The other was a lean, shrunken man, with red eyes. He stared apprehensively at the pilot's room forward, muttering to himself. I caught a few of his words,
"The shining horrors! The shining horrors. Devils from the sky!"
The machine left the crater floor and flew rapidly up on a steep spiral course. In a few minutes the rugged mountain panorama was spread out like a relief map below us. Presently the stars were visible, and still we climbed, comfortable enough in the heated, air-tight compartment. The propellers had been stopped, but the gravity-neutralizing gas continued to lift the vessel straight up.
Then I noticed a faint purple veil coming over the stars above. Suddenly it seemed that we were plunging through a bank of thin purple mist. Abruptly we shot above a landscape weirder than the wildest dream!
We had climbed above a vast plain!
A flat purple desert stretched illimitably away below us. Far in the west rose a colossal range of sheer purple mountains. The weird plain was covered with strange and stunted violet plants. In the south was a patch of blazing blue that looked like a lake of heavy mist. Beyond rose a forest of fern-like violet plants.
It was a new land above the air!
The sky was utterly black, above that desolate purple world. The stars were blazing with strange splendor, like a mist of sunlit diamond dust. They were brighter than they ever are on earth, for we were above the atmosphere. I turned toward the east, to look at the morning sun. Its light was blinding. The solar corona spread out like great wings from a sphere of livid white.
And on the purple desert, below the blazing sun, was a city!
Great spires and towers and domes rose above the dull flat expanse of purple and blue and violet. The strange buildings were scarlet. They gleamed with a metallic luster, as if they were made of the same metal as the red airplanes.