboniferous Era on the surface."

"Then you think there is land here, trees, even men! You really think--the Green Girl?"

"That was just an idea, about the green tan. But there is sure to be land, of some sort, where the lips of this abyss curve up to meet the water above. And there is no reason why there might not be life upon it--highly developed life, at that. Life may be as old in this place as outside, perhaps older, for it has been protected from the cataclysms of one kind and another that may have swept life off the surface again and again through the ages. And we know there is some kind of intelligence here--"

"No wonder they were willing to freeze the earth! They couldn't tell the difference if the sea were frozen a mile thick!"

Still we held our course to the northward. Presently Sam went back below again. An hour later the horizon was broken by a line of dull blue in the north. A thin blue strip appeared between black sea and scarlet sky, and widened slowly. In another hour I could make out a wall of towering blue cliffs all across the north, rising from the sea as if to support the red sky. They were veiled in the mists of infinite distances. When Sam had made his observations, computed his angles and completed his calculations, he announced that they were a hundred miles north of us, and met the red sky at a level four miles above us as we floated along!

That meant that we were nine miles below the level of the Pacific, according to Sam's figures. The seat of the menace we thought to conquer was a mile below us yet!

As the hours went by, and we still went northward at our crawling pace (we went slowly because Sam thought that the use of the engines at full power would create an etheric disturbance that would reveal our position to our mysterious enemy). The jagged rim of the abyss rose steadily out of the sea. The cliffs, when I focused my powerful glasses upon them, seemed composed of sheer columns of blue rock, reaching up to meet the red roof of waters like gigantic prisms of blue basalt.

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