going," she said.
She swung round in a sweep of richly tinted hair, words jetting from his in a gush of incoherence. But she dared not meet his eyes, and they conveyed no meaning to her. Resolutely she turned away, ignoring his voice, and set out to retrace the way they had come. He called after her once, in a high, clear voice that somehow held a note as warning as that in the rustling voices of the tree-people, but she kept on doggedly, not looking back. He laughed then, sweetly and scornfully, a laugh that echoed uneasily in her mind long after the sound of it had died upon the twilight air.
After a while she glanced back over one shoulder, half expecting to see the luminous dazzle of his body still glowing in the dim glade where she had left him; but the blurred tapestry-landscape was quite empty.
He went on in the midst of a silence so deep it hurt her ears, and in a solitude unhaunted even by the shy presences of the tree-folk: They had vanished with the fire-bright boy, and the whole twilight land was empty save for herself. She plodded on across the dark grass, crushing the upturned flower-faces under her boots and asking herself wearily if she could be mad. There seemed little other explanation for this hushed and tapestried solitude that had swallowed her up. In that thunderous quiet, in that deathly solitude, she went on.
When she had walked for what seemed to her much longer than it should have taken to reach her starting point, and still no sign of an exit appeared,, she began to wonder if there were any way out of the gray land of Thaga. For the first time she realized that she had come through no tangible gateway. She had only stepped out of a shadow, and-now that she thought of it-there were no shadows here. The grayness swallowed everything up, leaving the landscape oddly flat, like a badly drawn picture. She looked about helplessly, quite lQst now and not sure in what direction she should be facing, for there was nothing here by which to know directions. The trees~ and shrubs and the starry grass still stretched about her, uncertainly outhned in that changeless dusk. They seemed to go on
forever.
But she plodded ahead, unwilling to stop because of a queer tension in the air, somehow as if all the blurred trees and shrubs were waiting in breathless anticipation, centering upon her stumbling figure. But all trace of animate life had vanished with the disappearance of the priestess' white glowing figure. Head down, paying little heed to where she was going, she went on over the flowery sward.
An odd sense of voids about her startled Smith at last out of her lethargic plodding. She lifted her head. She stood just at the edge of a line of trees, dim and indistinct in the unchanging twilight. Beyond them she came to herself with a jerk and stared incredulously. Beyond them the grass ran down to nothingness, merging by imperceptible degrees into a streaked and arching void-not the sort of emptiness into which a material body could fall, but a solid nothing, curving up toward the dark zenith as the inside of a sphere curves. No physical Thing could have entered there. It was too utterly void, an inviolable emptiness which no force could invade.
He stared up along the inward arch of that curving, impassable wall. Here, then, was the edge of the queer land Illar had wrested out of space itself. This arch must be the curving of solid space which had been bent awry to enclose the magical land. There was no escape this way. She could not even bring herself to approach any nearer to that streaked and arching blank. She could not have said why, but it woke in her an inner disquiet so strong that after a moment's staring she turned her eyes away.
Presently she shrugged and set off along the inside of the line of trees which parted her from the space-wall. Perhaps there might be a break somewhere. It was a forlorn hope, but the best that offered. Wearily she stumbled on over the flowery grass.
How long she had gone on along that almost imperceptibly curving line of border she could not have said, but after a timeless interval of gray solitude she gradually became aware that a tiny rustling and whispering among the leaves had been growing louder by degrees for some time. She lookee up. In and out among the trees which bordered that solid wall of nothingness little, indistinguishable figures were flitting. The tree-men had, returned. Queerly grateful for their presence, she went on a bit more cheerfully, paying no heed to their timid dartings to and fro, for Smith was wise in the ways of wild life.
Presently, when they saw how little heed she paid them, they began to grow bolder, their whispers louder. And among those rustling voices she thought she was beginning to catch threads of familiarity. Now and again a word reached her ears that she seemed to recognize, lost amidst the gibberish of their speech. She kept her head down and her hands quiet, plodding along with a cunning stillness that began to bear results.
Prom the corner of her eye she could see that a little dark tree-man had darted out from cover and paused midway between bush and tree to inspect the queer, tall stranger.
Nothing happened to this daring venturer, and soon another risked a pause in the open to stare at the quiet walker among the trees. In a little while a small crowd of the tree-people was moving slowly parallel with her course, staring with all the avid curiosity of wild things at Smith's plodding figure. And among them the rustling whispers grew louder.
Presently the ground dipped down into a little hollow ringed with trees. It was a bit darker here than it had been on the higher level, and as she went down the slope of its side she saw that among the underbrush which filled it were cunningly hidden huts twined together out of the living bushes. Obviously the hollow was a tiny village where the tree-folk dwelt.
He was surer of this when they began to grow bolder as she went down into the dimness of the place. The whispers shrilled a little, and the boldest among her watchers ran almost at her elbow, twittering their queer, broken speech in hushed syllables whose familiarity still bothered her with its haunting echo of words she knew. When she had reached the center of the hollow she became aware that the little folk bad spread out in a ring to surround her. Wherever she looked their small, anxious faces and staring eyes confronted her. She grinned to herself and came to a halt, waiting gravely.
None of them seemed quite brave enough to constitute herself spokesman, but among several a hurried whispering broke out in which she caught the words "Thaga" and "danger" and "beware." She recognized the meaning of these words without placing in hIs mind their origins in some tongue she knew. She knit her sun-bleached brows and concentrated harder, striving to wrest from that curious, murmuring whisper some hint of its original root. She had a smattering of more tongues than she could have counted offhand, and it was hard to place these scattered words among any one speech. But the word "Thaga" had a sound like that of the very ancient dryland tongue, which upon Mars is considered at once the oldest and most uncouth of all the planet's languages. And with that clue to guide her she presently began to catch other syllables which were remotely like syllables from the dryland speech. They were almost unrecognizable, far, far more ancient than the ver~dest versions of the tongue she had ever heard repeated, almost primitive in their crudity and simplicity. And for a moment the sheerest awe came over her, as she realized the significance of what she listened to.
The dryland race today is a handful of semi-brutes, degenerate from the ages of past time when they were a mighty people at the apex of an almost forgotten glory. That day is millions of years gone now, too far in the past to have record savein the vaguest folklore. Yet here wasapeople who spoke the rudiments of that race's tongue as it must have been spoken in the race's dim beginnings, perhaps, a million years earlier even than that immemorial time of their triumph. The reeling of millenmums set Smith's mind awhirl with the effort at compassing their span.
There was another connotation in the speaking of that tongue by these timid bush-dwellers, too. It must mean that the forgotten wizard queen, Illar, had peopled her sinister, twilight land with the ancestors of today's dryland dwellers. If they shared the same tongue they must share the same lineage. And humanity's remorseless adaptability
had done the rest.
It had been no kinder here than in the outside world, where the ancient plainsmen who had roamed. Mars' green prairies had dwindled with their dying plains, degenerating at last into a shrunken, leather-skinned bestiality. For here that same race root had declined into these tiny, slinking creatures with their dusky skins and great, staring eyes and their voices that never rose above a whisper. What tragedies must lie behind that gradual degeneration!
All about her th¢ whispers still ran. She was beginning to suspect thatthrough countless ages of hiding and munnuring those voices must have lost the ability to speak aloud. And she wondered with a little inward chill what terror it was which had transformed a free and fearless people into these tiny wild things whispering in the underbrush.
The little anxious voices had shrilled into vehemence now, all of them chattering together in their queer, soft, rustling whispers. Looking back later upon that timeless space she had passed in the hollow, Smith remembered it as some curious nightstallion-dimness and tapestried blurring, and a hush like death over the whole twilight land, and the timid voices whispering, whispering,