You may still see traces of harbours dug and cities built thousands of years ago, when the Hither folk were living men and women--not their shadows.

The big water outside stops us for a space, but," he added, laughing gruffly and taking a draught of a strong beer he had been heating by the fire, "King Ar-hap has their pretty noses between his fingers; he takes tribute and girls while he gets ready--they say he is nearly ready this summer, and if he is, it will not be much of an excuse he will need to lick up the last of those triflers, those pretences of manhood." Then we fell to talking of Ar-hap, his subjects and town, and I learned the tides had swept me a long way to the northward of the proper route between the capitals of the two races, that day they carried me into the Dead-Men's Ice, as these entertainers of mine called the northern snows.

To get back to the place previously aimed at, where the woodmen road came out on the seashore, it was necessary to go either by boat, a roundabout way through a maze of channels, "as tangled as the grass roots in autumn"; or, secondly, by a couple of days' marching due southward across the base of the great peninsula we were on, and so strike blue water again at the long-sought-for harbour.
As I lay dozing and dreaming on a pile of strange furs in the corner of the hut that evening I made up my mind for the land journey tomorrow, having had enough for the moment of nautical Martian adventures; and this point settled, fell again to wondering what made me follow so reckless a quest in the way I was doing; asking myself again and again what was gazelle-eyed Heru to me after all, and why should it matter even as much as the value of a brass waist-coat button whether Hath had her or Ar-hap?
What a fool I was to risk myself day by day in quaint and dangerous adventures, wearing out good Government shoe-leather in other men's quarrels, all for a silly slip of royal girlhood who, by this time, was probably making herself comfortable and forgetting both Hath and me in the arms of her rough new lord.
And from Heru my mind drifted back dreamily to poor An, and Seth, the city of fallen magnificence, where the spent masters of a strange planet now lived on sufferance--the ghosts of their former selves.
Where was An, where the revellers on the morning--so long ago it seemed!--when first that infernal rug of mine translated a chance wish into a horrible reality and shot me down here, a stranger and an outcast?
Where was the magic rug itself?
Where my steak and tomato supper?
Who had eaten it?
Who was drawing my pay?
If I could but find the rug when I got back to Seth, gods! but I would try if it would not return whence I had come, and as swiftly, out of all these silly coils and adventuring.
So musing, presently the firelight died down, and bulky forms of hide-wrapped woodmen sleeping on the floor slowly disappeared in obscurity like ranges of mountains disappearing in the darkness of night.

All those uncouth forms, and the throb of the sea outside, presently faded upon my senses, and I slept the heavy sleep of one whose wakefulness gives way before an imperious physical demand.

All through the long hours of the night, while the waves outside champed upon the gravels, and the woodmen snored and grunted uneasily as they simultaneously dreamt of the day's hunting and digested its proceeds, I slept; and then when dawn began to break I passed from that heavy stupor into another and lighter realm, wherein fancy again rose superior to bodily fatigue, and events of the last few days passed in procession through my mind.
I dreamt I was lunching at a fashionable seaside resort with Polly at my side, and An kept bringing us melons, which grew so monstrous every time a knife was put into them that poor Polly screamed aloud.