to your chronometer-watch and your careful record, we know the very hour. Almost a whole year has gone by since that day we went forth upon the mountain. How are we going to explain that to the curious?"
"Tut, tut!" smiled Mil ton. "If all otir difficulties could be so easily solved as that!"
"I believe, however," he went on, "that we ought to leave the world, our world, a record of the discovery. I will set down to the extent that time permits those things which, in my opinion, will interest the scientific world. As for the discovery itself, the journey and our adventures, yours, Bill, is the hand to record that."
"A record?" I exclaimed. "Then why all this secrecy, this moving under cover of darkness, if you are going to broadcast the discovery of Drome to the whole world?" "Because we will then have left that world and the way to this will have been blasted up and otherwise closed."
"That," I told him, "will never keep them out."
"I think that it will. And, if any ever does find his way down, he'll never return to the surface; he'll spend the rest of his days here in Drome, even if he lives to be as old as Methuselah. Be sure you put that into the record! The Dromans are human, and so they are not quite saints. But their land is never going to be infested with plunderers, dope-peddlers and bootleggers if I can prevent it, and I feel confident that I can.
"This closing of the way will not mean complete isolation. At any rate, I hope that it will not. For I feel confident that ere very long the two worlds will communicate with each other by radio—yes, that each will even see, by means of television, the inhabitants and the marvels of the other."
One or two weird things befell us
during our return journey, but
time presses and I can not pause to
record them here. The party was
composed of picked men, one of whom
was Narkus. We had one ape-bat.
This going up was a more difficult
business, I want to tell you, than our
going down had been. There was one
consolation: we did not get lost.
Onward and upward we toiled, and at last, on the 28th of July, we reached the Tamahnowis Rocks.
This was about 10 o'clock in the morning. The way out was completely blocked by the ice. Cool air, however, was flowing in through fissures and clefts in the walls and the roof of the tunnel. We waited until along toward midnight, for fear someone might be about—that some sound might reveal the secret of the rock.
It was about 11 o'clock when we began to dig our way out through the ice. The tunnel was not driven out into the glacier but up alongside the rock wall, through the edge of the ice-stream. Hurrah! At last our passage was through! And, as old Dante has it:
"Thence issuing we again beheld the stars."
[THE END]
