Conscious that her body was damaged beyond immediate remedy, and aware that her separate mind could not communicate with her friends unless their own should be receptive, she had entrusted me with the message which I had tardily delivered. But in the meantime, she had found it easy to establish intercourse with minds which were anxiously awaiting news of herself and her companion, and it was on the information that she had supplied that the expedition was started.
It was a deliberate breach of the treaty on which their security was founded, but with two of their number in jeopardy, and the body of one lying where the Dwellers could not fail to find it sooner or later, they had felt that they had no alternative but to attempt the enterprise.
Among the various creatures which lived upon the surface of the continent, it appeared that there were certain ferocious animals of the lowest kind, gregarious in their habits, collected in mountain strongholds, and having bodies which were like those of fish in this respect, that they decayed after a short space of years, sometimes even rotting while the unfortunate animals remained within them, and being continually replaced by young of the same species which grew up around them. They did not appear to have any life apart from these bodies, though my informant could not tell with certainty whether they actually ceased to exist when their bodies perished, or were incarnated in their descendants.
These creatures had carnivorous feasts at regular intervals, in anticipation of which they hunted the wild things of the land, and set traps for them, into one of which the unfortunate Amphibian had fallen. As one of these feast days was shortly due, she was now penned up, not merely in anticipation of death, but that her body might be destroyed beyond remedy, in which case I understood that the path of reincarnation might be both long and difficult.
The problems were, therefore, first, to remove the body which lay in the tunnel entrance to a place of safety, where it could be repaired, and its owner could resume it; and second, to rescue her companion either by force or subtlety, bringing their faculty of thinking in unison, and of combined willpower, to operate against opponents who were not expecting attack, and who relied upon their savage strength and weapons to maintain their own security, and to hold the prey that they had captured; and third, to do these things, if either were possible, without the knowledge of the Dwellers, whose means of information were only vaguely guessed, but who were known to come out on the surface in the daytime.
XII
The March
We were now clear of the covered way, under a sky of brilliant starshine, holding a course through the darkness that never wavered or slackened, even when the gorge was crossed by the invisible bridge.
Here it occurred to me to ask how, if the country relied upon its girdle of strange growths for its immunity from the outside world, it could afford to risk invasion up so wide an unprotected channel as the gorge supplied, but I could learn nothing beyond the suggestion that its enemies would probably be too stupid to discover the gap, (if it really were unprotected), which seemed a strange supposition when applied to a power so dreaded, and the information that this gorge was remembered as the scene of a great battle before the protective girdle had been planted, in which the Dwellers had been destroyed in hundreds, but in which one of their enemies had also perished, and the remains of its body had blocked the channel for many years afterwards.
I had thought of the Dwellers hitherto as dominating by their strength and size, as well as by their evident physical knowledge and engineering skill, in both of which my present companions appeared to take little interest, but I now had a vision as of a world in which a race of ants of superior intelligence might revolt successfully against mankind, and of a warfare in which they had been trodden down, as a man might stamp on an ant’s nest. But the truth, as I learnt later, was somewhat different.
My companion now pressed for some account of myself, and I answered many questions, finding her more ready to believe that I was the product of an earlier civilisation than I should have anticipated, but that this information made it appear the more necessary that the Dwellers should be informed of my existence, and the less probable that they would regard it with complacency.
She explained that it was known to the Dwellers that the earth had been the scene of countless civilisations, through aeons of forgotten times, all of which had successively destroyed themselves by the misuse of their own discoveries, and that their whole energy was directed to overcoming this recurrent danger, which had appeared to operate with the certainty of a fundamental law. To them I might well appear as the seed of death which nature had sent forward to frustrate a purpose which might otherwise have defeated her own intention. On the other hand, she suggested kindly, my obvious ignorance and insignificance might be my protection, as I had so evidently been born upon the earth in one of its more barbarous epochs. As to their own course regarding myself, they would do what they could, but—and her mind shut suddenly, though not before I had caught a glimpse of her difficulty.
For if they were discovered in the present enterprise, even if it did not in itself cause their destruction, they might find themselves at open war with the Dwellers, in which case there would be no purpose in surrendering me,
