We did not take the platforms, for I assumed it would be too cold for the girls to make sustained flights. Against this cold we provided ourselves well with the white furry garments of the Twilight People. I need not go into details of our march to the Dark City. It occupied some three weeks. We met with no opposition, passing a few isolated settlements, whose inhabitants rather welcomed us than otherwise.
This region we passed through took us almost to the ill‑defined borders of the Dark Country. It was not mountainous, but rather more a great broken plateau with a steady ascent. Each day it grew darker and colder, until at last we entered perpetual night. It was not the sort of night we know on earth, but a Stygian blackness.
We used little torches now, of the light‑ray current, and our little army, trudging along in their lurid glare, and dragging its wagons piled high with the projectors, presented a curious and weird picture. The country for the most part was barren rock, with a few stunted trees growing in the ravines and crevices. There was an abundance of water.
We encountered several rainstorms, and once during the last week it snowed a little. Except for the storms, the wind held steady, a gentle breeze from the colder regions in front blowing back toward the Light Country behind us.
During the latter days of our journey I noticed a curious change in the ground. It seemed now, in many places, to be like a soft, chalky limestone, which ran in pockets and seams between strata of very hard rock. I called Miela's attention to it once, and she pointed out a number of irregular shaped, small masses of a substance which in daylight I assumed might be yellow. These were embedded in the soft limestone.
"Sulphur," she said. "Like that on your earth. There is much of it up here, I have heard."
The Dark City occupied a flat plateau, slightly elevated above the surrounding country, and on the brink of a sheer drop of some six or seven thousand feet to an arm of the polar sea.
Our problems now were very different from when we had laid siege to the Lone City. The conformation of the country allowed us no opportunity to approach closer than two or three miles to the barrage of light we must expect. We could not reach the city from these nearest points with our projectors.
There were many lateral ravines depressed below the upper surface of the main plateau, and though the light‑rays from the city, directed horizontally, would sweep their tops, we found we could traverse many of them a considerable distance in safety. But from the bottoms of them we could only fire our rockets without specific aim and our projectors not at all.
Only by the most fortuitous of circumstances did we escape complete annihilation the first moment we appeared within range. We had no idea what lay ahead—although the guides we had brought with us from the Lone City informed us we were nearing our destination—and the scene remained in complete darkness until we were hardly more than five miles outside Tao's stronghold.