This was formed and coloured much as the room they had quitted; and it led to another apartment, much larger--about fifty feet across--coloured a deep, cool green. Its ceiling, coved like the other, seemed made of some self-radiating substance from which came both light and heat. Four or five tables, looking like ebony work, were arranged along the side walls. When they were seated at one of these, the Rhamda placed his fingers on some round alna-white buttons ranged along the edge of the table.

"In your world," he apologised, "our clumsy service would doubtless amuse you; but it is the best we have been able to devise so far."

He pressed the button. Instantly, without the slightest sound or anything else to betray just how the thing had been accomplished, the table was covered with golden dishes, heaped with food, and two flagon-like goblets, full to the brim with a dark, greenish liquid that gave off an aroma almost exhilarating; not alcoholic, but something just above that. The Rhamda, disregarding or not noticing Watson's gasp of wonder, lifted his goblet in the manner of the host in health and welcome.

"You may drink it," he offered, "without fear. It is not liquor--if I may use a word which I believe to be current in your world. I may add that it is one of the best things that we shall be able to offer you while you are with us."

Indeed it wasn't liquor. Watson took a sip; and he made a mental note that if all things in the Thomahlia were on a par with this, then he certainly was in a world far above his own. For the one sip was enough to send a thrill through his veins, a thrill not unlike the ecstasy of supreme music--a sparkling exuberance, leaving the mind clear and scintillating, glorified to the quick thinking of genius.

Later Watson experienced no reaction such as would have come from drinking alcohol or any other drug.

It was the strangest meal ever eaten by Watson. The food was very savoury, and perfectly cooked and served. Only one dish reminded him of meat.

"You have meats?" he asked. "This looks like flesh."

Geos shook his head. "No. Do you have flesh to eat, on the other side?

We make all our food."

MAKE food. Watson thought best simply to answer the question:

"As I remember it, Rhamda Geos, we had a sort of meat called beef--the flesh of certain animals."

The Rhamda was intensely interested. "Are they large? Some interpret the Jarados to that effect. Tell me, are they like this?" And he pulled a silver whistle from his pocket and, placing it to his lips, blew two short, shrill notes.

Immediately a peculiar patter sounded down the corridor; a ka-tuck, ka-tuck, ka-tuck, not unlike galloping hoof-beats. Before Watson could do any surmising a little bundle of shining black, rounded the entrance to the room and ran up to them. Geos picked it up.

It was a horse. A horse, beautifully formed, perfect as an Arab, and not more than nine inches high!

Now, Chick had been in the Blind Spot, conscious, but a short while. He knew that he was in the precise position that Rhamda Avec had occupied that morning on the ferry-boat. Chick recalled the pictures of the Lilliputian deer and the miniature kittens; yet he was immensely surprised.

The little fellow began to neigh, a tiny, ridiculous sound as compared with the blast of a normal-sized horse, and began to paw for the edge of the table.

"What does he want?"

"A drink. They will do anything for it." Geos pressed a button, and in a moment he had another goblet. This he held before the little stallion, who thrust his head in above his nostrils and drank as greedily as a Percheron weighing a ton. Watson stroked his sides; the mane was like spun silk, he felt the legs symmetrical, perfectly shaped, not as large above the fetlocks as an ordinary pencil.

"Are they all of this size?"

"Yes; all of them. Why do you ask?"

"Because"--seeing no harm in telling this--"as I remember them, a horse on the other side would make a thousand of this one. People ride them."

The Rhamda nodded.

"So it is told in the books of Jarados. We had such beasts, once, ourselves. We would have them still, but for the brutality and stupidity of our ancestors. It is the one great sin of the Thomahlia. Once we had animals, great and small, and all the blessings of Nature; we had horses and, I think, what you call beef; a thousand other creatures that were food and help and companions to man. And for the good they had done our ancestors destroyed them!"

"Why?"

"It was neglect, unthinking and selfish. A time came when our civilisation made it possible to live without other creatures. When machinery came into vogue we put aside the animals as useless; those we had no further use for we denied the right to reproduce. The game of the forest was hunted down with powerful weapons of destruction; all went, in a century or two; everything that could be killed. And with them went the age of our highest art, that age of domesticated animals.

"Our greatest paintings, our noblest sculpture, came from that age; all the priceless relics that we call classic. And in its stead we had the mechanical age. Man likewise became a mechanism, emotionless, with no taste for Nature. Meat was made synthetically, and so was milk."

"You don't mean to say they did not preserve cows for the sake of their milk?"

"No; that kind of milk became old-fashioned; men regarded it as unsanitary, fit only for the calves. What they wanted was something chemically pure; they waged war on bacteria, microbes, and Nature in general; a cow was merely a relic whose product was always an uncertainty. With no reason for the meat and no use for the milk, our vegetarians and our purists gradually eliminated them altogether. It was a strange age; utilitarian, scientific, selfish; it was then headed straight for destruction."

And he went on to relate how men began to lose the power of emotion; there were no dependent beasts to leaven his nature with the salt of kindness; he thought only of his own aggrandisement. He became like his machine, a fine thing of perfectly correlated parts, but with no higher nature, no soul, no feeling; he was less than a brute. The animals disappeared one by one, passing through the channel of death, into the world beyond the Spot of Life, leaving behind only these tiny survivors, playthings, kept in existence longer than all others because of a mere fad.

"Does your spiritism include animals as well as men?"

"Naturally; everything that is endowed with life."

"I see. Let me ask you: why didn't the Rhamdas interfere and put a stop to this wanton sacrilege against Nature?"

The Rhamda smiled. "You forget," replied he, "that these events belong far in the past. At that time the Rhamdas were not. It was even before the coming of the Jarados."

Watson asked no more questions for a while. He wanted to think. How could this man Rhamda Geos, if indeed he were a man, accept him, Watson, as a spirit? Solid flesh was not exactly in line with his idea of the unearthly. How to explain it? He had to go back to Holcomb again. The doctor had accepted without question Avec's naturalness, his body, his appetite. Reasonably enough, Geos, with some smattering of his superior's wisdom, should accept Watson in the same way.

And then, the Jarados: at every moment his name had cropped up. Who was he? So far he had heard no word that might be construed as a clue.

The great point, just now, was that the Rhamda Geos accepted him as a spirit, as the fact and substance promised by Avec. But--where was the doctor?

Chick ventured this question:

"My coming was foretold by the Rhamda Avec, I understand. Is this in accord with the words of the Jarados?"

The Rhamda looked up expectantly and spoke with evident anxiety.

"Can you tell me anything about the Jarados?"

"Let us forgo that," side-stepped Watson. "Possibly I can tell you much that you would like to know. What I want to know is, just how well prepared you are to receive me?"

"Then you come from the Jarados!"

"Perhaps."

"What do you know about him?"

"This: someone should have preceded me! The fact and the substance-you were to have it inside three days! It has been several hundred times the space allotted! Is it not so?"

The Rhamda's eyes were pin-pointed with eagerness.

"Then it IS true! You are from the Jarados! You know the great Rhamda Avec--you have seen him!"

"I have," declared Watson.

"In the other world? You can remember?"

"Yes," again committing himself. "I have seen Avec--in another world.

But tell me, before we go on I would have an answer to my question: did anyone precede me?"