It dived into a hole and vanished.
But they came out to clear space. They could look for miles and miles.
There was a savannah of rolling soil which gradually sloped down to a
swift-running river. The grass--if it was grass--was quite green, but it
had multitudes of tiny rose-colored flowers down the central rib of each
leaf. Nearby it seemed the color of Earth-grass, but it faded
imperceptibly into an incredible old-rose tint in the distance. The
mountain-scarps on either side of the valley were sheer and tall. There
was a great stony spur reaching out above the lowland, and there was
forest at its top and bare brown stone dropping two thousand feet sheer.
And up the valley, where it narrowed, a waterfall leaped out from the
cliff and dropped hundreds of feet in an arc of purest white, until it
was lost to view behind tree-tops.
They looked. They stared. Cochrane was a television producer, and Holden
was a psychiatrist, and Babs was a highly efficient secretary. They did
not make scientific observations. The ecological system of the valley
escaped their notice. They weren't qualified to observe that the flying
things around seemed mostly to be furry instead of feathered, and that
insects seemed few and huge and fragile,--and they did not notice that
most of the plants appeared to be deciduous, so indicating that this
planet had pronounced seasons.
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