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the mountains. But the desert, we found very quickly, wasn’t as flat as it had looked from the ship. What we hadn’t seen was a depression which hid a tremendous cleft, half a mile across and ten times that in depth, which ran parallel to the way we were going. This was when I first shut my eyes, because the Robot drove, without any slackening of the terrific speed, directly along the lip of the chasm, so that it didn’t seem there could be more than six inches between our wheels and extinction . . .
    When I opened my eyes—cautiously—I saw we were past the chasm and heading straight for a sort of rocky escarpment which shot abruptly out of the red earth between us and the mountains. The sheet of blue-grey rock seemed to stretch for miles on either side, towering perhaps a hundred feet above the floor of the desert. There was no break in it that I could see, yet we were hurtling straight at it. At a speed I hated even to guess.
    I shut my eyes again.
    There was a rushing interval, then a faint deceleration followed by the sharp swing of a curve. I heard one of the others say something. It sounded like an exclamation, and I risked another peek—and exclaimed myself.
    There must have been an opening in the wall of rock, because now we were on the other side of it and rolling much slower down a gentle slope toward a broad valley which had the rock as one side of it and the foot of a mountain as the other. And we might have been a thousand miles from any desert, because here, stretching out as far as we could see, were trees and shrubs and grassland, even the placid glimmering of a narrow river . . .
    Again my first impression—as it had been to that view of the planet from the air—was of similarity to Earth. But as we dropped down the slope, the valley came into better focus and the similarity dissolved. The trees which at first glance might have been tropical Earth growths, weren’t really like any terra plant at all. Not in trunk, nor foliage, nor even shape. And the grass was a soft golden color and the river a deep, deep blue, almost like the Mediterranean . . .
    We didn’t speak, our eyes were too busy. Decelerating until we couldn’t have been going more than forty terra miles an hour, we slid into a grove of the odd trees, on a track of hard, smooth earth which wasn’t red like the desert but almost the same blue-grey as the rock. The trees were thick on each side of us—and when I saw Adams and Farman with their hands on the butts of their D-R pistols, I followed the example, not quite so eager for sightseeing now . . .
    The trees began to thin, and the track curved. We cleared the grove and seemed to be heading for a towering shoulder or rock which jutted out from the mountainside. Adams and Farman relaxed, and their hands came away from the pistols butts. The Robot was driving really slow now, and there was plenty of time to take stock of our latest surroundings.
    They were beautiful, but as different from the country we’d just passed through as that had been from the desert. I spotted what made the difference, and was just going to speak when Adams did it for me.
    “Landscaped,” he said.
    He was right. There was something about the whole terrain, which stretched for maybe a quarter of a terra-mile each side of the rock-mass, that shouted of planning. The way the smooth reaches of golden turf melted into copses of trees and shrubs; the way the deep-blue stream curved in a graceful sweep; the way the whole vista melted gradually into the mountains ahead and the wild country at each side . . .
    I said, “You hit it right, Skipper. This was all laid out.”
    “There ought to be a building,” Adams said. “Or buildings.”
    Farman said, “But there isn’t. Nary construction.”
    But I’d seen something. “Yes, there is,” I said, pointing. “Look at that pool.”
    It was on our left, with the track running between it and the shoulder of rock. It was surrounded by trees and a hedge which had