There were the same furnishings, and on the wall-tablet the giant was painting a fourth mark, below three which were there already.
He had taken off his belt, and thrown it into a corner, with the six captives still fastened to it.
He now pulled one of them off, and taking it between thumb and finger, shredded the four limbs. While he did this, the creature made no sound, but the wide jaws snapped continually.
Laying down the limbless body, he proceeded to peel and eat the limbs as one might shred off the skin of a banana. They did not bleed, the flesh being like a stiff jelly, of a bright-red colour, and veined with a gristly white substance, giving an appearance like the flesh of a pomegranate.
Hideous as these creatures were, it shocked me to see this callous tearing of one that still lived, apparently with undiminished vitality; but the eater’s face, as I now saw it, had no suggestion of savagery. Rather it was melancholy and preoccupied, and as he ate he talked continually to himself in a plaintive monotone, though with an organ volume.
I reflected that men who are otherwise humane will swallow a living oyster, of the skinning of eels, of the fish that are boiled alive in Indian kettles, and of a hundred cruelties to which custom has inured mankind, and thought I understood, however incompletely—which, of course, I did not.
The limbs being gone, he picked up the trunk, and, twisting off the gnashing head, he threw it down and proceeded to complete his meal. Such offal as there was—it was unlike that of any creature familiar to me—he collected neatly, with the peeled skin, and the severed head, and opening the bag in which I lay, threw them in with me. I realised afterwards that it was for the orderly deposit of such refuse, among the aromatic moss, that he carried it with him.
Afterwards—but not then. For as he shook and closed the bag the severed head rolled against me, and the snapping teeth ripped the leather of my left sleeve from wrist to elbow. Panic seized me at this, beyond reason, and I was more terrified of one severed head than I had been before of the whole animal. How, I thought, if we were both carried in the bag together, and it were shaken against me? Already I felt its wide mouth closing on my flesh, and biting deeper while I strove to shake it free, with no body to strike at. How if there should be five more heads tumbling about me? And how soon did they really die? Terror edging my wits, I realised that because their bodies had not the thin fluid of familiar blood, the head could only be very slowly affected by the separation. Then how long might—? I struggled up to the mouth of the bag. It was drawn too tightly for escape, though I could see through it as before.
My captor lay stretched full length. An arm moved restlessly. More than once he muttered the same words. E-lo-ne, E-lo-ne, so it sounded, with a hopeless, falling cadence, infinitely sad.
Evidently I was forgotten, if I had ever held his thought beyond a moment.
After a time he slept.
Then I struggled to kick back the moss, and gain a space to stand upright, and swing the axe, and desperately I attacked the side of the bag.
It proved unexpectedly easy, and then difficult.
The first stroke cut down a long slit with a rasping sound, and the light shone through it. The next stroke made a parallel slit, and I thought that a few more would bring my freedom. But I found that, though I could make many downward slits, I could not squeeze myself through them, and to crosscut was a different matter. I hacked long and desperately before I contrived a ragged hole, through which I crawled to freedom.
As I escaped, my fear left me. I did not dread the sleeping giant one tenth as much as the contact of the unbodied head, with its snapping jaws, and small malignant eyes.
Deliberately, I drank and ate before I turned to take the upward way.
Of that long toil there is little that is worth a word, with so much else for telling.
Somewhat the rising current of air must have buoyed me. Coming to the higher resting-place, I slept long, and ate and drank before and after.
VIII
The Birds
When I came again to the surface-world there was no sign of life around, but a great stillness, and the dawn was breaking in an unimagined splendour.
On my left hand, not distant, sank the ravine, black and terrible. Beyond it was the distant forest of the nameless things. But before me, to the reach of sight, the ground sloped downward, and was covered with a level-surfaced growth, so close that I could only guess its depth, but showing only a sea of leaves, not larger than a man’s hand, and of a bright green, as though varnished; and these leaves the dawn-light altered to reflected gold, so that my dazzled sight recoiled from a splendour beyond endurance.
It was as though one should look straight at the noonday sun, to find a glory not of one small-seeming orb, but of stretched leagues, and myriad facets, of an equal brilliance.
But at length, as the sun rose, the light changed and faded. A thin mist moved over the surface of the unending field of green, but was not dense enough to hide it.
The green growth came to the very edge of the opal path, and looking down I saw a tangle of sinuous macaroni-like stalks that twisted restlessly, having leaves only at the top, on the close and level surface; and as I watched, tongues like pink worms pushed upward, and licked and wavered in the air, and drew backward. As the day advanced, thousands of these pink tongues were thrust upward and withdrawn continually, giving a wavering pinkness to the
