“Nature has other laws here, it seems?”

“Nothing can exist here that is not a compound of the three worlds.”

“Yet the water is flowing somewhere.”

“I can’t explain it, but there are three wills in it.”

“Is there no such thing as pure Thire-matter?”

“Thire cannot exist without Amfuse, and Amfuse cannot exist without Faceny.”

Maskull thought this over for some minutes.  “That must be so,” he said at last.  “Without life there can be no love, and without love there can be no religious feeling.”

In the half light of the land, the tops of the hills containing the valley presently attained such a height that they could not be seen.  The sides were steep and craggy, while the bed of the valley grew narrower at every step.  Not a living organism was visible.  All was unnatural and sepulchral.

Maskull said, “I feel as if I were dead, and walking in another world.”

“I still do not know what you are doing here,” answered Corpang.

“Why should I go on making a mystery of it?  I came to find Surtur.”

“That name I’ve heard—­but under what circumstances?”

“You forget?”

Corpang walked along, his eyes fixed on the ground, obviously troubled.  “Who is Surtur?”

Maskull shook his head, and said nothing.

The valley shortly afterward narrowed, so that the two men, touching fingertips in the middle, could have placed their free hands on the rock walls on either side.  It threatened to terminate in a cul-de-sac, but just when the road seemed least promising, and they were shut in by cliffs on all sides, a hitherto unperceived bend brought them suddenly into the open.  They emerged through a mere crack in the line of precipices.

A sort of huge natural corridor was running along at right angles to the way they had come; both ends faded into obscurity after a few hundred yards.  Right down the centre of this corridor ran a chasm with perpendicular sides; its width varied from thirty to a hundred feet, but its bottom could not be seen.  On both sides of the chasm, facing one another, were platforms of rock, twenty feet or so in width; they too proceeded in both directions out of sight.  Maskull and Corpang emerged onto one of these platforms.  The shelf opposite was a few feet higher than that on which they stood.  The platforms were backed by a double line of lofty and unclimbable cliffs, whose tops were invisible.

The stream, which had accompanied them through the gap, went straight forward, but, instead of descending the wall of the chasm as a waterfall, it crossed from side to side like a liquid bridge.  It then disappeared through a cleft in the cliffs on the opposite side.

To Maskull’s mind, however, even more wonderful than this unnatural phenomenon was the absence of shadows, which was more noticeable here than on the open plain.  It made the place look like a hall of phantoms.