As she concluded thus, we reached the place where the trench we followed stopped abruptly before a rising bank, and we knew that we were at the end of the divided fields, and could no longer travel in the same concealment. Steps led here to a trodden path, which we left immediately for the lesser risk of a hillside which was covered with gigantic boulders, between which we moved cautiously upward, while the day was slowly dying, the western sky showing, for the first time in my experience, something of the sunset-light of my familiar world, in a cloud-born glory of yellow and purple light above the mountains.
My companion answered my thought: “It is the season of storms approaching. In three days’ time there will be cloud, and great winds, and hidden skies. It is nothing to us, but for those that live on the earth’s surface it must be distasteful.”
I made no reply, for at that moment my glance fell on a Browning pistol which lay amongst the loose stones I was treading. In the compelling strangeness of the experiences through which I had passed I had given little thought to those who had come here before me, but I remembered now the arsenal of weapons with which Templeton had returned and vanished.
I looked round, as though expecting him to appear before me. In the growing gloom I searched round for some further sign, but could find nothing. I opened my mind to my companion, but she could not help me, though she searched with keener eyes than mine. I reflected that we were a long distance from the spot on which I—and presumably he, but was that certain?—had first arrived. If he had travelled so far, he might have gone farther. The abandoned pistol was ominous, but perhaps he had only thrown it away because his ammunition was ended. Possibly he had left it there, intending to return. Possibly he dropped it by accident. Anyway, it was useless to me, and I laid it down where I found it.
And as I rose, my companion’s mind, to which I was becoming increasingly sensitive, interjected urgently: “Do not move, or fear. Look up to the right hand.”
The ridge of the rocky hill we climbed stood out sharply against the sunset light behind it, and above it rose the head and shoulders of a giant form. He had stepped over to our side of the ridge, and stood above us, one hand on the crest, as a man might lean his hand on his own gate, and was gazing around, as one who is more occupied with his own thoughts than with a familiar scene beneath him.
So he stayed for a moment, and then descended the hill with giant strides, as the Titans may have moved when they found the earth too small, and thought to own the heavens.
He might have crushed us under foot, as a plough-horse treads a crouching mouse in the furrow, but we stood quiet and unmoving as he went past without seeing us—or so I thought, but my companion differed. “You cannot know the thoughts of the Dwellers,” she told me. “They are not as we, or as you are. They are terrible in power, and, sometimes, in forbearance also. But they are beyond our understanding.”
My own impression was different. I saw a Titan indeed, but one of my own kind, and one, I thought, who was preoccupied with a great perplexity. But whether he had seen us I could not tell.
XVIII
The Arsenal of the Killers
The moon had not yet risen, but the starlight was brilliant, as we climbed the path that led to the stronghold of the Killers.
As we approached it in the darkness it looked larger than it had appeared to me in the vision, and our task more formidable.
At this high altitude the night began to be cold already, and I supposed that the temperature might fall very low before the dawn of the next day. I began to understand why I had found the stillness of the first night so absolute, and why all creatures sought for rest and warmth during a nighttime so much longer than our own, and in which the change of temperature might be so much greater.
But I had more urgent considerations to engage my thoughts. To rescue the imprisoned Amphibian from a guarded prison in the midst of the stronghold of the Killers, whether it were attempted by force or strategy, appeared about equally hopeless, but the Leaders had laid this task upon me, and whether they really believed me capable of performing it, or had used me as a pawn in a larger purpose, I was equally committed to the adventure.
My comrade also laid the responsibility upon me, as she clearly had the right to do. I had her promise of unquestioning aid in anything for which I might call upon her, and I had learnt to rely more than a little upon her fearless serenity of mind, as well as upon the abundant physical vitality which she shared with me so freely.
On the other hand, the more I relied upon her powers of spirit or body, the more menacing became the fact that I was braving those who had entrapped one of her own kind, of superior grade to herself, who apparently could not escape unrescued.
Whether they had received warning of our coming I could not tell, but I reflected that even though a report should have reached them
