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returned, penetrating as the thickness of the darkness eased.
    Jolie found herself on a slope, but the mountain had changed. It was now alien. No-it was a mountain-sized depression! They were standing on the slope of a roughly conical pit. Yet, oddly, it wasn’t dark in its depths; it was lightest at the base and darkening at its rim.
    Rim? Jolie looked upslope-and spied a giant dome. This was not a pit, it was a closed cave!
    Beside her, Orlene was gazing around with equal wonder. “Like the inside of a tremendous diamond!” she said.
    Jolie had to agree. The walls of their prison were faceted, and the whole was like an elegant cut. How had they come here?
    Again Orlene fathomed it first: “The dark cloud, it phased us into the mountain!” she exclaimed. “We are inside the mountain!”
    “But then it’s upside down!” Jolie said. “Narrow at the base and broad at the-”
    “It isn’t, we are!” Orlene said. “We were climbing toward the point; now we are descending toward the point. We’re inverted, inside and upside down.”
    Indeed, it seemed to be so. “That was one impressive bit of magic,” Jolie said. “The wand got us away from the locusts by phasing us into the mountain, where they couldn’t go.”
    “Well, you did tell me to use it at need!”
    They contemplated each other. Their clothing was tattered but still serviceable. Their skins were abraded, but not seriously damaged. The locusts had not been able to do a lot of damage in the few seconds they had had.
    “Do you suppose the wand can conjure us back outside?” Orlene asked.
    “That seems likely. But maybe we should descend to the peak of the mountain first, then go out. That will save energy and danger.”
    Orlene nodded agreement. They resumed their travel, following the same path they had, but from the other side: a slightly raised surface. Indeed, all of the local contours seemed to be the same as those of the outside of the mountain, with the exception of the living portion: the grass, brush and trees. The outcroppings of rock were pits here, and the depressions were mounds. On the larger scale this was an evenly faceted surface, but on the immediate level it was highly varied.
    In fact, it seemed to be such a perfect inversion of the outer surface of the mountain that increasingly Jolie wondered about it. She had thought the mountain was a shell, with an inside and an outside, and that the wand had phased them through that shell and put them on the inner surface. But such a mold had no need to be identical on inside and outside, and indeed was unlikely to be. In fact, it might be close to impossible on a scale like this; such a thin film, following the exact surface of a mountain, should quickly collapse unless soundly buttressed on one side or the other. This one wasn’t buttressed outside or inside.
    “Something funny about this,” Orlene said. “I’m not sure we’re inside a hollow mountain; I think we’re part of it!”
    “We’d be embedded in it!” Jolie said, laughing.
    “No, somehow we’re reacting to the rock and earth the solid inanimate parts, as if they are air, while the air is like rock to us now. Gravity is reversed too; we’re trying to fall away from the planet, but the air is stopping us. Normally we’re trying to fall into the center of the planet, but the ground stops us.”
    “But we’re not on the planet,” Jolie pointed out. “We’re at the verge of Purgatory, which is nowhere in relation to the planet, but might be pictured as a two-dimensional plane somewhere between Earth and infinity. We seem solid here because our ghostly state has better definition; it’s an illusion, for we have no three-dimensional solidity.”
    “Oh, I forgot about that! I’m still thinking in mortal terms. Sometimes it’s hard to believe I’m really dead.”
    “Your body is dead; your soul lives on. But I think you have helped me answer a confusion I was having. I thought this big diamond structure should