coming out into a world that one of even less intelligence than the great Mahars could easily see was a different world from her own Pellucidar.
What had she thought of the outer world's tiny sun?
What had been the effect upon her of the moon and myriad stars of the clear African nights?
How had she explained them?
With what sensations of awe must she first have watched the sun moving slowly across the heavens to disappear at last beneath the western horizon, leaving in his wake that which the Mahar had never before witnessed—the darkness of night? For upon Pellucidar there is no night. The stationary sun hangs forever in the center of the Pellucidarian sky—directly overhead.
Then, too, she must have been impressed by the wondrous mechanism of the prospector which had bored its way from world to world and back again. And that it had been driven by a rational being must also have occurred to her.
Too, she had seen me conversing with other men upon the earth's surface. She had seen the arrival of the caravan of books and arms, and ammunition, and the balance of the heterogeneous collection which I had crammed into the cabin of the iron mole for transportation to Pellucidar.
She had seen all these evidences of a civilization and brain-power transcending in scientific achievement anything that her race had produced; nor once had she seen a creature of her own kind.
There could have been but a single deduction in the mind of the Mahar―there were other worlds than Pellucidar, and the gilak was a rational being.
Now the creature at my side was creeping slowly toward the near-by sea. At my hip hung a long-barreled six-shooter―somehow I had been unable to find the same sensation of security in the newfangled automatics that had been perfected since my first departure from the outer world―and in my hand was a heavy express rifle.
I could have shot the Mahar with ease, for I knew intuitively that she was escaping―but I did not.
I felt that if she could return to her own kind with the
