He gripped my hand.
"That, some day I will repay!" he said.

I looked again at the thing.
At its end was a tiny cone covered with a glistening, gelatinous substance.
Rador pulled from a tree beside us a fruit somewhat like an apple.
"Look!" he said.

He dropped it upon the dart--and at once, before my eyes, in less than ten seconds, the fruit had rotted away! "That's what would have happened to Rador but for you, friend!" he said.
Come now between this and the prelude to the latter half of the drama whose history this narrative is--only scattering and necessarily fragmentary observations.
First--the nature of the ebon opacities, blocking out the spaces between the pavilion-pillars or covering their tops like roofs, These were magnetic fields, light absorbers, negativing the vibrations of radiance; literally screens of electric force which formed as impervious a barrier to light as would have screens of steel.
They instantaneously made night appear in a place where no night was.
But they interposed no obstacle to air or to sound.

They were extremely simple in their inception--no more miraculous than is glass, which, inversely, admits the vibrations of light, but shuts out those coarser ones we call air--and, partly, those others which produce upon our auditory nerves the effects we call sound.
Briefly their mechanism was this: [For the same reason that Dr.Goodwin's exposition of the mechanism of the atomic engines was deleted, his description of the light-destroying screens has been deleted by the Executive Council .-- J.

B.F., President, I.A.of S.] There were two favoured classes of the ladala--the soldiers and the dream-makers.