In a sense they were foolishly unwary.  This was completely strange territory.  It could have contained anything.  Earlier explorers would have approached every bush with caution and moved over every hilltop with suspicion, anticipating deadly creatures, unparalleled monsters, and exotic and peculiar circumstances designed to entrap the unprepared.  Earlier explorers, of course, would probably have had advice from famous men to prepare them for all possible danger.

But this was a valley between snow-clad mountains.  The river that ran down its length was fed by glaciers.  This was a temperate climate.  The trees were either coniferous or something similar, and the vegetation grew well but not with the frenzy of a tropic region.  There were fruits here and there.  Later, to be sure, they would prove to be mostly astringent and unpalatable.  They were broad-leafed, low-growing plants which would eventually turn out to be possessed of soft-fleshed roots which were almost unanimously useless for human purposes.  There were even some plants with thorns and spines upon them.  But they encountered no danger.

By and large, wild animals everywhere are ferocious only when desperate.  No natural setting can permanently be so deadly that human being will be attacked immediately they appear.  An area in which peril is continuous is one in which there is so much killing that there is no food-supply left to maintain its predators.  On the whole, there is simply a limit to how dangerous any place can be.  Dangerous beasts have to be relatively rare, or they will not have enough to eat, when they will thin out until they are relatively rare and do have enough to eat.

So the three explorers moved safely, though their boldness was that of ignorance, below gigantic trees nearly as tall as the space-ship standing on end.  They saw a small furry biped, some twelve inches tall, which waddled insanely in the exact line of their progress and with no apparent hope of outdistancing them.  They saw a gauzy creature with incredibly spindly legs.  It flew from one tree-trunk to another, clinging to rough bark on each in turn.  Once they came upon a small animal which looked at them with enormous, panic-stricken blue eyes and then fled with a sinuous gait on legs so short that they seemed mere flippers.  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.