Down, down—on into a pit of bottomless depth, circling slowly, cautiously, and nosing steadily. Now they could look upward, and see the stars shining out of a black sky, as if they were in a deep well; and still they descended past steep cliffs of white rock, walls as smooth as a rifle bore; then into a region of jagged walls, and stone of volcanic ore; past innumerable dark holes that pierced gloomily into dreadful, mysterious places under the ground; whirling all the time within the grasp of a crater ten miles in diameter.

Suddenly it grew dark. The sun, in throwing its light into the crater had been cut off by the slight rotations of the moon. It was a gloom that caused Joan to close her eyes, and hold her breath.

Would they never reach the bottom?

Miles dropped away, and still the air held them up, and they sailed in circles. That his companion might follow, Epworth turned on his flash light, and attached it to the wing of his glider.

It was a flight like Mercury speeding as a messenger through inscrutable space. Two little planes, with operators wearing air helmets that dimmed vision, were slipping softly, silently, into the bowels of the moon, hunting a strange land in an unknown world.

It necessitated matchless courage, and steady nerves. These two went on seeking to save.

They went on until complete darkness engulfed them—a darkness that grew steadily murky, oppressive, frightful. Still they continued. Where Epworth led, Joan was determined to follow. Would they ever be able to climb out? Would their small, inefficient gliders, the invention of a moment, notwithstanding their propelling power, be able to ascend that dizzy height? True that when they entered, the air was so rare that they had to wear air helmets, and that now they put them aside to find heavier and better breathing; but the space was limited, there was no wind to get beneath the plane and elevate it; the whole mysterious dark world was as still as death, and as creepy as the grave.

Joan was on the verge of screaming aloud. Epworth was beginning to get nervous.

He looked down, and thought he saw a light. Before he could settle his mind on this point he bumped against the ground. It was a light shock, and he felt no injury but it served to stop the flight of his glider. The next moment Joan bumped into him and also came to a stop. The contact came before he had an opportunity to call out to her to be on guard.

“Julian! Julian!” she cried. “Where are you?”

“Do not be alarmed,” he reassured. “I am here.”

Disengaging the plane from her shoulders, and leaving the straps that held it tight on the wing, she advanced toward him. When she came to him he was stepping out of the glider.

“What now?” she inquired dryly. “We are in the bottom of Mount Agrippa, and, if you will excuse the slang, it certainly has a grip I do not like.”

“I believe I see a dim light off there,” he pointed out with his index finger. “Do you see it?”

“Perhaps it is an underground volcano,” she suggested. “I feel warm.”

“Merely underground heat. Were it a volcano it would be brighter. However we will not know unless we investigate.”

Shifting his tear gun, which he had attached to his belt, to a convenient place, and holding his flash light in his hand, the young man led the way cautiously. They were on a level, ashy floor, in which their feet buried at each step; but without pausing to investigate the character of the soil they strode forward steadily. It was a longer walk than he thought it would be, and presently they became aware that there was a roof over their heads—a roof of earth. When Joan made this discovery she was for turning back.

“No,” Epworth decided. “The light ahead is getting stronger. Presently we will be somewhere.”

This conclusion was not justified by what they saw but the light began to get brighter, and after a time they could see each other.

“It is spooky,” Joan breathed out, lagging behind a little. “Absolutely unhuman. There is no sun, there is no heat, but we can see. What causes it?”

“It is a phosphorescent glow emanating from the walls of the crater,” Julian replied thoughtfully. “That is the only ex——”

“Help! Help, Julian!” Joan screamed. “Something’s got me. Something——”

Her utterances were cut off by two long, thin, bone-like tentacles twisting around her neck. At the same second Epworth was attacked.

The young man however was as swift as an eagle, and had been ever on the alert. He recognized the fact instantly that the crickets were upon them, and that he could not fight them with his flash light. Dropping the light, which was attached to his clothing by a cord, he drew his tear gun and swept a stream of tear gas into the face of the Things around him. The gas stopped them instantly, and with an agile bound he darted to Joan’s side. She was in the hands of six crickets, their bodies dimly visible in the phosphorous light. They were standing on their hind legs, and were making a saddle of their middle extremities while pushing Joan into the saddle with their front hands.

Epworth’s tear gun proved highly efficient. It gassed the two who made the saddle. This caused the other four to drop the girl. Instantly the young man shot the tear gas above Joan’s head into their faces, caught the girl and dragged her to him. A stream of the insects came at him, chirping savagely. Darting to the side of the cave he carried his companion with him.

The effort seemed useless, for now his retreat was cut off by an army of the hopping monsters. The only thing left him was to back against the wall, and use his tear gun. This he did.

The crickets, with their singing chirps, became suddenly appalling with their din. Epworth shuddered, side stepped, and undertook to push Joan behind him in order to protect her. The move was fatal. Stumbling over a boulder, he fell backward head over heels into a hole in the wall.

In a desperate effort to save Joan he twisted her in his arms, and placed her above his body with a view of making a cushion of his body when they struck terra firma. How far it was to the bottom of this hole he had no way of ascertaining. It might be two thousand feet deep. These moon holes were tremendous affairs. All he knew was that he was falling and that the crickets were sending out musical notes of triumph.

However, since coming to the moon he had discovered that he could jump a long ways and land without being hurt; that he could even leap off a high cliff without danger to life or limb, and now he found that they were not falling fast, and this gave him encouragement.

They struck bottom abruptly. Epworth was jarred and bruised some, but not seriously hurt although he lay as if stunned for several seconds. Joan was unhurt, and during the descent had regained her full faculties, which were leaving her under the choking power of the cricket tentacles. The second they were still she twisted out of Epworth’s arms, caught his flash light, which had been knocked out of circuit by the fall, and began to work with it hysterically. In a brief period she had it in action and was throwing a narrow stream of light around.

They had landed on a large ledge suspended over a bottomless chasm, and behind them there was a big tunnel. As they were dangerously close to the edge of the precipice she staggered to her feet and pulled Epworth away from the danger point.

“My,” she whispered, “I thought we were goners.”

Without waiting for Epworth to speak she stepped to the tunnel and shot her light ray into its gloomy depth. For several seconds the light pierced the gloom for fifteen feet, flickered, and died out. The battery had been exhausted, and now they were in murky, terrifying gloom with a deep chasm on three sides. In dying despair the girl covered her face with her hands.

Epworth, breathing heavily, sat up.

“Let me have the flash light,” he suggested.

“It has gone out for good,” she replied in a hopeless voice, at the same time handing him the tube. “I can’t get a ray out of it.”

Epworth fumbled with it for a moment in the dark.

“The batteries are dead,” he explained. “How foolish not to have looked into this before we started.”

“Great heavens!” Joan moaned. “Lost in the center of the moon, and no light to direct our steps.”

“Never say die,” the young man encouraged. “Take my hand. It is my left. I am holding my automatic in my right.”

They groped forward. Action was at the moment necessary to keep Joan from losing her mind. On and on they stumbled. Each step they expected to plunge heels-over-head into another deep chasm but persistently they followed the twisting meanderings of the passage.

Suddenly Joan stopped and sniffed the air, trembling violently.

“There—there—is something alive in this place,” she muttered feebly. “I—I—smell something awful—horrid, and—and—I—feel—a—sinister—presence.”

Epworth sniffed with his nostrils. The scent was now overpowering, musty, terrifyingly rotten.

“You must be mistaken about there being living beings in here,” he protested. “That smell would indicate that we have stumbled on the crickets’ graveyard.”

“Or, or, or,” Joan caught his hand convulsively to keep from screaming, “their commissary department. Maybe—maybe—living beings are confined here until they rot, and are then eaten as food.”

Epworth could not suppress the shudder that swept over him from head to foot.