“Well, I understand all that,” replied Maskull, after listening attentively.  “But what I don’t grasp is this—­if living creatures here sport so energetically, how does it come about that human beings wear much the same shape as in my world?”

“I’ll explain that too,” said Panawe.  “All creatures that resemble Shaping must of necessity resemble one another.”

“Then sporting is the blind will to become like Shaping?”

“Exactly.”

“It is most wonderful,” said Maskull.  “Then the brotherhood of man is not a fable invented by idealists, but a solid fact.”

Joiwind looked at him, and changed colour.  Panawe relapsed into sternness.

Maskull became interested in a new phenomenon.  The jale-coloured blossoms of a crystal bush were emitting mental waves, which with his breve he could clearly distinguish.  They cried out silently, “To me To me!” While he looked, a flying worm guided itself through the air to one of these blossoms and began to suck its nectar.  The floral cry immediately ceased.

They now gained the crest of the mountain, and looked down beyond.  A lake occupied its crater-like cavity.  A fringe of trees partly intercepted the view, but Maskull was able to perceive that this mountain lake was nearly circular and perhaps a quarter of a mile across.  Its shore stood a hundred feet below them.

Observing that his hosts did not propose to descend, he begged them to wait for him, and scrambled down to the surface.  When he got there, he found the water perfectly motionless and of a colourless transparency.  He walked onto it, lay down at full length, and peered into the depths.  It was weirdly clear:  he could see down for an indefinite distance, without arriving at any bottom.  Some dark, shadowy objects, almost out of reach of his eyes, were moving about.  Then a sound, very faint and mysterious, seemed to come up through the gnawl water from an immense depth.  It was like the rhythm of a drum.  There were four beats of equal length, but the accent was on the third.  It went on for a considerable time, and then ceased.

The sound appeared to him to belong to a different world from that in which he was travelling.  The latter was mystical, dreamlike, and unbelievable—­the drumming was like a very dim undertone of reality.  It resembled the ticking of a clock in a room full of voices, only occasionally possible to be picked up by the ear.

He rejoined Panawe and Joiwind, but said nothing to them about his experience.  They all walked round the rim of the crater, and gazed down on the opposite side.  Precipices similar to those that had overlooked the desert here formed the boundary of a vast moorland plain, whose dimensions could not be measured by the eye.  It was solid land, yet he could not make out its prevailing colour.  It was as if made of transparent glass, but it did not glitter in the sunlight.  No objects in it could be distinguished, except a rolling river in the far distance, and, farther off still, on the horizon, a line of dark mountains, of strange shapes.  Instead of being rounded, conical, or hogbacked, these heights were carved by nature into the semblance of castle battlements, but with extremely deep indentations.