THE DESTROYING SPLENDOR
I
To Grom, hunting farther to the south of the Tribal Fires than he had
ever ranged before, came suddenly a woman running, mad with fright, a
baby clutched to her bosom. She fell at Grom's feet, gibbering
breathlessly, and plainly imploring his protection. Both she and the
child were streaming with blood, and covered with strange cup-like
wounds, as if the flesh had been gouged out of them with some
irresistible circular instrument.
Grom swiftly fitted an arrow to his bow, and peered through the trees
to see what manner of adversary the fugitive was like to bring upon
him. At the same time, he gave a piercing cry, which was answered at
once from some distance behind him.
Having satisfied himself (the country being fairly open) that the
woman's pursuer, whatever it might be, was not close upon her heels,
and that no immediate danger was in view, he turned his attention upon
the woman herself. She was not of his race, and he looked down upon
her with cold aversion. At first glance he thought she was one of the
Bow-legs. But the color of her skin, where it could be seen for the
blood, was different, being rather of a copper-red; and she was
neither so hairy on the body nor of so ape-like proportions. She was
sufficiently hideous, however, and of some race plainly inferior to
the People of the Caves. The natural instinct of a Cave Man would have
been to knock her and her offspring on the head without ceremony--an
effective method of guarding his more highly developed breed from the
mixture of an inferior blood. But Grom, the Chief and the wise man,
had many vague impulses moving him at times which were novel to the
human play-fellows of Earth's childhood. He disliked hurting a woman
or a child. He might, quite conceivably, have refused to concern
himself with the suppliant before him, and merely left her and her
baby to the chances of the jungle. But the peculiar character of her
wounds interested him. She aroused his curiosity. Here was a new
mystery for him to investigate. The woman was saved.
Knowing a few words of the Bow-legs' tongue, which he had learned from
his lame slave Ook-ootsk, he addressed the crouching woman, telling
her not to fear. The tongue was unintelligible to her, but the tones
of his voice seemed to reassure her. She sat up, revealing again the
form of the little one, which she had been shielding with her hair and
her bosom as if she feared the tall white hunter might dash its brains
out; and Grom noted with keen interest that the child also had one of
those terrible, cup-shaped wounds, almost obliterating its fat,
copper-colored shoulder. He saw, also, that the woman's face, though
uncomely, was more intelligent and human than the bestial faces of the
Bow-legs' women. It was a broad face, with very small, deep-set eyes,
high cheek bones, a tiny nose, and a very wide mouth, and it looked as
if some one had sat on it hard and pushed it in. The idea made him
smile, and the smile completed the woman's reassurance. She poured a
stream of chatter quite unlike the clicks and barkings of the
Bow-legs. Then she crept closer to Grom's feet, and proceeded to give
her little one the breast. It was twisting uneasily with the pain of
its dreadful wound, but it nursed hungrily, and with the prudent
stoicism of a wild creature it made no outcry.
As Grom stood studying the pair, the mother kept throwing glances of
horror over her shoulder, as if expecting her assailants to arrive at
any moment. Grom followed her eyes, but there was no sign of any
pursuit. Then he observed the fugitives' wounds more closely, and
noted that the blood upon them was already, in most cases, pretty well
coagulated. He noted also certain other wounds, deep, narrow
punctures, like stabs. He guessed that they could not be much less
than an hour old. The Thing, whatever it was, which had inflicted
them--the Thing with so strange a mouth, and so strange a way of using
it--had apparently given up the pursuit. Grom's curiosity burned
within him, and he was angry at the woman because she could not speak
to him in his own language, or at least in that of the Bow-legs. It
seemed to him willful obstinacy on her part to refuse to understand
the Bow-legs' tongue. He stooped over her, and roughly examined one of
the wounds with his huge fingers. She winced, but made no complaint,
only covering her baby with her hair and her arms in terror lest it
should suffer a like harsh handling.
With a qualm of compunction, which rather puzzled him, Grom gave over
his investigating, and turned to a tall, slim youth with a great mop
of chestnut hair who at this moment came running up to him. It was
A-ya's young brother, Mo, Grom's favorite follower and hunting mate;
and he had come at speed, being very swift of foot, in answer to
Grom's signal. Breathing quickly, he stood at Grom's side, and looked
down with wonder and dislike upon the crouching woman.
Briefly Grom explained, and then pointed to the inexplicable wounds.
The youth, unable to believe that any human creature should be unable
to comprehend plain human speech, such as that of the Cave People,
tried his own hand at questioning the woman. He got a flow of chatter
in reply, but, being able to make nothing out of it, he imagined it
was not speech at all, and turned away angrily, thinking that she
mocked him. Grom, smiling at the mistake, explained that the woman was
talking her own language, which he intended presently to learn as he
had learned that of the Bow-legs.
"But now," said he, "we will go and see what it is that has bitten the
woman. It is surely something with a strange mouth."
Mo, who was not only brave to recklessness, but who would have
followed Grom through the mouth of hell, sprang forward eagerly. Grom,
who realized that the mystery before him was a perilous one, and who
loved to do dangerous things in a prudent manner, looked to his
bow-string and saw that his arrows were handy in his girdle, before he
started on the venture. Besides his bow he carried the usual two
spears and his inseparable stone-headed club. Though danger was his
delight, it was not the danger itself but the thrill of overcoming it
that he loved.
The moment he stepped forward, however, the woman divined his purpose
and leapt wildly to her feet. She sprang straight in front of him,
screaming and gesticulating. She was plainly horror-stricken at the
thought that the two men should venture into the perils from which she
had so hardly escaped. To Grom's keen intelligence her gestures were
eloquent. She managed to convey to him the idea of great numbers, and
the impossibility of his dealing with them. When he attempted to pass
her, she threw herself down and clung to his feet, shaking with her
terror. When she saw that Grom was at last impressed, she stretched
herself out as if dead, and then, after a few moments of ghastly
rigidity, with fixed, staring eyes, she came to and held up one hand
with the fingers outspread.
This frantic pantomime Grom could read in no other way than as an
attempt to tell him that the unknown Something had killed five of the
woman's companions. The information gave him pause. Adventurous as he
was, he had small respect for mere pig-headed recklessness. He was
resolved to solve the problem--but after all it could abide his more
thorough preparation.
"Come back," he ordered, turning to the impetuous Mo. "She says they
are too many for us two. They have killed five of her people. We will
go back to the Caves, and after three sleeps for good counsel, we will
return with fire and find the destroying Thing."
II
On their return to the Caves, Grom gave the strange woman and her baby
to his faithful slave Ook-ootsk, who accepted the gift with enthusiasm
because, being a Bow-leg, he had not been allowed to take any of the
Cave Women to wife. He lavished his attentions upon the unhappy
stranger, but he could make no more of her speech than Grom had done.
The girl A-ya, however, in a moment of peculiar insight had gathered,
or thought she gathered, from the stranger's signs, that the dreadful
and destroying Thing was something that flew--therefore, a great
flesh-eating bird. But she gathered, also, that it was something which
in some way bore a resemblance to fire--for the woman, after getting
over her first terror of the dancing flames, kept pointing to them and
then to her wounds in a most suggestive way. This, however, as Grom
rather scornfully pointed out, was too absurd. There was nothing that
could be in the least like fire itself; and the wounds of the
fugitives had no likeness whatever to the corrosive bites of the
flame. A-ya took the correction submissively, but held her own
thought; and when a day or two later, events proved her to have been
right, she discreetly refrained from calling her lord's attention to
the fact--a point upon which Grom was equally reserved.
With so provocative a mystery waiting to be solved, Grom could not
long rest idle. Had she not known well it would be a waste of
breath, A-ya would have tried to dissuade him from the perilous, and
to her mind profitless, adventure. It was one she shrank from in
spite of her tried courage and her unwavering trust in Grom's prowess.
The mystery of it daunted her. She feared it in the same way that
she feared the dark. But she kept her fears to herself, and claimed
her long-established right to go with Grom on the expedition. Grom
was willing enough, for there was no one whose readiness and nerve, in
a supreme crisis, he could so depend upon, and he wanted her close at
hand with her fire-basket. There was nothing to keep her at home, as
the children were looked after by Ook-ootsk.
It was a very little party which started southward from the
Caves--simply Grom, A-ya, young Mo, and a dwarfish kinsman of Grom's,
named Loob, who was the swiftest runner in the tribe and noted for his
cunning as a scout. He could go through underbrush like a shadow, and
hide where there was apparently no hiding-place, making himself
indistinguishable from the surroundings like a squatting partridge.
Each one carried a bow, two light spears, and a club--except A-ya, who
had no club, and only one spear. The weapon she chiefly relied upon
was the bow, which she loved with passion. She considered herself the
inventor of it; and in the accuracy of her shooting she outdid even
Grom. In addition to these weapons, each member of the party except
the leader himself carried a fire-basket, in which a mass of red coals
mixed with punk smouldered in a bed of moist clay.
The little expedition traveled Indian file, Grom leading the way, with
A-ya at his heels, then Loob the Scout, and young Mo bringing up the
rear. They had started about dawn, when the first of the morning rose
was just beginning to pale the cave-mouth fires. They traveled
swiftly, but every two hours or so they would make a brief halt beside
a spring to drink and breathe themselves and to look to the precious
fires in the fire-baskets. When it wanted perhaps an hour of noon,
they came to a little patch of meadow surrounding a solitary
Judas-tree covered with bloom. Here they built a fire, for the
replenishing of the coals in the fire-baskets, and as a menace to
prowling beasts. Then they dined on their sun-dried meat and on ripe
plantains gathered during the journey. Having dined, the three younger
members of the party stretched themselves out in the shade for their
noon sleep, while Grom, whose restless brain never suffered him to
sleep by day, kept watch, and pondered the adventure which lay before
them.
As Grom sat there, ten or a dozen paces from the fire, absorbed in thought,
his eyes gradually focussed themselves upon a big purple-and-lemon orchid
bloom, which glowed forth conspicuously from the rank green
jungle-growth fringing the meadow. The gorgeous bloom seemed to rise out of
a black, curiously gnarled elbow of branch or trunk which thrust itself out
through the leafage. Grom's eyes dwelt for a time, unheeding, upon this
piece of misshapen tree trunk. Suddenly he saw the blackness wink. His
startled vision cleared itself instantly, and revealed to him the hideous,
two-horned mask of a black rhinoceros, peering forth just under the
orchid blossom.
Grom's first impulse was to wake the sleepers with a yell and shepherd
them to refuge in the tree--for the gigantic woolly rhinoceros, with
his armor of impenetrable hide, was a foe whom Man had not yet learned
to handle with any certainty. But a deeper instinct held Grom
motionless. He knew that the monster, whose eyesight was always dim
and feeble, could not see him distinctly, and was in all probability
staring in stupid wonder at the dancing flames of the camp-fire. As
long as no smell of man should reach the brute's sensitive nostrils to
rouse its rage, it was not likely to charge. There was no wind, and
the air about him was full of the spicy bitterness of the wood-smoke.
Grom decided that the safest thing was to keep perfectly still and
wait for the next move in the game to come from the monster. He
devoutly trusted that the sleepers behind him were sleeping soundly,
and that no one would wake and sit up to attract the monster's
attention.
Grom could now see plainly that it was the fire, and not himself,
which the rhinoceros was staring at. The shifting flames, and the
smell of the smoke, apparently puzzled it. After a moment or two, it
took a step forward, so that half of its huge, black, shaggy bulk
projected from the banked greenery as from a frame. Then it stood
motionless, blinking its little malignant eyes, till the silent
suspense grew to be a strain even upon Grom's well-seasoned nerves.
At last a large stick, laid across the fire, burned through and fell
apart. The flames leapt upwards with redoubled vigor, preceded by a
volley of crackling sparks. Knowing the temper of the rhinoceros, Grom
expected it to fly into a fury and charge upon the fire at once. His
mouth opened, indeed, for the yell of warning which should wake the
sleepers and send them leaping into the tree. But he checked himself
in time. The monster, for once in its life, seemed to be abashed. The
curling red flames were too elusive a foe for it. With a grunt of
uneasiness, it drew back into the leafage; and in a moment or two Grom
heard the giant bulk crashing off through the jungle at a gallop. The
unwonted sensation of alarm, once yielded to, had swollen to a panic,
and the dull-witted brute fled on for a mile or more before it could
forget the cause of its terror.
That afternoon toward sundown the expedition reached the point where
the fugitive had made her appeal to Grom. For fear of giving
information to the unknown enemy, no fires were lighted. The night was
passed in a dense and lofty tree-top. For Grom, strung up with
excitement, suspense and curiosity, there was little sleep. For the
most part he perched on his woven platform with his arms about his
knees, listening to the sounds of the night--the occasional sudden
rush of a hunting beast, the agonized scream and scuffle, the
gurglings and noisy slaverings that told of the unseen tragedies
enacted far down in the murderous dark. But there was no sound novel
to his own experience. Once there came a scratching of claws and a
sniffing at the base of the tree.
But Grom dropped a live coal from his fire-basket, and chanced to make
a lucky shot. With a snarl some heavy body bounced away from the tree.
The coal then fell into a tuft of dry grass, which flared up suddenly.
Grom had a glimpse of huge shapes and startled, savage eyes backing
away from the circle of light. The blaze died down as quickly as it
had arisen; and thereafter the night prowlers kept at a distance from
the tree. But the sleepers had all been thoroughly aroused and till
dawn they sat discussing, for the hundredth time, the chances of the
morrow's venture.
Before the sun was clear of the horizon, the little party was again
upon the march, but now going with the wariness of a sable. They no
longer went Indian file, but flitting singly from tree to tree, from
covert to covert, Grom picking up the old trail of the fugitive, the
rest of the party keeping him in view and peering ahead for some sign
of the unknown Terror. The red woman in her flight had left a sharp
trail enough; but in the lapse of three days it had been so
obliterated that all Grom's wood-craft was needed to decipher it, and
his progress was slow. He began to be puzzled at the absence of any
other trail, of any footsteps of a mysterious, unknown monster. Such
tracks as crossed those of the fugitive, however terrible, were all
familiar to his eye.
Suddenly he almost stumbled over a hideous sight. A low whistle
brought his followers closing in upon him. The skeleton of a
full-grown man lay outstretched in the grass. The bones were
fresh--bloodstained and bright--and a swarm of blood-sucking insects
arose from them. They were picked minutely clean, except for a portion
of the skull, where the long, strong, densely matted hair seemed to
have served as an effective armor. The bones were not pulled about, or
crushed for their marrow, as they would have been if the victim had
been the prey of any of the great carnivorous beasts. And there were
no tracks about it save those of a few small rat-like creatures. It
was clear that the Mystery, whatever it might be, had wings.
"A bird!" whispered A-ya, with a gleam of triumph in her eyes, at the
same time glancing up into the tree-tops apprehensively. But Grom did
not think so. There were no marks of mighty claws on the turf around
the skeleton.
Grom cast about him an eager but anxious eye. The country was not
densely wooded at this point, but studded with low thickets, and set
here and there with scattered trees. From a little way ahead came a
gleam of calm water through the greenery. It was a scene of peace, and
security, and summer loveliness. Its very beauty seemed to Grom an
added menace, as if some peculiar treachery must lurk behind it.
In the center of an open glade, not far from the skeleton, Grom set
his party to building a circle of fires, as likely to afford the
surest kind of a refuge. A supply of fuel having been gathered, he
directed A-ya and Mo to remain and tend the fires and not to leave the
circle unless he should summon them. Loob, the cunning scout, he sent
off to the left through the underbrush. He himself followed the trail
of the fugitive--now doubled by that of the other fugitive whose
skeleton lay there in the sun--down toward that gleam of water through
the trees. A-ya gazed after him anxiously as he vanished, half minded
to dare his displeasure and follow him.
Grom was presently able to make out that the water was a wide, reedy
lake or the arm of a shallow river. There was no wind, and the surface
shone like clear glass. But once and again his eyes were dazzled by a
dart of intense radiance, a great flash of rose or violet or
blue-green flame, shooting over the surface of the water. A memory of
what A-ya had professed to gather from the stranger woman rushed into
his mind. Perhaps the Destroying Thing was like a bird, and
nevertheless, at the same time, something like fire. He felt himself
confronted by a mystery which made even his tried nerves creep; and he
hid himself in the densest undergrowth as he stole forward toward the
water. He had forgotten, and forsaken, the trail he was following, in
his haste to solve the problem of those darting splendors.
A few moments more and he gained the edge of an open glade which led
straight to the water. He paused behind the screening leaves. Out over
the water a bar of ruby light, surrounded by a globe of rose-pink
mist, shot by and vanished from his narrow field of vision. He was
just about to thrust out his head and crane his neck to follow the
gorgeous apparition, when a peculiar dry rustling in the air above
checked him. He glanced up cautiously, and saw hovering, not more than
twenty or thirty yards away, a beautiful and dreadful being.
In shape it was exactly like a dragon-fly; but the length of its
flaming violet body was greater than that of Grom's longest arrow. The
spread of its two pairs of transparent, crystal-shining, colorless
wings was even greater than the length of its body. Its enormous eyes,
wells of purple fire which took up the whole of the top and sides of
its monstrous head, seemed to see everywhere at once; and Grom
shivered with the feeling that they had spied him out and were peering
into his very soul.
The awful eyes may have seen him, indeed; but at that moment they
spied out something else which apparently concerned them more. With a
pounce like a flash of violet lightning--and, indeed, almost as
swift--the bright shape swooped to the grass. The four shining wings
waved there for a moment, and there seemed to be a mild struggle. Then
the giant fly rose again, lightly, into the air, holding in the clutch
of its six slender, jointed legs the body of one of those black,
rat-like animals which Grom knew so well as infesting the grass of all
meadows near the water. The captor flew to a naked branch near the
waterside, alighted upon it, and proceeded to make its meal, holding
up the body between the end joints of its front pair of legs and
turning it over and over deftly while its appalling jaws both crushed
and mangled it. The process was amazingly swift. In the space of a
couple of minutes all the blood, flesh, and soft material of the rat
were squeezed out and sucked down. The remnants were rolled into a
hard little ball, perfectly spherical, and scornfully tossed aside.
And the monster, leaping into the air with a rustle of its glittering
wings, flashed off over the water.
Almost in the same moment an amazingly loud rustle, like the sweep of
a fierce gust of rain upon a rank of palmetto leaves, filled the air
above the glade, and Grom, looking up with a start, saw a great shoal
of the radiant shapes storm by, as if with the rainbow entangled in
their wings. He wondered upon what foray they were bent; and now for
the first time he realized, with a creeping of the flesh, what it was
that had overtaken the man whose skeleton he had found in the grass.
The shoal swept out over the lake a little way, and then down the
shore toward the left; and Grom drew a long breath as he assured
himself that their course was taking them far from the fires of A-ya
and Mo.
When Grom lowered his eyes to earth again he started. On the side of
the stump of a fallen tree, out in the glade not more than eight or
ten yards distant, clung one of the monsters, scintillating blue-green
and amethyst in the full blaze of the sun. Its wings, exquisitely
netted and of crystal transparency, were tinged with an ineffable
purple iridescence. Its jointed body, slightly longer than Grom's arm,
was nearly as thick as his wrist, and ended at the tail with a
formidable double claw. Its six legs, arranged in three pairs under
the thorax, were armed on the inner sides with powerful spines,
needle-pointed and steel hard, with which to grip and hold its
victims. The thorax, from the back of which sprouted the four great
wings, was of the thickness of Grom's forearm, while its head was as
big as Grom's two great fists put together. It was this head which
held Grom's fascinated gaze, giving him more of the sensation of cold
fear than he had ever known before. More than two-thirds of the head
consisted of a pair of huge, globose eyes, without pupil, ethereally
transparent, yet unfathomable. From the depths of them flamed a
ceaselessly changing radiance of blue-green, purple and violet. Grom
found the stare of those blank, pupilless eyes almost intolerable.
It was plainly straight at him, through the ineffectual screen of the
leafage, that the dreadful insect was staring. At first it stared with
the back of its head. Then, very deliberately, it turned its head
completely around, without moving its body a hair-breadth, till its
mouth was in the same plane with its back. This gave Grom a sense of
disgust, and his shrinking dread began to give way to a sort of rage.
Then he took note of the monster's mouth--and understood those great
cup-shaped wounds on the woman and the child. The mouth took up the
remaining third of the head, and seemed to consist of globular discs
working one over the other, so as either to cut cleanly or to grind.
They were working, slowly, now--and Grom felt suddenly that he must
put a stop to it, that he must put out the awful light in those
monstrous devil eyes. Stealthily, almost imperceptibly, he fitted an
arrow to his bow, raised it, drew it, and took a long, steady aim. He
must not miss. The shaft flew--and the great fly was pinned, through
the thorax, to the soft, rotten wood of its perch.
To Grom's horror that stroke, which to any beast he knew would have at
once been fatal, did not kill the monstrous fly. Its struggles, and
the beating of its four great wings were so violent that the
arrow-head was presently wrenched loose from its hold in the wood, and
the raging splendor, with the shaft half-way through its thorax,
bounded into the air. It darted straight at Grom, who had prudently
edged in among a tangle of stems. Its fury carried it through the
screen of leafage--but then, its wings impeded by the branches, and
the arrow hampering it, it dashed itself to the earth. Instantly Grom
was upon it, stamping its slim body, as it lay there blazing and
quivering, into the soil. The violet light in the huge, pupilless eyes
still stared up at him implacable, from a head turned squarely over
the back. But in a cold fury Grom shattered the gleaming head with his
club. Then he trod the silver wings to dust.
Having slaked his wrath effectually, Grom turned to stare forth again
at those destroying splendors darting and glittering above the surface
of the lake. To his surprise there were no more of them to be seen.
Then far off down the shore he heard the voice of Loob, shouting for
help. The shouting changed at once to a scream of terror, and Grom
started to the rescue on the full run--taking care, however, to keep
within cover of the thickets. But before he had gone a quarter of a
mile he heard A-ya's voice calling him, wildly, insistently, mingled
with excited yells from Mo. He shouted in reply and dashed madly for
the fires. The peril of A-ya put all other considerations out of his
mind.
As he burst forth into the glade of refuge, he saw A-ya and young Mo
leaping about frantically among their fires, now trying to stir the
fires to a fiercer blaze, now beating upwards with their spears, while
above them darted and gleamed and swooped and scintillated, with a
horrid dry rustling of their silver wings, shoal upon shoal of the
devouring monsters. As he burst into the open, with a great shout of
encouragement, something dropped upon him. He felt his head instantly
caged by six steel-like legs which gripped like jaws, their spines
sinking deep into the flesh of neck and cheek. He reached up his left
hand, caught his dreadful assailant just where the head and thorax
join, and strove to throttle it. This was impossible, by reason of the
insect's armor, but he succeeded in holding off those horrid jaws from
his face as he dashed for the circle. Another monster swooped and
struck its spines into his back, and bit a great mouthful out of his
shoulder. But he gained the fires, and, holding his breath, sprang
right through the fiercest flame. The wings of his assailants
shrivelled instantly, and the flame, drawn into the mouth of their
breathing tubes, sealed them up. Grom tore them off, and slammed the
writhing, wingless bodies into the fire.
Inside the circle, now that the fires were burning high, it was
possible to defend oneself effectually, as the bulk of the assailants
seemed to realize that the flames were fatal to their frail wings. But
there were enough so headlong in their ferocity that both Grom and Mo
were kept busy beating them off with spears, while A-ya fed the fires;
and the ground inside the circle was littered with the radiant bodies
of the dying insects, which, even in dying, bit like bull-dogs if foot
or leg came within reach. Grom noticed that their supply of fuel was
all but gone, and his heart sank. He measured with his eyes the
distance to the nearest thickets that looked dense enough for a
shelter.
"We'll have to run for those bushes," he said presently. "They can't
fly in where the branches are thick. It breaks their wings."
"Good," said young Mo. But A-ya, whose shapely shoulders and thighs
were already covered with hideous wounds, trembled at the prospect.
At that moment, however an amazing change came over the scene. A black
thunder-cloud passed across the face of the sun. The moment the
sunshine vanished the destroyers seemed to forget their fury. All the
life and energy went out of them. They simply flocked to the nearest
trees and hung themselves up, gigantic, jewelled blooms, upon the
branches. In less than a minute every dreadful wing was stilled.
"Now is our time. Come!" commanded Grom, leading the way out of the
circle.
"Let's stop and kill them all!" pleaded young Mo, his eyes red with
rage.
But Grom pointed to the cloud. "It will pass quickly," said he. "We
must be far from here before the sun shows his face again."
He paused, however, to transfix upon his spear-head one of their
wounded but still fluttering foes, that he might be able to show the
tribe what manner of monsters they had had to deal with. Both A-ya and
Mo followed his example; and they all ran off down the glade searching
for Loob, whom they soon found and bearing their strange trophies on
their spear-heads they went on. The monsters, clinging sullenly to
their perches, rolled baleful eyes of emerald and rose and amethyst
upon them as they went, but lifted never a wing to follow them. Ten
minutes later the sun came out again. Then the monsters all sprang
hurtling into the air, and darted hither and thither above the glade
in shoals of iridescent radiance, seeking their prey. But Grom and
A-ya, Mo and Loob triumphant in spite of their wounds, were by this
time far away among the inland thickets, where those intolerable eyes
could not search them out, nor the clashing wings pursue.