'Having a doze?' said Devine.  'A bit blasé about new planets by now?'

'Can you see anything?' interrupted Weston.

'I can't manage the shutters, damn them,' returned Devine.  'We may as well get to the manhole.'

Ransom awoke from his brown study.  The two partners were working together close beside him in the semi-darkness.  He was cold and his body, though in fact much lighter than on Earth, still felt intolerably heavy.  But a vivid sense of his situation returned to him; some fear, but more curiosity.  It might mean death, but what a scaffold!  Already cold air was coming in from without, and light.  He moved his head impatiently to catch some glimpse between the labouring shoulders of the two men.  A moment later the last nut was unscrewed.  He was looking out through the manhole.

Naturally enough all he saw was the ground - a circle of pale pink, almost of white: whether very close and short vegetation or very wrinkled and granulated rock or soil he could not say.  Instantly the dark shape of Devine filled the aperture, and Ransom had time to notice that he had a revolver in his hand - 'For me or for sorns or for both?' he wondered.

'You next,' said Weston curtly.

Ransom took a deep breath and his hand went to the knife beneath his belt.  Then he got his head and shoulders through the manhole, his two hands on the soil of Malacandra.  The pink stuff was soft and faintly resilient, like india-rubber; clearly vegetation.  Instantly Ransom looked up.  He saw a pale blue sky - a fine winter-morning sky it would have been on Earth - a great billowy cumular mass of rose-colour lower down which he took for a cloud, and then -

'Get out,' said Weston from behind him.

He scrambled through and rose to his feet.  The air was cold but not bitterly so, and it seemed a little rough at the back of his throat.  He gazed about him, and the very intensity of his desire to take in the new world at a glance defeated itself.  He saw nothing but colours - colours that refused to form themselves into things.  Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it: you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.  His first impression was of a bright pale world - a water-colour world out of child's paint-box; a moment later he recognized the flat belt of light blue as a sheet of water, or of something like water, which came nearly to his feet.  They were on the shore of a lake or river.

'Now then,' said Weston, brushing past him.  He turned and saw to his surprise a quite recognizable object in the immediate foreground - a hut of unmistakably terrestrial pattern though built of strange materials.

'They're human,' he gasped.  'They build houses?'

'We do,' said Devine.  'Guess again,' and, producing a key from his pocket, proceeded to unlock a very ordinary padlock on the door of the hut.  With a not very clearly defined feeling of disappointment or relief Ransom realized that his captors were merely returning to their own camp.  They behaved as one might have expected.  They walked into the hut, let down the slats which served for windows, sniffed the close air, expressed surprise that they had left it so dirty, and presently re-emerged.

'We'd better see about the stores,' said Weston.