“I’ll be damned,” he said aloud.

There was only one stone hard enough to cut a ruby⁠—the diamond.

It was almost dark when he returned to where Barber was resting beside their packs.

“What did you find to keep you out so late?” Barber asked curiously.

He dropped a double handful of rubies, sapphires and diamonds at Barber’s feet.

“Take a look,” he said. “On a civilized world what you see there would buy us a ship without our having to lift a finger. Here they’re just pretty rocks.

“Except the diamonds,” he added. “At least we now have something to cut those quartz crystals with.”

They took only a few of the rubies and sapphires the next morning but they gathered more of the diamonds, looking in particular for the gray-black and ugly but very hard and tough carbonado variety. Then they resumed their circling of the chasm’s walls.

The heat continued its steady increase as the days went by. Only at night was there any relief from it and the nights were growing swiftly shorter as the blue sun rose earlier each morning. When the yellow sun rose the chasm became a blazing furnace around the edge of which they crept like ants in some gigantic oven.

There was no life in any form to be seen; no animal or bush or blade of grass. There was only the barren floor of the chasm, made a harsh green shade by the two suns and writhing and undulating with heat waves like a nightmare sea, while above them the towering cliffs shimmered, too, and sometimes seemed to be leaning far out over their heads and already falling down upon them.

They found no more minerals of any kind and they came at last to the place where they had seen the smoke or vapor.