even this hateful and repulsive thing alone in a strange and hostile
world. The result was that when I entered the iron mole I took
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