Tarrano snapped off his ray. "Quite safe, Lady Elza. Do not be alarmed. I doubt if they will locate us again. They should be very busy now in the Great City. I'm surprised they could even think to notify this Station we have just passed."
We were indeed very busy in the Great City during those hours, as you shall presently hear.
Tarrano and Elza were not again disturbed. How far they went in the boat she does not know, but at last they landed in a sheltered cove. An air vehicle was there. Tarrano transferred Elza to it, and in a moment more they were aloft.
The vehicle was little more than an oblong platform, with a low railing. A platform of a substance resembling glascite-transparent; and with a glascite shield V-shaped in front to break the rush of wind and yet give vision. A mechanism, not of radio-power, but of gravity like the space-flyers. Such platforms had been, but were no longer in use on Earth. Elza had never seen one. It was a new experience for her, this flying with nothing above one, nothing to the side, or underneath save that transparent substance. To her it was like floating, and at times falling headlong through the air.
They rose no more than a thousand feet at first, and then swept parallel with the ground. At a tremendous speed; even at this height the forests seemed moving backward as the ground moves beneath a surface vehicle.
Dark, somber forests of luxuriant tropical vegetation. It was now nearing dawn; the auroral lights were dropping low in the sky; the great Venus Cross of Dawn was rising, its first two stars already above the line of hills to one side.
Then the sky out there flushed red; a limb of the glorious Sun of Venus came up. A new day. And even though the air was warm, within Elza was ashiver.
"It is very wonderful to me, my Elza, this being alone with you."
He sat beside her, gazing at her with his calm, impenetrable eyes. It was near noon of that day following their escape from the Water Festival. They had flown possibly two thousand miles. The Sun had risen, but after a time—since their enormous speed and change of latitude had affected the angle at which they viewed it—the Sun now was hanging almost level, not far above the horizon.
Beneath the platform—a mile below now—lay a tumbled waste of naked crags. The borders of the Cold Country! Tarrano's stronghold! The birthplace of his dreams of universal conquest.