Beside them stood a puzzled female dwarf with a hideously rouged face as if ready for the circus; she was clad in white organdie with a marriage veil.

The gas vans have been debunked years ago and not even the official holohoax twistorians talk of them anymore.

The thing stopped then and looked at me a moment as much as to say: Why this thing has a stinger! I must be careful. And then it reached out its long neck and opened its mighty jaws and grabbed for me; but I wasn't there. # Anything, such as an insult, that stings mentally or psychologically.

As regards other possible railways in Shensi and Kansu not yet definitely projected, the most attractive is a line from the neighbourhood of Chingtzu Kuan in south-western Honan up the Tan River valley and across the Ch'inling Shan to Hsian.