fourth planet from another sun. The men find a strange world that grows ever stranger: a desert plain exuding acrid vapors, a greenish tinge at the horizon, a gray seven-foot tree that hisses and withdraws into the ground when touched, and thickets of vegetation like hanging spiders.

In a labyrinth of plant-shaped buildings are dead ends, passage-ways, domes, vaulted ceilings, and giant statues. And everywhere there are images of death: mass graves, naked bodies in ditches and wells, a beehive structure filled with clusters of giant eggs -- a skeleton within each egg.

The crew's attempt to communicate with this civilization leads to violence and to a cruel truth -- cruel precisely because it is so human.