Seaton strained his eyes, trying to see them more clearly; but owing to the speed of the ship, the rapidity of the animals' movements, the unsatisfactory illumination, and the extreme difficulty of translating at all rapidly the incomprehensible four-dimensional forms into their three-dimensional equivalents, he could not even approximate either the size or the appearance of the creatures with which he, unarmed and defenseless, might have to deal.
"Can you make any sense out of those animals down there, Peg?" Seaton demanded. "See, there's one just jumped out of the river and seemed to fly into that clump of bamboolike stuff there. Get any details?"
"No. What with the poor light and everything being so awful and so distorted, I can hardly see anything at all. Why—what of them?"
"This of 'em. We're coming back this way, and we may have to come on foot. I'll try to steal a ship, of course, but the chance that we'll be able to get one—or to run it after we do get it—is mighty slim. But assuming that we are afoot, the more we know about what we're apt to go up against the better we'll be able to meet it. Oh, we're slowing down—been wondering what that thing up ahead of us is. It looks like a cross between the Pyramid of Cheops and the old castle of Bingen on the Rhine, but I guess it's a city—it seems to be where we're headed for."
"Does this water actually flow out from the side of that wall, or am I seeing things?" the girl asked.
"It seems to—your eyes are all right, I guess. But why shouldn't it? There's a big archway, you notice—maybe they use it for power or something, and this is simply an outfall—"
"Oh, we're going in!" Margaret exclaimed, her hand flashing out to Seaton's arm.
"Looks like it, but they probably know their stuff." He pressed her hand reassuringly. "Now, Peg, no matter what happens, stick to me as long as you possibly can!"
As Seaton had noticed, the city toward which they were flying resembled somewhat an enormous pyramid, whose component units were themselves mighty buildings, towering one above and behind the other in crenelated majesty to an awe-inspiring height. In the wall of the foundation tier of buildings there yawned an enormous opening, spanned by a noble arch of metaled masonry, and out of this gloriously arched aqueduct there sprang the stream whose course the airship had been following so long. Toward that forbidding opening the hypership planed down, and into it she floated slowly and carefully.