They forged on for hours, ever west across the dim desert. The Planeteers followed closely behind their glowing guides, but the three comrades were beginning to tire from the weight of their asterium-coated space-suits, while the two radioactive men showed no sign of fatigue.
"Damn the gravitation of this world!” Gunner gritted. “It's as strong as Earth's, and it shouldn't be half that strong on a little planet like this."
"The huge radioactive core of this world gives it its unusual mass,” Sual Av declared. “And the radiation from it is responsible for the warmth that permits a gaseous atmosphere here,"
Thorn's heart quickened as he saw beyond their radiant guides, a low, barren dark range of mountains looming up through the haze.
"We're getting there!” Thorn cried eagerly.
Clymer Nison and his radioactive Martian comrade led them on through a pass between two peaks. The mountains towered a few thousand feet on either side, somber, bare rock slopes faintly luminous with the emanations throbbing from their radioactive atoms.
On into the tumbled peaks, through valleys thick with the shining blue haze, over long ridges, Nison led the way. For the space-pioneer who had wandered this dreary world for nine long centuries seemed to know each square yard of its surface.
They entered a deep chasm, a gloomy gorge with precipitous shining walls and a floor strewn with fallen masses of radiant rock. Along this the two radioactive men led the way. The shimmering sand of the chasm floor was deeply marked by a path, that had been trodden by many men coming and going in past times.
To the Planeteers, this gorge was an awesome and uncanny place. The great shining boulders through which the path wound, the feebly radiant cliffs that towered on either side, the strip of starry black sky far overhead, all combined to depress the spirit by their alien, forbidding atmosphere.
Through the blue, shimmering hazes that floated thick in the chasm, Clymer Nison and his companion led the way. At last Nison turned.