in the barren waste.
"How far is the scratch, do you suppose?" the Very Young Man wanted to know.
They stopped and consulted a moment; then the Very Young Man clambered up to the top of a rock. "There's a range of hills over there pretty close," he called down to them. "That must be the way."
They had just started again in the direction of the hills when, almost without warning, and with a great whistle and roar, a gale of wind swept down upon them. They stood still and looked at each other with startled faces, bracing with their feet against its pressure.
"Oh, golly, what's this?" cried the Very Young Man, and sat down suddenly upon the ground to keep from being blown forward.
The wind increased rapidly in violence until, in a moment, all three of the men were crouching upon the ground for shelter.
"Great Scott, this is a tornado!" ejaculated the Big Business Man. His words were almost lost amid the howling of the blast as it swept across the barren waste of rocks.
"Rogers never told us anything about this. It's getting worse every minute. I——" A shower of pebbles and a great cloud of metallic dust swept past, leaving them choking and gasping for breath.
The Very Young Man got upon his hands and knees.
"I'm going over there," he panted. "It's better."
CHAPTER XIV.
STRANGE EXPERIENCES
Led by the Very Young Man, the three crawled a few yards to where a cluster of bowlders promised better shelter. Huddled behind this mass of rock, they found themselves protected in a measure from the violence of the storm. Lying there, they could see yellowish-gray clouds of sand go sweeping by, with occasionally a hail of tiny pebbles, blowing almost horizontal. Overhead, the sky was unchanged. Not a vestige of cloud was visible, only the gray-blue of an immense distance, with the huge gleaming light, like an enormous sun, hung in its center.
The Very Young Man put his hand on the Doctor's arm. "It's going down," he said. Hardly were the words out of his mouth before, with even less warning than it began, the gale abruptly ceased. There remained only the pleasantly gentle breeze of a summer afternoon blowing against their faces. And this came from almost an opposite direction to the storm.
The three men looked at one another in amazement.
"Well, I'll be——" ejaculated the Very Young Man. "What next?"
They waited for some time, afraid to venture out from the rocks among which they had taken refuge. Then, deciding that the storm, however unexplainable, was over for the time at least, they climbed to their feet and resumed their journey with bruised knees, but otherwise none the worse for the danger through which they had passed.
After walking a short distance, they came up a little incline, and before them, hardly more than a quarter of a mile away, they could see a range of hills.
"The scratch must be behind those hills," said the Very Young Man, pointing.
"It's a long distance," said the Big Business Man thoughtfully. "We're still growing smaller—look."
Their minds had been so occupied that for some time they had forgotten the effect of the drug upon their stature. As they looked about them now they could see the rocks around them still increasing steadily in size, and could feel the ground shifting under their feet when they stood still.
"You're right; we're getting smaller," observed the Very Young Man. "How long before we'll stop, do you suppose?"
The Doctor drew the Chemist's memoranda from the pouch of his belt. "It says about five or six hours for the first four pellets," he read.
The Very Young Man looked at his watch. "Quarter to nine. We've been less than an hour yet. Come on, let's keep going," and he started walking rapidly forward.
They walked for a time in silence. The line of hills before them grew visibly in size, and they seemed slowly to be nearing it.
"I've been thinking," began the Doctor thoughtfully as he glanced up at the hills. "There's one theory of Rogers's that was a fallacy. You remember he was quite positive that this change of stature became steadily more rapid, until it reached its maximum rate and then remained constant. If that were so we should probably be diminishing in size more rapidly now than when we first climbed on to the ring. If we had so much trouble getting to the ring then"—he smiled at the remembrance of their difficulty—"I don't see how we could ever get to those hills now."
"Gee, that's so," said the Very Young Man. "We'd never be able to get anywhere, would we?"
"How do you figure it works?" asked the Big Business Man.
The Doctor folded up the paper and replaced it in his belt. "I don't know," he answered. "I think probably it proceeds in cycles, like the normal rate of growth—times of rapid progress succeeded by periods of comparative inactivity."
"I never knew people grew that way," observed the Very Young Man.
"They do," said the Doctor. "And if these drugs produce the same effect we——" He got no further, for suddenly the earth seemed to rise swiftly under them, and they were thrown violently to the ground.
The Very Young Man, as he lay prone, looked upward, and saw the sunlike light above fall swiftly down across the sky and disappear below the horizon, plunging the world about them into the gloom of a semi-twilight. A wind, fiercer than before, swept over them with a roar.
"The end of the world," murmured the Very Young Man to himself. And he wondered why he was not frightened.
Then came the feeling of an extraordinary lightness of body, as though the ground were dropping away from under him. The wind abruptly ceased blowing. He saw the ball of light rise swiftly from the horizon and mount upward in a great, gleaming arc to the zenith, where again it hung motionless.
The three men lay quiet, their heads reeling. Then the Very Young Man sat up dizzily and began feeling himself all over. "There's nothing wrong with me," he said lugubriously, meeting the eyes of his friends who apparently were also more surprised than hurt. "But—oh, my gosh, the whole universe went nutty!" he added to himself in awe.
"What did that?" asked the Big Business Man. He climbed unsteadily to his feet and sat upon a rock, holding his head in his hands.
The Doctor was up in a moment beside him. "We're not hurt," he said, looking at his companions. "Don't let's waste any more time—let's get into that valley." The Very Young Man could see by his manner that he knew or guessed what had happened.
"But say; what——" began the Very Young Man.
"Come on," interrupted the Doctor, and started walking ahead swiftly.
There was nothing for his two friends to do but to follow. They walked in silence, in single file, picking their way among the rocks. For a quarter of an hour or more they kept going, until finally they came to the ridge of hills, finding them enormous rocks, several hundred feet high, strewn closely together.
"The valley must be right beyond," said the Doctor. "Come on."
The spaces between these huge rocks were, some of them, fifty feet or more in width. Inside the hills the travelers found the ground even rougher than before, and it was nearly half an hour before they emerged on the other side.
Instead of the shallow valley they expected to find, they came upon a precipice—a sheer drop into a tremendous cañon, half as wide possibly as it was deep. They could see down to its bottom from where they stood—the same rocky, barren waste as that through which they had been traveling. Across the cañon, on the farther side, lay another line of hills.
"It's the scratch all right," said the Very Young Man, as they stopped near the brink of the precipice, "but, holy smoke! Isn't it big?"
"That's