discovered among the writings of her kind in the buried city of

Phutra, it was still an open question among the Mahars as to whether

man pos-sessed means of intelligent communication or the power of

reason.

Her kind believed that in the center of all-pervading solidity

there was a single, vast, spherical cavity, which was Pellucidar.

This cavity had been left there for the sole purpose of providing

a place for the creation and propagation of the Mahar race.

Everything within it had been put there for the uses of the Mahar.

I wondered what this particular Mahar might think now. I found

pleasure in speculating upon just what the effect had been upon her

of passing through the earth's crust, and coming out into a world

that one of even less intelligence than the great Mahars could

easily see was a different world from her own Pel-lucidar.

What had she thought of the outer world's tiny sun?

What had been the effect upon her of the moon and myriad stars of

the clear African nights?

How had she explained them?

With what sensations of awe must she first have watched the sun

moving slowly across the heavens to disappear at last beneath the

western horizon, leaving in his wake that which the Mahar had never

before witnessed--the darkness of night? For upon Pellucidar there

is no night. The stationary sun hangs forever in the center of

the Pellucidarian sky--directly overhead.

Then, too, she must have been impressed by the wondrous mechanism

of the prospector which had bored its way from world to world and

back again. And that it had been driven by a rational being must

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