The craft began to move.  This time its motion was smoother arguing an even surface.  However, it had not gone far before, to the engineer’s astonishment, it began to move straight down a slope so steep that no mechanism with which Smith was familiar could possibly have clung to it.  As this happened, his adopted eyes told him that the craft was located upon one of those enormous boulders, in the center of a stream of such absolute immensity that he fairly gasped.  The thing was—­colossal!

And yet it was true.  The unseen machine deliberately moved along until it was actually clinging, not to the top, but to the side of the rock.  The water appeared to be about five yards beneath, to the right.  To the left was the sky, while the center of that strange vision was now upon a similar boulder seemingly a quarter of a mile distant, farther out in the stream.  But the fellow at the periscope didn’t change position one whit!

It was so unreal.  Smith deliberately ignored everything else and watched again for indications of eyelids.  He saw not one flicker, but noticed a certain tiny come-and-go, the merest sort of vibration, which indicated the agent’s heart-action.  Apparently it beat more than twice as fast as Smith’s.

But it relieved him to know that his agent was at least a genuine living being.  For a moment he had fancied something utterly repellent to him.  Suppose this Sanusian were not any form of natural creature at all, but some sort of supermachine, capable of functioning like an organism?  The thought made the engineer shudder as no morgue could.

Presently the queer craft approached the water closely enough, and at such an angle, that Smith looked eagerly for a reflection.  However, the water was exceedingly rough, and only a confused brownish blur could be made out.  Once he caught a queer sound above the noise of the water; a shrill hiss, with a harsh whine at the end.  “Just like some kind of suction apparatus,” as he later described it.

And then, with that peculiar sound fresh in his ears, came the crowning shock of the whole experience.  Floating toward the boulder, but some distance away, was what looked like a black seed.  Next moment the vision flashed clear, as usual, and the engineer saw that the object was really a beetle; and in a second it was so near that Smith’s own body, back on the earth, involuntarily shrank back into the recesses of his chair.

For that beetle was an enormity in the most unlimited sense of the word.  It was infinitely larger than any beetle the engineer had ever seen—­ infinitely!  It was as large as a good-sized horse!

But before Smith could get over his amazement there was a rush and a swirl in the water behind the insect.  Spray was dashed over the rock, a huge form showed itself indistinctly beneath the waves, and next instant the borrowed eyes were showing the engineer, so clearly as to be undeniable, the most astounding sight he had ever seen.