was still submerged.
The ledge narrowed as he worked his way along the foot of the cliff
until he had his back to the rock and was moving sideways with his toes
in the water. Eventually he could go no further without actually
stepping down into the water. He had no way of judging the depth of the
waters, which were turbid and uninviting.
Still trying to keep his feet dry, he squatted down on the narrow ledge
and leaned out so far that his balance as threatened. He steadied
himself with one hand against the wall, and with the other reached out
towards the partially submerged opening.
The lip of the hole was smooth, as he had remembered it, and once again
it seemed to him that it was too square and straight to be anything
other than man-made. As he rolled up his sleeve he noticed that his
injured thumb was still bleeding, but he ignored it and thrust his arm
down below the surface of the pool. He groped downwards, trying to trace
the sill of the opening, He felt what seemed to be blocks of roughly
dressed masonry, and reached down further until the water reached
halfway up his biceps.
Suddenly some living creature, swift and weighty, swirled in the dark
waters right in front of his face, and as an immediate reflex he jerked
his arm out of the water.
The thing followed his arm up to the surface, slashing at his bare flesh
with long, needle'sharp fangs, and he had a glimpse of a head as evil
and villainous as that of a barracuda' He realized instinctively that it
must have been attracted by the smell of the blood from his injured
thumb.
He leaped to his feet and teetered on the narrow ledge, clutching his
arm. Only one of the creature's frontal fangs had touched him, but it
had opened the skin like a razor cut, a long shallow wound across the
back of his right hand from which fresh blood dribbled and splattered
into the pool at his feet.
Instantly the black waters seemed to come alive, roiling and seething
with frenzied writhing aquatic shapes.
Nicholas, his back flattened against the rock wall, stared down at them
with loathing and horror. He could vaguely make out the shape of them,
sinuous and ribbonlike, some of them as thick as his calf, black and
gleaming.
One of them thrust its head out on to the ledge and snapped its jaws.
Its eyes were huge and glistening and its snout was elongated, the long
jaws lined with fangs that overlapped its thin lips. The body behind the
head was six feet long, and lashed like a whip as it drove itself high
up on to the ledge, reaching out for Nicholas's bare legs. He shouted
with revulsion and leaped back, stumbling and splashing on to safer
footing. Clutching his bleeding hand, stare aC Ae evi . aead had
disappeared, but the surface of the pool was still agitated by the lithe
ophidian shapes.
'Eels!the realized. 'Giant tropical eels.'
Of course the blood had excited them. The fall in the water-level had
trapped them in the pool, congregated them in such numbers that they had
probably already devoured the fish that they depended upon for food. Now
