her with me.

That she knew that we were about to return to Pellucidar was

evident, for immediately her manner changed from that of habitual

gloom that had pervaded her, to an almost human expression of

contentment and delight.

Our trip through the earth's crust was but a repetition of my

two former journeys between the inner and the outer worlds. This

time, however, I imagine that we must have maintained a more

nearly perpendicular course, for we accomplished the journey in a

few min-utes' less time than upon the occasion of my first journey

through the five-hundred-mile crust. just a trifle less than

seventy-two hours after our departure into the sands of the Sahara,

we broke through the surface of Pellucidar.

Fortune once again favored me by the slightest of margins, for when

I opened the door in the prospector's outer jacket I saw that we

had missed coming up through the bottom of an ocean by but a few

hundred yards.

The aspect of the surrounding country was entirely unfamiliar

to me--I had no conception of precisely where I was upon the one

hundred and twenty-four million square miles of Pellucidar's vast

land surface.

The perpetual midday sun poured down its torrid rays from zenith,

as it had done since the beginning of Pellucidarian time--as it

would continue to do to the end of it. Before me, across the wide

sea, the weird, horizonless seascape folded gently upward to meet

the sky until it lost itself to view in the azure depths of distance

far above the level of my eyes.

How strange it looked! How vastly different from the flat and puny

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