But slits in the pseudopods suddenly gaped open like great, vertical mouths, and engulfed the goats like gigantic snakes. In a matter of moments, the entire herd disappeared from sight.
Maputu stood half-senseless with shock. Never in all the sixty rains of his existence had he seen such a thing as the gelatinous mass now rolling toward him like a flood. Maputu was a courageous man. His wiry body bore scars left by the claws of a lion he had driven from his herd when he was a young warrior. But this thing was far more than a lion ...
Still, the sight of his beloved flock swallowed by this thing from the pit nerved the old man to the brink of madness. Roaring a war-cry half-remembered from his long-gone youth, Maputu charged toward the formless monster and hurled his spear with all the power in his lean sinews.
The iron-tipped missile struck the creature’s rubbery surface – and bounced harmlessly away.
It was then that true fear rooted Maputu to where he stood. His eyes bulged in his seamed, ebony face, and his tongue clove to the roof of his mouth, preventing him from screaming even as the glistening folds opened to envelop him.
INEXORABLY, THE SWALLOWING-monster made its ponderous way toward the Lubaga River. There, five young girls from Mwandishi were filling large, earthen pots with water for the village. They chattered and laughed happily as they occasionally splashed each other.
Then the girlish laughter turned into shrill screams as a shapeless shadow reared high above them. It was so huge that it nearly blotted out the sky. Transfixed by terror, four of the girls were quickly absorbed into the creature’s substance. The fifth, shrieking hysterically, splashed wildly toward deeper water and started to swim toward the other side. Then a large, scaly shape flashed toward her, and she moaned in despair. Crocodile!
Turning from the jaws of the huge reptile, the girl stumbled and fell into the waiting mouth of the swallowing-monster. The crocodile stopped short, a shaft of surprise penetrating its dim brain. The swallowing-monster’s pseudopod extended a few feet farther ... then the crocodile was gone, too.
Slowly, the mighty bulk withdrew from the river. As it lurched toward Mwandishi, only flattened reeds and the shards of five water-pots remained on the riverbank.
TEN MWANDISHI WARRIORS practiced spear-casting in a field outside the palisade of their village. Their target was a lion-skin stuffed with straw. On stalwart young man, whose name was Njemja, threw harder and more accurately than all the rest. After one cast that would have pierced the heart of a living target, one of Njemja’s comrades tossed a jest.
“Too bad Ayoti wasn’t here to see that one.”
Njemja smiled good-naturedly. Ayoti, his wife, was great with child, and it seemed that any day now, the ancestor-spirits would see fit to bring a new life into the tribe.
Then Njemja’s smile changed to a gasp of dismay and disbelief, as did those of the others. Filling the horizon like an advancing fogbank was the titanic thing that had swallowed Maputo, his flock, the five girls and the crocodile. It rolled toward them like an unstoppable juggernaut.
Like Maputo, the young warriors’ first impulse was to hurl their spears into the body of the onrushing monstrosity. But their hard-flung weapons had no more effect than that of the goatherd – they were easily deflected by the creature’s resilient surface.
Rendered nearly mindless by fright, some of the warriors broke and fled for the safety of the palisade of Mwandishi. Others, including Njemja, drew their daggers and attacked the swallowing-monster at close quarters. When the vertical mouths opened, Njemja was the first to be engulfed. The others followed soon after, slashing futilely with their puny weapons.
THE PEOPLE OF MWANDISHI had little warning other than the incoherent cries of the warriors as they frantically shut the gates of the palisade. There was only time for a few garbled words of explanation before the walls fell flat, as if they were made from straw rather than thick poles of wood. The swallowing-monster’s mass had surrounded the entire village. Then it flexed its boneless bulk like a gigantic muscle, demolishing the palisade.
Then the creature attacked. Men, women and children ran screaming in all directions, only to be confronted by thick, cylindrical pseudopods with widening vertical slits waiting to envelop them. Sturdy dwellings of wood and thatch were smashed like toys beneath the feet of a giant. There was no escape – the swallowing-monster was everywhere, absorbing everything that lived, from adult warriors and women to the scrawny chickens that infested the village. Soon all were gone ... except one.
In the first moments of chaotic madness, Ayoti, wife of Njemja, had fled in directionless panic like all the rest. By sheer chance, she had run toward the charred remnants of the dwelling of Mchumu, which had burned down the day before. Following some instinct for survival lodged deep in her brain, the pregnant woman crawled into the burnt ruins and began to cover herself with handfuls of ash and blackened sticks of wood. Within minutes, Ayoti had buried herself beneath a pile of debris.
Ayoti’s heart stood still as she felt an extension of the swallowing-monster slither toward her. It stopped. Then it slid closer, questing with senses that required neither eyes nor ears. At last it withdrew, for it had sensed only a mound of lifeless rubble, not the woman lying motionless beneath it.
IT WAS THE DANGER OF suffocation that finally forced Ayoti to dig her way through the ashes back to open air. As she emerged from hiding, a scene of utter devastation greeted her eyes. The swallowing-monster was gone ... and so was everything else in Mwandishi. The thatched dwellings were all in ruins. The cattle-pens
