He glanced ahead, and jammed the rudder quickly.
“Watch where you are going,” he bawled out. “You came mighty near wrecking us on that sharp extension of the crater.”
The glider turned abruptly, and dropped rapidly for several seconds before Epworth could level out.
“What is getting the matter with these things on my eyes?” Billy demanded petulantly. “It is getting dark. I can’t see a thing below us, and ten minutes ago I could see the walls of the crater easily.”
Epworth stared around. It seemed that they had been suddenly engulfed in a gloom that the night spectacles would not penetrate. Had their cavern lamps suddenly grown useless from age, or had they been broken in some way? It was an annoying interrogation. To go on, and on, and on, through everlasting darkness was appalling, fearful, mentally destructive.
“Moawha says remove your cavern lamps,” Joan called out. “We must be drifting into some kind of a light.”
When Epworth removed the head gear, and carefully placed it around his neck so that he could quickly replace it on his head, he discovered that the walls of the crater were no longer visible although there was an eery, mysterious light all around. It was not a phosphorous glow because there were no rocks or vegetation to give out such a glow. It was a dim light of day, and they were falling through space.
“Heavens,” he muttered, “we have dropped entirely through the moon, and are we now sailing out into space?”
They fell a mile before the interrogation was answered. Then the light grew brighter and they saw beneath them trees, rivers, green rolling hills.
“Heaven be praised!” Joan cried out with a shout of joy. “At last we are getting somewhere. It must be Moawha’s home. She was laughing, chattering, and cooing to me in an unknown tongue.”
They landed gently on a high hill overlooking a large valley but the moment she got out of the glider and looked around, Moawha lost her enthusiasm, and grasping Joan by the arm ran hurriedly to a dense thicket of undergrowth to hide.
“Come with us,” she called in a low tone to Epworth and Billy. “Hide the gliders and then hunt cover.”
They followed her instructions, and when they were hidden in the undergrowth, she caught Epworth by the arm, tiptoed to the edge of the thicket and pointed down into a part of the valley he had not seen. His eyes opened wide at what he saw.