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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41586 ***
+
+                          The RED DUST
+
+                      _By Murray Leinster_
+
+                 _A Sequel to "The Mad Planet."_
+
+    [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from January 1927
+    Amazing Stories. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
+    that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+[Illustration: Burl raised his spear, and plunged down on the back of
+the moving thing, thrusting his spear with all the force he could
+command. He had fallen upon the shining back of one of the huge,
+meat-eating beetles, and his spear had slid across the horny armor and
+then stuck fast, having pierced only the leathery tissue between the
+insect's head and thorax.]
+
+
+    _You who have read "The Mad Planet" by Murray Leinster, will welcome
+    the sequel to that story. The world, in a far distant future, is
+    peopled with huge insects and titanic fungus growths. Life has been
+    greatly altered, and tiny Man is now in the process of becoming
+    acclimated to the change. We again meet our hero Burl, but this time
+    a far greater danger menaces the human race. The huge insects are
+    still in evidence, but the terror they inspire is as nothing
+    compared to the deadly Red Dust. You will follow this remarkable
+    story with breathless interest._
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Prey
+
+
+The sky grew gray and then almost white. The overhanging banks of clouds
+seemed to withdraw a little from the steaming earth. Haze that hung
+always among the mushroom forests and above the fungus hills grew more
+tenuous, and the slow and misty rain that dripped the whole night long
+ceased reluctantly.
+
+As far as the eye could see a mad world stretched out, a world of
+insensate cruelties and strange, fierce maternal solicitudes. The
+insects of the night--the great moths whose wings spread far and wide in
+the dimness, and the huge fireflies, four feet in length, whose beacons
+made the earth glow in their pale, weird light--the insects of the night
+had sought their hiding-places.
+
+Now the creatures of the day ventured forth. A great ant-hill towered a
+hundred feet in the air. Upon its gravel and boulder-strewn side a
+commotion became visible.
+
+The earth crumbled, and fell into an invisible opening, then a dark
+chasm appeared, and two slender, threadlike antennæ peered out.
+
+A warrior ant emerged, and stood for an instant in the daylight, looking
+all about for signs of danger to the ant-city. He was all of ten inches
+long, this ant, and his mandibles were fierce and strong. A second and
+third warrior came from the inside of the ant-hill, and ran with tiny
+clickings about the hillock, waving their antennæ restlessly, searching,
+ever searching for a menace to their city.
+
+They returned to the gateway from which they had made their appearance,
+evidently bearing reassuring messages, because shortly after they had
+reëntered the gateway of the ant-city, a flood of black, ill-smelling
+workers poured out of the opening and dispersed upon their business. The
+clickings of their limbs and an occasional whining stridulation made an
+incessant sound as they scattered over the earth, foraging among the
+mushrooms and giant cabbages, among the rubbish-heaps of the gigantic
+bee-hives and wasp colonies, and among the remains of the tragedies of
+the night for food for their city.
+
+The city of the ants had begun its daily toil, toil in which every one
+shared without supervision or coercion. Deep in the recesses of the
+pyramid galleries were hollowed out and winding passages that led down a
+fathomless distance into the earth below.
+
+Somewhere in the maze of tunnels there was a royal apartment, in which
+the queen-ant reposed, waited upon by assiduous courtiers, fed by royal
+stewards, and combed and rubbed by the hands of her subjects and
+children.
+
+But even the huge monarch of the city had her constant and pressing duty
+of maternity. A dozen times the size of her largest loyal servant, she
+was no less bound by the unwritten but imperative laws of the city than
+they. From the time of waking to the time of rest, she was ordained to
+be the queen-mother in the strictest and most literal sense of the word,
+for at intervals to be measured only in terms of minutes she brought
+forth a single egg, perhaps three inches in length, which was instantly
+seized by one of her eager attendants and carried in haste to the
+municipal nursery.
+
+There it was placed in a tiny cell a foot or more in length until a
+sac-shaped grub appeared, all soft, white body save for a tiny mouth.
+Then the nurses took it in charge and fed it with curious, tender
+gestures until it had waxed large and fat and slept the sleep of
+metamorphosis. When it emerged from its rudimentary cocoon it took the
+places of its nurses until its soft skin had hardened into the horny
+armor of the workers and soldiers, and then it joined the throng of
+workers that poured out from the city at dawn to forage for food, to
+bring back its finds and to share with the warriors and the nurses, the
+drone males and the young queens, and all the other members of its
+communities, their duties in the city itself. That was the life of the
+social insect, absolute devotion to the cause of its city, utter
+abnegation of self-interest for the sake of its fellows--and death at
+their hands when their usefulness was past. They neither knew nor
+expected more or less.
+
+It is a strange instinct that prompts these creatures to devote their
+lives to their city, taking no smallest thought for their individual
+good, without even the call of maternity or sex to guide them. Only the
+queen knows motherhood. The others know nothing but toil, for purposes
+they do not understand, and to an end of which they cannot dream. At
+intervals all over the world of Burl's time these ant-cities rose above
+the surrounding ground, some small and barely begun, and others ancient
+colonies which were truly the continuation of cities first built when
+the ants were insects to be crushed beneath the feet of men. These
+ancient strongholds towered two, three, and even four hundred feet above
+the plains, and their inhabitants would have had to be numbered in
+millions if not billions.
+
+Not all the earth was subject to the ants, however. Bees and wasps and
+more deadly creatures crawled over and flew above its surface. The bees
+were four feet and more in length. And slender-waisted wasps darted here
+and there, preying upon the colossal crickets that sang deep bass music
+to their mates--and the length of the crickets was the length of a man,
+and more.
+
+Spiders with bloated bellies waited, motionless, in their snares, whose
+threads were the size of small cables, waiting for some luckless giant
+insect to be entangled in the gummy traps. And butterflies fluttered
+over the festering plains of this new world, tremendous creatures whose
+wings could only be measured in terms of yards.
+
+An outcropping of rock jutted up abruptly from a fungus-covered plain.
+Shelf-fungi and strangely colored molds stained the stone until the
+shining quartz was hidden almost completely from view, but the whole
+glistened like tinted crystal from the dank wetness of the night. Little
+wisps of vapor curled away from the slopes as the moisture was taken up
+by the already moisture-laden air.
+
+Seen from a distance, the outcropping of rock looked innocent and still,
+but a nearer view showed many things.
+
+Here a hunting wasp had come upon a gray worm, and was methodically
+inserting its sting into each of the twelve segments of the faintly
+writhing creature. Presently the worm would be completely paralyzed, and
+would be carried to the burrow of the wasp, where an egg would be laid
+upon it, from which a tiny maggot would presently hatch. Then weeks of
+agony for the great gray worm, conscious, but unable to move, while the
+maggot fed upon its living flesh--
+
+There the tiny spider, youngest of hatchlings, barely four inches
+across, stealthily stalked some other still tinier mite, the little,
+many-legged larva of the oil-beetle, known as the bee-louse. The almost
+infinitely small bee-louse was barely two inches long, and could easily
+hide in the thick fur of a great bumblebee.
+
+This one small creature would never fulfill its destiny, however. The
+hatchling spider sprang--it was a combat of midgets which was soon over.
+When the spider had grown and was feared as a huge, black-bellied
+tarantula, it would slay monster crickets with the same ease and the
+same implacable ferocity.
+
+The outcropping of rock looked still and innocent. There was one point
+where it overhung, forming a shelf, beneath which the stone fell away in
+a sheer-drop. Many colored fungus growths covered the rock, making it a
+riot of tints and shades. But hanging from the rooflike projection of
+the stone there was a strange, drab-white object. It was in the shape of
+half a globe, perhaps six feet by six feet at its largest. A number of
+little semicircular doors were fixed about its sides, like inverted
+arches, each closed by a blank wall. One of them would open, but only
+one.
+
+The house was like the half of a pallid orange, fastened to the roof of
+rock. Thick cables stretched in every direction for yards upon yards,
+anchoring the habitation firmly, but the most striking of the things
+about the house--still and quiet and innocent, like all the rest of the
+rock outcropping--were the ghastly trophies fastened to the outer walls
+and hanging from long silken chains below.
+
+Here was the hind leg of one of the smaller beetles. There was the
+wing-case of a flying creature. Here a snail-shell, two feet in
+diameter, hanging at the end of an inch-thick cable. There a boulder
+that must have weighed thirty or forty pounds, dangling in similar
+fashion.
+
+But fastened here and there, haphazard and irregularly, were other more
+repulsive remnants. The shrunken head-armor of a beetle, the fierce jaws
+of a cricket--the pitiful shreds of a hundred creatures that had formed
+forgotten meals for the bloated insect within the home.
+
+Comparatively small as was the nest of the clotho spider, it was
+decorated as no ogre's castle had ever been adorned--legs sucked dry of
+their contents, corselets of horny armor forever to be unused by any
+creature, a wing of this insect, the head of that. And dangling by the
+longest cord of all, with a silken cable wrapped carefully about it to
+keep the parts together, was the shrunken, shriveled, dried-up body of a
+long-dead man!
+
+Outside, the nest was a place of gruesome relics. Within, it was a place
+of luxury and ease. A cushion of softest down filled all the bulging
+bottom of the hemisphere. A canopy of similarly luxurious texture
+interposed itself between the rocky roof and the dark, hideous body of
+the resting spider.
+
+The eyes of the hairy creature glittered like diamonds, even in the
+darkness, but the loathsome, attenuated legs were tucked under the
+round-bellied body, and the spider was at rest. It had fed.
+
+It waited, motionless, without desires or aversions, without emotions or
+perplexities, in comfortable, placid, machinelike contentment until time
+should bring the call to feed again.
+
+A fresh carcass had been added to the decorations of the nest only the
+night before. For many days the spider would repose in motionless
+splendor within the silken castle. When hunger came again, a nocturnal
+foray, a creature would be pounced upon and slain, brought bodily to the
+nest, and feasted upon, its body festooned upon the exterior, and
+another half-sleeping, half-waking period of dreamful idleness within
+the sybaritic charnel-house would ensue.
+
+Slowly and timidly, half a dozen pink-skinned creatures made their way
+through the mushroom forest that led to the outcropping of rock under
+which the clotho spider's nest was slung. They were men, degraded
+remnants of the once dominant race.
+
+Burl was their leader, and was distinguished solely by two three-foot
+stumps of the feathery, golden antennæ of a night-flying moth he had
+bound to his forehead. In his hand was a horny, chitinous spear, taken
+from the body of an unknown flying creature killed by the flames of the
+burning purple hills.
+
+Since Burl's return from his solitary--and involuntary--journey, he had
+been greatly revered by his tribe. Hitherto it had been but a
+leaderless, formless group of people, creeping to the same hiding-place
+at nightfall to share in the food of the fortunate, and shudder at the
+fate of those who might not appear.
+
+Now Burl had walked boldly to them, bearing, upon his back the gray bulk
+of a labyrinth spider he had slain with his own hands, and clad in
+wonderful garments of a gorgeousness they envied and admired. They hung
+upon his words as he struggled to tell them of his adventures, and
+slowly and dimly they began to look to him for leadership. He was
+wonderful. For days they had listened breathlessly to the tale of his
+adventures, but when he demanded that they follow him in another and
+more perilous affair, they were appalled.
+
+A peculiar strength of will had come to Burl. He had seen and done
+things that no man in the memory of his tribe had seen or done. He had
+stood by when the purple hills burned and formed a funeral pyre for the
+horde of army ants, and for uncounted thousands of flying creatures. He
+had caught a leaping tarantula upon the point of his spear, and had
+escaped from the web of a banded web-spider by oiling his body so that
+the sticky threads of the snare refused to hold him fast. He had
+attacked and killed a great gray labyrinth spider.
+
+But most potent of all, he had returned and had been welcomed by
+Saya--Saya of the swift feet and slender limbs, whose smile roused
+strange emotions in Burl's breast.
+
+It was the adoring gaze of Saya that had roused Burl to this last pitch
+of rashness. Months before the clotho spider in the hemispherical silk
+castle of the gruesome decorations had killed and eaten one of the men
+of the tribe. Burl and the spider's victim had been together when the
+spider appeared, and the first faint gray light of morning barely
+silhouetted the shaggy, horrible creature as it leaped from ambush
+behind a toadstool toward the fear-stricken pair.
+
+Its attenuated legs were outstretched, its mandibles gaped wide, and its
+jaws clashed horribly as it formed a black blotch in mid air against the
+lightening sky.
+
+Burl had fled, screaming, when the other man was seized. Now, however,
+he was leading half a dozen trembling men toward the inverted dome in
+which the spider dozed. Two or three of them bore spears like Burl
+himself, but they bore them awkwardly and timorously. Burl himself was
+possessed by a strange, fictitious courage. It was the utter
+recklessness of youth, coupled with the eternal masculine desire to
+display prowess before a desired female.
+
+The wavering advance came to a halt. Most of the naked men stopped from
+fear, but Burl stopped to invoke his newly discovered inner self, that
+had furnished him with such marvelous plans. Quite accidentally he had
+found that if he persistently asked himself a question, some sort of
+answer came from within.
+
+Now he gazed up from a safe distance and asked himself how he and the
+others were to slay the clotho spider. The nest was some forty feet from
+the ground, on the undersurface of a shelf of rock. There was sheer open
+space beneath it, but it was firmly held to its support by long, silken
+cables that curled to the upper side of the rock-shelf, clinging to the
+stone.
+
+Burl gazed, and presently an idea came to him. He beckoned to the others
+to follow him, and they did so, their knees knocking together from their
+fright. At the slightest alarm they would flee, screaming in fear, but
+Burl did not plan that there should be any alarm.
+
+He led them to the rear of the singular rock formation, up the gently
+sloping side, and toward the precipitous edge. He drew near the point
+where the rock fell away. A long, tentacle-like silk cable curled up
+over the edge of a little promontory of stone that jutted out into
+nothingness.
+
+Burl began to feel oddly cold, and something of the panic of the other
+men communicated itself to him. This was one of the anchoring cables
+that held the spider's castle secure. He looked and found others, six or
+seven in all, which performed the task of keeping the shaggy, horrid
+ogre's home from falling to the ground below.
+
+His idea did not desert him, however, and he drew back, to whisper
+orders to his followers. They obeyed him solely because they were
+afraid, and he spoke in an authoritative tone, but they did obey, and
+brought a dozen heavy boulders of perhaps forty pounds weight each.
+
+Burl grasped one of the silken cables at its end and tore it loose from
+the rock for a space of perhaps two yards. His flesh crawled as he did
+so, but something within him drove him on. Then, while beads of
+perspiration stood out on his forehead--induced by nothing less than
+cold, physical fear--he tied the boulder to the cable. The first one
+done, he felt emboldened, and made a second fast, and a third.
+
+One of his men stood near the edge of the rock, listening in agonized
+apprehension. Burl had soon tied a heavy stone to each of the cables he
+saw, and as a matter of fact, there was but one of them he failed to
+notice. That one had been covered by the flaking mold that took the
+place of grass upon the rocky eminence.
+
+There were left upon the promontory, several of the boulders for which
+there was no use, but Burl did not attempt to double the weights on the
+cables. He took his followers aside and explained his plan in whispers.
+Quaking, they agreed, and, trembling, they prepared to carry it out.
+
+One of them stationed himself beside each of the boulders, Burl at the
+largest. He gave a signal, and half a dozen ripping, tearing sounds
+broke the sullen silence of the day. The boulders clashed and clattered
+down the rocky side of the precipice, tearing--perhaps "peeling"--the
+cables from their adhesion to the stone. They shot into open space and
+jerked violently at the half-globular nest, which was wrenched from its
+place by the combined impetus of the six heavy weights.
+
+Burl had flung himself upon his face to watch what he was sure would be
+the death of the spider as it fell forty feet and more, imprisoned in
+its heavily weighted home. His eyes sparkled with triumph as he saw the
+ghastly, trophy-laden house swing out from the cliff. Then he gasped in
+terror.
+
+One of the cables had not been discovered. That single cable held the
+spider's castle from a fall, though the nest had been torn from its
+anchorage, and now dangled heavily on its side in mid air. A convulsive
+struggle seemed to be going on within.
+
+Then one of the archlike doors opened, and the spider emerged, evidently
+in terror, and confused by the light of day, but still venomous and
+still deadly. It found but a single of its anchoring cables intact, that
+leading to the cliff top hard by Burl's head.
+
+The spider sprang for this single cable, and its legs grasped the
+slender thread eagerly while it began to climb rapidly up toward the
+cliff top.
+
+As with all the creatures of Burl's time, its first thought was of
+battle, not flight, and it came up the thin cord with its poison fangs
+unsheathed and its mandibles clashing in rage. The shaggy hair upon its
+body seemed to bristle with insane ferocity, and the horrible, thin legs
+moved with desperate haste as it hastened to meet and wreak vengeance
+upon the cause of its sudden alarm.
+
+Burl's followers fled, uttering shrieks of fear, and Burl started to his
+feet, in the grip of a terrible panic. Then his hand struck one of the
+heavy boulders. Exerting every ounce of his strength, he pushed it over
+the cliff just where the cable appeared above the edge. For the fraction
+of a second there was silence, and then the indescribable sound of an
+impact against a soft body.
+
+There was a gasping cry, and a moment later the curiously muffled
+clatter of the boulder striking the earth below. Somehow, the sound
+suggested that the boulder had struck first upon some soft object.
+
+A faint cry came from the bottom of the hill. The last of Burl's men was
+leaping to a hiding-place among the mushrooms of the forest, and had
+seen the sheen of shining armor just before him. He cried out and waited
+for death, but only a delicately formed wasp rose heavily into the air,
+bearing beneath it the more and more feebly struggling body of a giant
+cricket.
+
+Burl had stood paralyzed, deprived of the power of movement, after
+casting the boulder over the cliff. That one action had taken the last
+ounce of his initiative, and if the spider had hauled itself over the
+rocky edge and darted toward him, slavering its thick spittle and
+uttering sounds of mad fury, Burl would not even have screamed as it
+seized him. He was like a dead thing. But the oddly muffled sound of the
+boulder striking the ground below brought back hope of life and power of
+movement.
+
+He peered over the cliff. The nest still dangled at the end of the
+single cable, still freighted with its gruesome trophies, but on the
+ground below a crushed and horribly writhing form was moving in
+convulsions of rage and agony.
+
+Long, hairy legs worked desperately from a body that was no more than a
+mass of pulped flesh. A ferocious jaw tried to clamp upon something--and
+there was no other jaw to meet it. An evil-smelling, sticky liquid
+exuded from the mangled writhing, thing upon the earth, moving in
+terrible contortions of torment.
+
+Presently an ant drew near and extended inquisitive antennæ at the
+helpless monster wounded to death. A shrill stridulation sounded out,
+and three or four other foot-long ants hastened up to wait patiently
+just outside the spider's reach until its struggles should have lessened
+enough to make possible the salvage of flesh from the perhaps
+still-living creature for the ant city a mile away.
+
+And Burl, up on the cliff-top, danced and gesticulated in triumph. He
+had killed the clotho spider, which had slain one of the tribesmen four
+months before. Glory was his. All the tribesmen had seen the spider
+living. Now he would show them the spider dead. He stopped his dance of
+triumph and walked down the hill in haughty grandeur. He would reproach
+his timid followers for fleeing from the spider, leaving him to kill it
+alone.
+
+Quite naïvely Burl assumed that it was his place to give orders and that
+of the others to obey. True, no one had attempted to give orders before,
+or to enforce their execution, but Burl had reached the eminently
+wholesome conclusion that he was a wonderful person whose wishes should
+be respected.
+
+Burl, filled with fresh notions of his own importance, strutted on
+toward the hiding-place of the tribe, growing more and more angry with
+the other men for having deserted him. He would reproach them, would
+probably beat them. They would be afraid to protest, and in the future
+would undoubtedly be afraid to run away.
+
+Burl was quite convinced that running away was something he could not
+tolerate in his followers. Obscurely--and conveniently in the extreme
+back of his mind--he reasoned that not only did a larger number of men
+present at a scene of peril increase the chances of coping with the
+danger, but they also increased the chances that the victim selected by
+the dangerous creature would be another than himself.
+
+Burl's reasoning was unsophisticated, but sound; perhaps unconscious,
+but none the less effective. He grew quite furious with the deserters.
+They had run away! They had fled from a mere spider.
+
+A shrill whine filled the air, and a ten-inch ant dashed at Burl with
+its mandibles extended threateningly. Burl's path had promised to
+interrupt the salvaging work of the insect, engaged in scraping shreds
+of flesh from the corselet of one of the smaller beetles slain the
+previous night. The ant dashed at Burl like an infuriated fox-terrier,
+and Burl scurried away in undignified retreat. The ant might not be
+dangerous, but bites from its formic acid-poisoned mandibles were no
+trifles.
+
+Burl came to the tangled thicket of mushrooms in which his tribefolk
+hid. The entrance was tortuous and difficult to penetrate, and could be
+blocked on occasion with stones and toadstool pulp. Burl made his way
+toward the central clearing, and heard as he went the sound of weeping,
+and the excited chatter of the tribes people.
+
+Those who had fled from the rocky cliff had returned with the news that
+Burl was dead, and Saya lay weeping beneath an over-shadowing toadstool.
+She was not yet the mate of Burl, but the time would come when all the
+tribe would recognize a status dimly different from the usual tribal
+relationship.
+
+Burl stepped into the clearing, and straightway cuffed the first man he
+came upon, then the next and the next. There was a cry of astonishment,
+and the next second instinctive, fearful glances at that entrance to the
+hiding-place.
+
+Had Burl fled from the spider, and was it following? Burl spoke loftily,
+saying that the spider was dead, that its legs, each one the length of a
+man, were still, and its fierce jaws and deadly poison-fangs harmless
+forevermore.
+
+Ten minutes later he was leading an incredulous, awed little group of
+pink-skinned people to the spot below the cliff where the spider
+actually lay dead, with the ants busily at work upon its remains.
+
+And when he went back to the hiding-place he donned again his great
+cloak that was made from the wing of a magnificent moth, slain by the
+flames of the purple hills, and sat down in splendor upon a crumbling
+toadstool, to feast upon the glances of admiration and awe that were
+sent toward him. Only Saya held back shyly, until he motioned for her to
+draw near, when she seated herself at his feet and gazed up at him with
+unutterable adoration in her eyes.
+
+But while Burl basked in the radiance of his tribe's admiration, danger
+was drawing near them all. For many months there had been strange red
+mushrooms growing slowly here and there all over the earth, they knew.
+The tribefolk had speculated about them, but forebore tasting them
+because they were strange, and strange things were usually dangerous and
+often fatal.
+
+Now those red growths had ripened and grown ready to emit their spores.
+Their rounded tops had grown fat, and the tough skin grew taut as if a
+strange pressure were being applied from within. And to-day, while Burl
+luxuriated in his position of feared and admired great man of his tribe,
+at a spot a long distance away, upon a hill-top, one of the red
+mushrooms burst. The spores inside the taut, tough skin shot all about
+as if scattered by an explosion, and made a little cloud of reddish,
+impalpable dust, which hung in the air and moved slowly with the
+sluggish breeze.
+
+A bee droned into the thin red cloud of dust, lazily and heavily flying
+back toward the hive. But barely had she entered the tinted atmosphere
+when her movements became awkward and convulsive, effortful and excited.
+She trembled and twisted in mid air in a peculiar fashion, then dropped
+to the earth, while her abdomen moved violently.
+
+Bees, like almost all insects, breathe through spiracles on the
+undersurfaces of their abdomens. This bee had breathed in some of the
+red mushroom's spores. She thrashed about desperately upon the
+toadstools on which she had fallen, struggling for breath, for life.
+
+After a long time she was still. The cloud of red mushroom spores had
+strangled or poisoned her. And everywhere the red fringe grew, such
+explosions were taking place, one by one, and wherever the red clouds
+hung in the air creatures were breathing them in and dying in
+convulsions of strangulation.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+The Journey
+
+
+Darkness. The soft, blanketing night of the age of fungoids had fallen
+over all the earth, and there was blackness everywhere that was not good
+to have. Here and there, however, dim, bluish lights glowed near the
+ground. There an intermittent glow showed that a firefly had wandered
+far from the rivers and swamps above which most of his kind now
+congregated. Now a faintly luminous ball of fire drifted above the
+steaming, moisture-sodden earth. It was a will-o'-the-wisp, grown to a
+yard in diameter.
+
+From the low-hanging banks of clouds that hung perpetually overhead,
+large, warm raindrops fell ceaselessly. A drop, a pause, and then
+another drop, added to the already dank moisture of the ground below.
+
+The world of fungus growths flourished on just such dampness and
+humidity. It seemed as if the toadstools and mushrooms could be heard,
+swelling and growing large in the darkness. Rustlings and stealthy
+movements sounded furtively through the night, and from above the heavy
+throb of mighty wing-beats was continuous.
+
+The tribe was hidden in the midst of a tangled copse of toadstools too
+thickly interwoven for the larger insects to penetrate. Only the little
+midgets hid in its recesses during the night-time, and the smaller moths
+during the day.
+
+About and among the bases of the toadstools, however, where their spongy
+stalks rose from the humid earth, small beetles roamed, singing
+cheerfully to themselves in deep bass notes. They were small and round,
+some six or eight inches long, and their bellies were pale gray.
+
+And as they went about they emitted sounds which would have been chirps
+had they been other than low as the lowest tone of a harp. They were
+truffle-beetles, in search of the dainty tidbits on which epicures once
+had feasted.
+
+Some strange sense seemed to tell them when one of half a dozen
+varieties of truffle was beneath them, and they paused in their
+wandering to dig a tunnel straight down. A foot, two feet, or two yards,
+all was the same to them. In time they would come upon the morsel they
+sought and would remain at the bottom of their temporary home until it
+was consumed. Then another period of wandering, singing their cheerful
+song, until another likely spot was reached and another tunnel begun.
+
+In a tiny, open space in the center of the toadstool thicket the
+tribefolk slept with the deep notes of the truffle-beetles in their
+ears. A new danger had come to them, but they had passed it on to Burl
+with a new and childlike confidence and considered the matter settled.
+They slept, while beneath a glowing mushroom at one side of the clearing
+Burl struggled with his new problem. He squatted upon the ground in the
+dim radiance of the shining toadstool, his moth-wing cloak wrapped about
+him, his spear in his hand, and his twin golden plumes of the moth's
+antennæ bound to his forehead. But his face was downcast as a child's.
+
+The red mushrooms had begun to burst. Only that day, one of the women,
+seeking edible fungus for the tribal larder, had seen the fat, distended
+globule of the red mushroom. Its skin was stretched taut, and glistened
+in the light.
+
+The woman paid little or no attention to the red growth. Her ears were
+attuned to catch sounds that would warn her of danger while her eyes
+searched for tidbits that would make a meal for the tribe, and more
+particularly for her small son, left behind at the hiding-place.
+
+A ripping noise made her start up, alert on the instant. The red
+envelope of the mushroom had split across the top, and a thick cloud of
+brownish-red dust was spurting in every direction. It formed a pyramidal
+cloud some thirty feet in height, which enlarged and grew thinner with
+minor eddies within itself.
+
+A little yellow butterfly with wings barely a yard from tip to tip,
+flapped lazily above the mushroom-covered plain. Its wings beat the air
+with strokes that seemed like playful taps upon a friendly element. The
+butterfly was literally intoxicated with the sheer joy of living. It had
+emerged from its cocoon barely two hours before, and was making its
+maiden flight above the strange and wonderful world. It fluttered
+carelessly into the red-brown cloud of mushroom spores.
+
+The woman was watching the slowly changing form of the spore-mist. She
+saw the butterfly enter the brownish dust, and then her eyes became
+greedy. There was something the matter with the butterfly. Its wings no
+longer moved lazily and gently. They struck out in frenzied, hysterical
+blows that were erratic and wild. The little yellow creature no longer
+floated lightly and easily, but dashed here and there, wildly and
+without purpose, seeming to be in its death-throes.
+
+It crashed helplessly against the ground and lay there, moving feebly.
+The woman hurried forward. The wings would be new fabric with which to
+adorn herself, and the fragile legs of the butterfly contained choice
+meat. She entered the dust-cloud.
+
+A stream of intolerable fire--though the woman had never seen or known
+of fire--burned her nostrils and seared her lungs. She gasped in pain,
+and the agony was redoubled. Her eyes smarted as if burning from their
+sockets, and tears blinded her.
+
+The woman instinctively turned about to flee, but before she had gone a
+dozen yards--blinded as she was--she stumbled and fell to the ground.
+She lay there, gasping, and uttering moans of pain, until one of the men
+of the tribe who had been engaged in foraging near by saw her and tried
+to find what had injured her.
+
+She could not speak, and he was about to leave her and tell the other
+tribefolk about her when he heard the clicking of an ant's limbs, and
+rather than have the ant pick her to pieces bit by bit--and leave his
+curiosity ungratified--the man put her across his shoulders and bore her
+back to the hiding-place of the tribe.
+
+It was the tale the woman had told when she partly recovered that caused
+Burl to sit alone all that night beneath the shining toadstool in the
+little clearing, puzzling his just-awakened brain to know what to do.
+
+The year before there had been no red mushrooms. They had appeared only
+recently, but Burl dimly remembered that one day, a long time before,
+there had been a strange breeze which blew for three day and nights, and
+that during the time of its blowing all the tribe had been sick and had
+wept continually.
+
+Burl had not yet reached the point of mental development when he would
+associate that breeze with a storm at a distance, or reason that the
+spores of the red mushrooms had been borne upon the wind to the present
+resting-places of the deadly fungus growths. Still less could he decide
+that the breeze had not been deadly only because it was lightly laden
+with the fatal dust.
+
+He knew simply that unknown red mushrooms had appeared, that they were
+everywhere about, and that they would burst, and that to breathe the
+red dust they gave out was grievous sickness or death.
+
+The tribe slept while the bravely attired figure of Burl squatted under
+the glowing disk of the luminous mushroom, his face a picture of
+querulous perplexity, and his heart full of sadness.
+
+He had consulted his strange inner self, and no plan had come to him. He
+knew the red mushrooms were all about. They would fill the air with
+their poison. He struggled with his problem while his people slumbered,
+and the woman who had breathed the mushroom-dust sobbed softly in her
+troubled sleep.
+
+Presently a figure stirred on the farther side of the clearing. Saya
+woke and raised her head. She saw Burl crouching by the shining
+toadstool, his gay attire draggled and unnoticed. She watched him for a
+little, and the desolation of his pose awoke her pity.
+
+She rose and went to his side, taking his hand between her two, while
+she spoke his name softly. When he turned and looked at her, confusion
+smote her, but the misery in his face brought confidence again.
+
+Burl's sorrow was inarticulate--he could not explain this new
+responsibility for his people that had come to him--but he was comforted
+by her presence, and she sat down beside him. After a long time she
+slept, with her head resting against his side, but he continued to
+question himself, continued to demand an escape for his people from the
+suffering and danger he saw ahead. With the day an answer came.
+
+When Burl had been carried down the river on his fungus raft, and had
+landed in the country of the army ants, he had seen great forests of
+edible mushrooms, and had said to himself that he would bring Saya to
+that place. He remembered, now, that the red mushrooms were there also,
+but the idea of a journey remained.
+
+The hunting-ground of his tribe had been free of the red fungoids until
+recently. If he traveled far enough he would come to a place where there
+were still no red toadstools. Then came the decision. He would lead his
+tribe to a far country.
+
+He spoke with stern authority when the tribesmen woke, talking in few
+words and in a loud voice, holding up his spear as he gave his orders.
+
+The timid, pink-skinned people obeyed him meekly. They had seen the body
+of the clotho spider he had slain, and he had thrown down before them
+the gray bulk of the labyrinth spider he had thrust through with his
+spear. Now he was to take them through unknown dangers to an unknown
+haven, but they feared to displease him.
+
+They made light loads of their mushrooms and such meat-stuffs as they
+had, and parceled out what little fabric they still possessed. Three men
+bore spears, in addition to Burl's long shaft, and he had persuaded the
+other three to carry clubs, showing them how the weapon should be
+wielded.
+
+The indefinitely brighter spot in the cloud-banks above that meant the
+shining sun had barely gone a quarter of the way across the sky when the
+trembling band of timid creatures made their way from their hiding-place
+and set out upon their journey. For their course, Burl depended entirely
+upon chance. He avoided the direction of the river, however, and the
+path along which he had returned to his people. He knew the red
+mushrooms grew there. Purely by accident he set his march toward the
+west, and walked cautiously on, his tribesfolk following him fearfully.
+
+Burl walked ahead, his spear held ready. He made a figure at once brave
+and pathetic, venturing forth in a world of monstrous ferocity and
+incredible malignance, armed only with a horny spear borrowed from a
+dead insect. His velvety cloak, made from a moth's wing, hung about his
+figure in graceful folds, however, and twin golden plumes nodded
+jauntily from his forehead.
+
+Behind him the nearly naked people followed reluctantly. Here a woman
+with a baby in her arms, there children of nine or ten, unable to resist
+the Instinct to play even in the presence of the manifold dangers of the
+march. They ate hungrily of the lumps of mushroom they had been ordered
+to carry. Then a long-legged boy, his eyes roving anxiously about in
+search of danger followed.
+
+Thirty thousand years of flight from every peril had deeply submerged
+the combative nature of humanity. After the boy came two men, one with a
+short spear, and the other with a club, each with a huge mass of edible
+mushroom under his free arm, and both badly frightened at the idea of
+fleeing from dangers they knew and feared to dangers they did not know
+and consequently feared much more.
+
+So was the caravan spread out. It made its way across the country with
+many deviations from a fixed line, and with many halts and pauses. Once
+a shrill stridulation filled all the air before them, a monster sound
+compounded of innumerable clickings and high-pitched cries.
+
+They came to the tip of an eminence and saw a great space of ground
+covered with tiny black bodies locked in combat. For quite half a mile
+in either direction the earth was black with ants, snapping and biting
+at each other, locked in vise-like embraces, each combatant couple
+trampled under the feet of the contending armies, with no thought of
+surrender or quarter.
+
+The sound of the clashing of fierce jaws upon horny armor, the cries of
+the maimed, and strange sounds made by the dying, and above all, the
+whining battle-cry of each of the fighting hordes, made a sustained
+uproar that was almost deafening.
+
+From either side of the battle-ground a pathway led back to separate
+ant-cities, a pathway marked by the hurrying groups of reinforcements
+rushing to the fight. Tiny as the ants were, for once no lumbering
+beetle swaggered insolently in their path, nor did the hunting-spiders
+mark them out for prey. Only little creatures smaller than the
+combatants themselves made use of the insect war for purposes of their
+own.
+
+These were little gray ants barely more than four inches long, who
+scurried about in and among the fighting creatures with marvelous
+dexterity, carrying off, piece-meal, the bodies of the dead, and slaying
+the wounded for the same fate.
+
+They hung about the edges of the battle, and invaded the abandoned areas
+when the tide of battle shifted, insect guerrillas, fighting for their
+own hands, careless of the origin of the quarrel, espousing no cause,
+simply salvaging the dead and living débris of the combat.
+
+Burl and his little group of followers had to make a wide detour to
+avoid the battle itself, and the passage between bodies of
+reinforcements hurrying to the scene of strife was a matter of some
+difficulty. The ants running rapidly toward the battle-field were hugely
+excited. Their antennæ waved wildly, and the infrequent wounded one,
+limping back toward the city, was instantly and repeatedly challenged by
+the advancing insects.
+
+They crossed their antennæ upon his, and required thorough evidence that
+he was of the proper city before allowing him to proceed. Once they
+arrived at the battle-field they flung themselves into the fray,
+becoming lost and indistinguishable in the tide of straining, fighting
+black bodies.
+
+Men in such a battle, without distinguishing marks or battle-cries,
+would have fought among themselves as often as against their foes, but
+the ants had a much simpler method of identification. Each ant-city
+possesses its individual odor--a variant on the scent of formic
+acid--and each individual of that city is recognized in his world quite
+simply and surely by the way he smells.
+
+The little tribe of human beings passed precariously behind a group of a
+hundred excited insect warriors, and before the following group of forty
+equally excited black insects. Burl hurried on with his following,
+putting many miles of perilous territory behind before nightfall. Many
+times during the day they saw the sudden billowing of a red-brown
+dust-cloud from the earth, and more than once they came upon the empty
+skin and drooping stalk of one of the red mushrooms, and more often
+still they came upon the mushrooms themselves, grown fat and taut,
+prepared to send their deadly spores into the air when the pressure from
+within became more than the leathery skin could stand.
+
+That night the tribe hid among the bases of giant puff-balls, which at a
+touch shot out a puff of white powder resembling smoke. The powder was
+precisely the same in nature as that cast out by the red mushrooms, but
+its effects were marvelously--and mercifully--different; it was
+innocuous.
+
+Burl slept soundly this night, having been two days and a night without
+rest, but the remainder of his tribe, and even Saya, were fearful and
+afraid, listening ceaselessly all through the dark hours for the
+menacing sounds of creatures coming to prey upon them.
+
+And so for a week the march kept on. Burl would not allow his tribe to
+stop to forage for food. The red mushrooms were all about. Once one of
+the little children was caught in a whirling eddy of red dust, and its
+mother rushed into the deadly stuff to seize it and bring it out. Then
+the tribe had to hide for three days while the two of them recovered
+from the debilitating poison.
+
+Once, too, they found a half-acre patch of the giant cabbages--there
+were six of them full grown, and a dozen or more smaller ones--and Burl
+took two men and speared two of the huge, twelve-foot slugs that fed
+upon the leaves. When the tribe passed on it was gorged on the fat meat
+of the slugs, and there was much soft fur, so that all the tribefolk
+wore loin-cloths of the yellow stuff.
+
+There were perils, too, in the journey. On the fourth day of the tribe's
+traveling, Burl froze suddenly into stillness. One of the hairy
+tarantulas--a trap-door spider with a black belly--had fallen upon a
+scarabæus beetle, and was devouring it only a hundred yards ahead.
+
+The tribefolk, trembling, went back for half a mile or more in
+panic-stricken silence, and refused to advance until he had led them a
+detour of two or three miles to one side of the dangerous spot.
+
+Long, fear-ridden marches through perilous countries unknown to them,
+through the golden aisles of yellow mushroom forests, over the flaking
+surfaces of plains covered with many-colored "rusts" and molds; pauses
+beside turbid pools whose waters were concealed by thick layers of green
+slime, and other evil-smelling ponds which foamed and bubbled slowly,
+which were covered with pasty yeasts that rose in strange forms of
+discolored foam.
+
+Fleeting glimpses they had of the glistening spokes of symmetrical
+spiders'-webs, whose least thread it would have been beyond the power of
+the strongest of the tribe to break. They passed through a forest of
+puff-balls, which boomed when touched and shot a puff of vapor from
+their open mouths.
+
+Once they saw a long and sinuous insect that fled before them and
+disappeared into a burrow in the ground, running with incredible speed
+upon legs of uncountable number. It was a centipede all of thirty feet
+in length, and when they crossed the path it had followed a horrible
+stench came to their nostrils so that they hurried on.
+
+Long escape from unguessed dangers brought boldness, of a sort, to the
+pink-skinned men, and they would have rested. They went to Burl with
+their complaint, and he simply pointed with his hands behind them. There
+were three little clouds of brownish vapor in the air, where they could
+see, along the road they had traversed. To the right of them a
+dust-cloud was just settling, and to the left another rose as they
+looked.
+
+A new trick of the deadly dust became apparent now. Toward the end of a
+day in which they had traveled a long distance, one of the little
+children ran a little to the left of the route its elders were
+following. The earth had taken on a brownish hue, and the child stirred
+up the surface mould with its feet.
+
+The brownish dust that had settled there was raised again, and the child
+ran, crying and choking, to its mother, its lungs burning as with fire,
+and its eyes like hot coals. Another day would pass before the child
+could walk.
+
+In a strange country, knowing nothing of the dangers that might assail
+the tribe while waiting for the child to recover, Burl looked about for
+a hiding-place. Far over to the right a low cliff, perhaps twenty or
+thirty feet high, showed sides of crumbling, yellow clay, and from where
+Burl stood he could see the dark openings of burrows scattered here and
+there upon its face.
+
+He watched for a time, to see if any bee or wasp inhabited them, knowing
+that many kinds of both insects dig burrows for their young, and do not
+occupy them themselves. No dark forms appeared, however, and he led his
+people toward the openings.
+
+The appearance of the holes confirmed his surmise. They had been dug
+months before by mining bees, and the entrances were "weathered" and
+worn. The tribefolk made their way into the three-foot tunnels, and hid
+themselves, seizing the opportunity to gorge themselves upon the food
+they carried.
+
+Burl stationed himself near the outer end of one of the little caves to
+watch for signs of danger. While waiting he poked curiously with his
+spear at a little pile of white and sticky parchment-like stuff he saw
+just within the mouth of the tunnel.
+
+Instantly movement became visible. Fifty, sixty, or a hundred tiny
+creatures, no more than half an inch in length, tumbled pell-mell from
+the dirty-white heap. Awkward legs, tiny, greenish-black bodies, and
+bristles protruding in every direction made them strange to look upon.
+
+They had tumbled from the whitish heap and now they made haste to hide
+themselves in it again, moving slowly and clumsily, with immense effort
+and laborious contortions of their bodies.
+
+Burl had never seen any insect progress in such a slow and ineffective
+fashion before. He drew one little insect back with the point of his
+spear and examined it from a safe distance. Tiny jaws before the head
+met like twin sickles, and the whole body was shaped like a rounded
+diamond lozenge.
+
+Burl knew that no insect of such small size could be dangerous, and
+leaned over, then took one creature in his hand. It wriggled frantically
+and slipped from his fingers, dropping upon the soft yellow
+caterpillar-fur he had about his middle. Instantly, as if it were a
+conjuring trick, the little insect vanished, and Burl searched for a
+matter of minutes before he found it hidden deep in the long, soft hairs
+of the fur, resting motionless, and evidently at ease.
+
+It was a bee-louse, the first larval form of a beetle whose horny armor
+could be seen in fragments for yards before the clayey cliff-side.
+Hidden in the openings of the bee's tunnel, it waited until the
+bee-grubs farther back in their separate cells should complete their
+changes of form and emerge into the open air, passing over the cluster
+of tiny creatures at the doorway. As the bees pass, the little bee-lice
+would clamber in eager haste up their hairy legs and come to rest in the
+fur about their thoraxes. Then, weeks later, when the bees in turn made
+other cells and stocked them with honey for the eggs they would lay, the
+tiny creatures would slip from their resting-places and be left behind
+in the fully provisioned cell, to eat not only the honey the bee had so
+laboriously acquired, but the very grub hatched from the bee's egg.
+
+Burl had no difficulty in detaching the small insect and casting it
+away, but in doing so discovered three more that had hidden themselves
+in his furry garment, no doubt thinking it the coat of their natural,
+though unwilling hosts. He plucked them away, and discovered more, and
+more. His garment was the hiding-place for dozens of the creatures.
+
+Disgusted and annoyed, he went out of the cavern and to a spot some
+distance away, where he took off his robe and pounded it with the flat
+side of his spear to dislodge the visitors. They dropped out one by
+one, reluctantly, and finally the garment was clean of them. Then Burl
+heard a shout from the direction of the mining-bee caves, and hastened
+toward the sound.
+
+It was then drawing toward the time of darkness, but one of the
+tribesmen had ventured out and found no less than three of the great
+imperial mushrooms. Of the three, one had been attacked by a parasitic
+purple mould, but the gorgeous yellow of the other two was undimmed, and
+the people were soon feasting upon the firm flesh.
+
+Burl felt a little pang of jealousy, though he joined in the consumption
+of the find as readily as the others, and presently drew a little to one
+side.
+
+He cast his eyes across the country, level and unbroken as far as the
+eye could see. The small clay cliff was the only inequality visible, and
+its height cut off all vision on one side. But the view toward the
+horizon was unobstructed on three sides, and here and there the black
+speck of a monster bee could be seen, droning homeward to its hive or
+burrow, and sometimes the slender form of a wasp passed overhead, its
+transparent wings invisible from the rapidity of their vibrations.
+
+These flew high in the air, but lower down, barely skimming the tops of
+the many-colored mushrooms and toadstools, fluttering lightly above the
+swollen fungoids, and touching their dainty proboscides to unspeakable
+things in default of the fragrant flowers that were normal food for
+their races--lower down flew the multitudes of butterflies the age of
+mushrooms had produced.
+
+White and yellow and red and brown, pink and blue and purple and green,
+every shade and every color, every size and almost every shape, they
+flitted gaily in the air. There were some so tiny that they would barely
+have shaded Burl's face, and some beneath whose slender bodies he could
+have hidden himself. They flew in a riot of colors and tints above a
+world of foul mushroom growths, and turgid, slime-covered ponds.
+
+Burl, temporarily out of the limelight because of the discovery of a
+store of food by another member of the tribe, bethought himself of an
+idea. Soon night would come on, the cloud-bank would turn red in the
+west, and then darkness would lean downward from the sky. With the
+coming of that time these creatures of the day would seek hiding-places,
+and the air would be given over to the furry moths that flew by night.
+He, Burl, would mark the spot where one of the larger creatures
+alighted, and would creep up upon it, with his spear held fast.
+
+His wide blue eyes brightened at the thought, and he sat himself down to
+watch. After a long time the soft, down-reaching fingers of the night
+touched the shaded aisles of the mushroom forests, and a gentle haze
+arose above the golden glades. One by one the gorgeous fliers of the
+daytime dipped down and furled their painted wings. The overhanging
+clouds became darker--finally black, and the slow, deliberate rainfall
+that lasted all through the night began. Burl rose and crept away into
+the darkness, his spear held in readiness.
+
+Through the black night, beneath deeper blacknesses which were the dark
+undersides of huge toadstools, creeping silently, with every sense
+alert for sign of danger or for hope of giant prey, Burl made his slow
+advance.
+
+A glorious butterfly of purple and yellow markings, whose wings spread
+out for three yards on either side of its delicately formed body, had
+hidden itself barely two hundred yards away. Burl could imagine it, now,
+preening its slender limbs and combing from its long and slender
+proboscis any trace of the delectable foodstuffs on which it had fed
+during the day. Burl moved slowly and cautiously forward, all eyes and
+ears.
+
+He heard an indescribable sound in a thicket a little to his left, and
+shifted his course. The sound was the faint whistling of air through the
+breathing-holes along an insect's abdomen. Then came the delicate
+rustling of filmy wings being stretched and closed again, and the
+movement of sharply barbed feet upon the soft earth. Burl moved in
+breathless silence, holding his spear before him in readiness to plunge
+it into the gigantic butterfly's soft body.
+
+The mushrooms here were grown thickly together, so there was no room for
+Burl's body to pass between their stalks, and the rounded heads were
+deformed and misshapen from their crowdings. Burl spent precious moments
+in trying to force a silent passage, but had to own himself beaten. Then
+he clambered up upon the spongy mass of mushroom heads, trusting to luck
+that they would sustain his weight.
+
+The blackness was intense, so that even the forms of objects before him
+were lost in obscurity. He moved forward for some ten yards, however,
+walking gingerly over his precarious foothold. Then he felt rather than
+saw the opening before him. A body moved below him.
+
+Burl raised his spear, and with a yell plunged down on the back of the
+moving thing, thrusting his spear with all the force he could command.
+He landed on a shifting form, but his yell of triumph turned to a scream
+of terror.
+
+This was not the yielding body of a slender butterfly that he had come
+upon, nor had his spear penetrated the creature's soft flesh. He had
+fallen upon the shining back of one of the huge, meat-eating beetles,
+and his spear had slid across the horny armor, and then stuck fast,
+having pierced only the leathery tissue between the insect's head and
+thorax.
+
+Burl's terror was pitiable at the realization, but as nothing to the
+ultimate panic which possessed him when the creature beneath him uttered
+a grunt of fright and pain, and, spreading its stiff wing-cases wide,
+shot upward in a crazy, panic-stricken, rocket-like flight toward the
+sky.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+The Sexton-Beetles
+
+
+Burl fell headforemost upon the spongy top of a huge toadstool that
+split with the impact and let him through to the ground beneath,
+powdering him with its fine spores. He came to rest with his naked
+shoulder half-way through the yielding flesh of a mushroom-stalk, and
+lay there for a second, catching his breath to scream again.
+
+Then he heard the whining buzz of his attempted prey. There was
+something wrong with the beetle. Burl's spear had struck it in an
+awkward spot, and it was rocketing upward in erratic flight that ended
+in a crash two or three hundreds yards away.
+
+Burl sprang up in an instant. Perhaps, despite his mistake, he had slain
+this infinitely more worthy victim. He rushed toward the spot where it
+had fallen.
+
+His wide blue eyes pierced the darkness well enough to enable him to
+sheer off from masses of toadstools, but he could distinguish no
+details--nothing but forms. He heard the beetle floundering upon the
+ground; then heard it mount again into the air, more clumsily than
+before.
+
+Its wing-beats no longer kept up a sustained note. They thrashed the air
+irregularly and wildly. The flight was zigzag and uncertain, and though
+longer than the first had been, it ended similarly, in a heavy fall.
+Another period of floundering, and the beetle took to the air again just
+before Burl arrived at the spot.
+
+It was obviously seriously hurt, and Burl forgot the dangers of the
+night in his absorption in the chase. He darted after his prey,
+fleet-footed and agile, taking chances that in cold blood he would never
+have thought of.
+
+Twice, in the pain-racked struggles of the monster beetle, he arrived at
+the spot where the gigantic insect flung itself about madly, insanely,
+fighting it knew not what, striking out with colossal wings and legs,
+dazed and drunk with agony. And each time it managed to get aloft in
+flight that was weaker and more purposeless.
+
+Crazy, fleeing from the torturing spear that pierced its very vitals,
+the beetle blundered here and there, floundering among the mushroom
+thickets in spasms that were constantly more prolonged and more
+agonized, but nevertheless flying heavily, lurching drunkenly, managing
+to graze the tops of the toadstools in one more despairing, tormented
+flight.
+
+And Burl followed, aflame with the fire of the chase, arriving at the
+scene of each successive, panic-stricken struggle on the ground just
+after the beetle had taken flight again, but constantly more closely on
+the heels of the weakening monster.
+
+At last he came up panting, and found the giant lying upon the earth,
+moving feebly, apparently unable to rise. How far he was from the tribe,
+Burl did not know, nor did the question occur to him at the moment. He
+waited for the beetle to be still, trembling with excitement and
+eagerness. The struggles of the huge form grew more feeble, and at last
+ceased. Burl moved forward and grasped his spear. He wrenched at it to
+thrust again.
+
+In an instant the beetle had roused itself, and was exerting its last
+atom of strength, galvanized into action by the agony caused by Burl's
+seizure of the spear. A great wing-cover knocked Burl twenty feet, and
+flung him against the base of a mushroom, where he lay, half stunned.
+But then a strangely pungent scent came to his nostrils--the scent of
+the red mushrooms!
+
+He staggered to his feet and fled, while behind him the gigantic beetle
+crashed and floundered--Burl heard a tearing and ripping sound. The
+insect had torn the covering of one of the red mushrooms, tightly packed
+with the fatal red dust. At the noise, Burl's speed was doubled, but he
+could still hear the frantic struggles of the dying beetle grow to a
+very crescendo of desperation.
+
+The creature broke free and managed to rise in a final flight, fighting
+for breath and life, weakened and tortured by the spear and the horrible
+spores of the red mushrooms. Then it crashed suddenly to the earth and
+was still. The red dust had killed it.
+
+In time to come, Burl might learn to use the red dust as poison gas had
+been used by his ancestors of thirty thousand years before, but now he
+was frightened and alone, lost from his tribe, and with no faintest
+notion of how to find them. He crouched beneath a huge toadstool and
+waited for dawn, listening with terrified apprehension for the ripping
+sound that would mean the bursting of another of the red mushrooms.
+
+Only the wing beats of night-flying creatures came to his ears, however,
+and the discordant noises of the four-foot truffle-beetles as they
+roamed the aisles of the mushroom forests, seeking the places beneath
+which their instinct told them fungoid dainties awaited the courageous
+miner. The eternal dripping of the raindrops falling at long intervals
+from the overhanging clouds formed a soft obbligato to the whole.
+
+Burl listened, knowing there were red toadstools all about, but not once
+during the whole of the long, dark hours did the rending noise tell of a
+bursting fungus casting loose its freight of deadly dust upon the air.
+Only when day came again, and the chill dampness of the night was
+succeeded by the steaming humidity of the morning, did a tall pyramid of
+brownish-red stuff leap suddenly into the air from a ripped mushroom
+covering.
+
+Then Burl stood up and looked around. Here and there, all over the whole
+countryside, slowly and at intervals, the cones of fatal red sprang into
+the air. Had Burl lived thirty thousand years earlier, he might have
+likened the effect to that of shells bursting from a leisurely
+bombardment, but as it was he saw in them only fresh and inexorable
+dangers added to an already peril-ridden existence.
+
+A hundred yards from where he had hidden during the night the body of
+his victim lay, crumpled up and limp. Burl approached speculatively. He
+had come even before the ants appeared to take their toll of the
+carcass, and not even a buzzing flesh-fly had placed its maggots on the
+unresisting form.
+
+The long, whiplike antennæ lay upon the carpet of mold and rust, and the
+fiercely toothed legs were drawn close against the body. The
+many-faceted eyes stared unseeingly, and the stiff and horny wing-cases
+were rent and torn.
+
+When Burl went to the other side of the dead beetle he saw something
+that filled him with elation. His spear had been held between his body
+and the beetle's during that mad flight, and at the final crash, when
+Burl shot away from the fear-crazed insect, the weight of his body had
+forced the spearpoint between the joints of the corselet and the neck.
+Even if the red dust had not finished the creature, the spear wound in
+time would have ended its life.
+
+Burl was thrilled once more by his superlative greatness, and
+conveniently forgot that it was the red dust that had actually
+administered the _coup de grâce_. It was so much more pleasant to look
+upon himself as the mighty slayer that he hacked off one of the
+barb-edged limbs to carry back to his tribe in evidence of his feat. He
+took the long antennæ, too, as further proof.
+
+Then he remembered that he did not know where his tribe was to be found.
+He had no faintest idea of the direction in which the beetle had flown.
+As a matter of fact, the course of the beetle had been in turn directed
+toward every point of the compass, and there was no possible way of
+telling the relation of its final landing-place to the point from which
+it had started.
+
+Burl wrestled with his problem for an hour, and then gave up in disgust.
+He set off at random, with the leg of the huge insect flung over his
+shoulder and the long antennæ clasped in his hand with his spear. He
+turned to look at his victim of the night before just before plunging
+into the near-by mushroom forest, and saw that it was already the center
+of a mass of tiny black bodies, pulling and hacking at the tough armor,
+and carving out great lumps of the succulent flesh to be carried to the
+near-by ant city.
+
+In the teeming life of the insect world death is an opportunity for the
+survivors. There is a strangely tense and fearful competition for the
+bodies of the slain. There had been barely an hour of daylight in which
+the ants might seek for provender, yet in that little time the freshly
+killed beetle had been found and was being skilfully and carefully
+exploited. When the body of one of the larger insects fell to the
+ground, there was a mighty rush, a fierce race, among all the tribes of
+scavengers to see who should be first.
+
+Usually the ants had come upon the scene and were inquisitively
+exploring the carcass long before even the flesh-flies had arrived, who
+dropped their living maggots upon the creature. The blue-bottles came
+still later, to daub their masses of white eggs about the delicate
+membranes of the eye.
+
+And while all the preceding scavengers were at work, furtive beetles and
+tiny insects burrowed below the reeking body to attack the highly
+scented flesh from a fresh angle.
+
+Each working independently of the others, they commonly appeared in the
+order of the delicacy of the sense which could lead them to a source of
+food, though accident could and sometimes did afford one group of
+workers in putrescence an advantage over the others.
+
+Thus, sometimes a blue-bottle anticipated even the eager ants, and again
+the very flesh-flies dropped their squirming offspring upon a limp form
+that was already being undermined by white-bellied things working in the
+darkness below the body.
+
+Burl grimaced at the busy ants and buzzing flies, and disappeared into
+the mushroom forest. Here for a long time he moved cautiously and
+silently through the aisles of tangled stalks and the spongy, round
+heads of the fungoids. Now and then he saw one of the red toadstools,
+and made a wide detour around it. Twice they burst within his sight,
+circumscribed as his vision was by the toadstools among which he was
+traveling.
+
+Each time he ran hastily to put as much distance as possible between
+himself and the deadly red dust. He traveled for an hour or more,
+looking constantly for familiar landmarks that might guide him to his
+tribe. He knew that if he came upon any place he had seen while with his
+tribe he could follow the path they had traveled and in time rejoin
+them.
+
+For many hours he went on, alert for signs of danger. He was quite
+ignorant of the fact that there were such things as points of the
+compass, and though he had a distinct notion that he was not moving in a
+straight line, he did not realize that he was actually moving in a
+colossal half-circle. After walking steadily for nearly four hours he
+was no more than three miles in a direct line from his starting-point.
+As it happened, his uncertainty of direction was fortunate.
+
+The night before the tribe had been feeding happily upon one of the
+immense edible mushrooms, when they heard Burl's abruptly changing cry.
+It had begun as a shout of triumph, and ended as a scream of fear. Then
+they heard hurried wing-beats as a creature rose into the air in a
+scurry of desperation. The throbbing of huge wings ended in a heavy
+fall, followed by another flight.
+
+Velvety darkness masked the sky, and the tribesmen could only stare off
+into the blackness, where their leader had vanished, and begin to
+tremble, wondering what they should do in a strange country with no bold
+chief to guide them.
+
+He was the first man to whom the tribe had ever offered allegiance, but
+their submission had been all the more complete for that fact, and his
+loss was the more appalling.
+
+Burl had mistaken their lack of timidity. He had thought it
+independence, and indifference to him. As a matter of fact, it was
+security because the tribe felt safe under his tutelage. Now that he had
+vanished, and in a fashion that seemed to mean his death, their old
+fears returned to them reenforced by the strangeness of their
+surroundings.
+
+They huddled together and whispered their fright to one another,
+listening the while in panic-stricken apprehension for signs of danger.
+The tribesmen visualized Burl caught in fiercely toothed limbs, being
+rent and torn in mid air by horny, insatiable jaws, his blood falling in
+great spurts toward the earth below. They caught a faint, reedy cry, and
+shuddered, pressing closer together.
+
+And so through the long night they waited in trembling silence. Had a
+hunting spider appeared among them they would not have lifted a hand to
+defend themselves, but would have fled despairingly, would probably have
+scattered and lost touch with one another, and spent the remainder of
+their lives as solitary fugitives, snatching fear-ridden rest in strange
+hiding-places.
+
+But day came again, and they looked into each other's eyes, reading in
+each the selfsame panic and fear. Saya was probably the most pitiful of
+all the group. Burl was to have been her mate, and her face was white
+and drawn beyond that of any of the rest of the tribefolk.
+
+With the day, they did not move, but remained clustered about the huge
+mushroom on which they had been feeding the night before. They spoke in
+hushed and fearful tones, huddled together, searching all the horizon
+for insect enemies. Saya would not eat, but sat still, staring before
+her in unseeing indifference. Burl was dead.
+
+A hundred yards from where they crouched a red mushroom glistened in the
+pale light of the new day. Its tough skin was taut and bulging,
+resisting the pressure of the spores within. But slowly, as the morning
+wore on, some of the moisture that had kept the skin soft and flaccid
+during the night evaporated.
+
+The skin had a strong tendency to contract, like green leather when
+drying. The spores within it strove to expand. The opposing forces
+produced a tension that grew greater and greater as more and more of the
+moisture was absorbed by the air. At last the skin could hold no longer.
+
+With a ripping sound that could be heard for hundreds of feet, the tough
+wrapping split and tore across its top, and with a hollow, booming noise
+the compressed mass of deadly spores rushed into the air, making a
+pyramidal cloud of brown-red dust some sixty feet in height.
+
+The tribesmen quivered at the noise and faced the dust cloud for a
+fleeting instant, then ran pell-mell to escape the slowly moving tide of
+death as the almost imperceptible breeze wafted it slowly toward them.
+Men and women, boys and girls, they fled in a mad rush from the deadly
+stuff, not pausing to see that even as it advanced it settled slowly to
+the ground, nor stopping to observe its path that they might step aside
+and let it go safely by.
+
+Saya fled with the rest, but without their extreme panic. She fled
+because the others had done so, and ran more carelessly, struggling with
+a half-formed idea that it did not particularly matter whether she were
+caught or not.
+
+She fell slightly behind the others, without being noticed. Then quite
+abruptly a stone turned under her foot, and she fell headlong, striking
+her head violently against a second stone. Then she lay quite still
+while the red cloud billowed slowly toward her, drifting gently in the
+faint, hardly perceptible breeze.
+
+It drew nearer and nearer, settling slowly, but still a huge and
+menacing mass of deadly dust. It gradually flattened out, too, so that
+though it had been a rounded cone at first, it flowed over the minor
+inequalities of the ground as a huge and tenuous leech might have
+crawled, sucking from all breathing creatures the life they had within
+them.
+
+A hundred and fifty yards away, a hundred yards away, then only fifty
+yards away. From where Saya lay unconscious on the earth, eddies within
+the moving mass could be seen, and the edges took on a striated
+appearance, telling of the curling of the dust wreaths in the larger
+mass of deadly powder.
+
+The deliberate advance kept on, seeming almost purposeful. It would have
+seemed possible to draw from the unhurried, menacing movement of the
+poisonous stuff that some malign intelligence was concealed in it, that
+it was, in fact, a living creature. But when the misty edges of the
+cloud were no more than twenty-five yards from Saya's prostrate body a
+breeze from one side sprang up--a vagrant, fitful little breeze, that
+first halted the red cloud and threw it into confusion and then drove it
+to one side, so that it passed Saya without harming her, though a single
+trailing wisp of dark-red mist floated very close to her.
+
+Then for a time Saya lay still indeed, only her breast rising and
+falling gently with faint and irregular breaths. Her head had struck a
+sharp-edged stone in her fall, and a tiny pool of sticky red had
+gathered from the wound.
+
+Perhaps thirty feet from where she lay, three small toadstools grew in a
+little clump, their bases so close together that they seemed but one.
+From between two of them, however, just where they parted, twin tufts of
+reddish threads appeared, twinkling back and forth, and in and out. As
+if they had given some reassuring sign, two slender antennæ followed,
+then bulging eyes, and then a small black body which had bright-red
+scalloped markings upon the wing-cases.
+
+It was a tiny beetle no more than eight inches long--a burying-beetle.
+It drew near Saya's body and clambered upon her, explored the ground by
+her side, moving all the time in feverish haste, and at last dived into
+the ground beneath her shoulder, casting back a little shower of hastily
+dug earth as it disappeared.
+
+Ten minutes later another similar insect appeared, and upon the heels of
+the second a third. Each of them made the same hasty examination, and
+each dived under the still form. Presently the earth seemed to billow at
+a spot along Saya's side, then at another. Perhaps ten minutes after the
+arrival of the third beetle a little rampart had reared itself all about
+Saya's body, precisely following the outline of her form. Then her body
+moved slightly, in a number of tiny jerks, and seemed to settle perhaps
+half an inch into the ground.
+
+The burying beetles were of those who exploited the bodies of the
+fallen. Working from below, they excavated the earth from the under side
+of such prizes as they came upon, then turned upon their backs and
+thrust with their legs, jerking the body so it sank into the shallow
+excavation they had prepared.
+
+The process would be repeated until at last the whole of the gift of
+fortune had sunk below the surrounding surface and the loosened earth
+fell in upon the top, thus completing the inhumation.
+
+Then in the darkness the beetles would feast and rear their young,
+gorging upon the plentiful supply of succulent foodstuff they had hidden
+from jealous fellow scavengers above them.
+
+But Saya was alive. Thirty thousand years before, when scientists
+examined into the habits of the burying-beetles, or the sexton-beetles,
+they had declared that fresh meat or living meat would not be touched.
+They based their statement solely upon the fact that the insects (then
+tiny creatures indeed) did not appear until the trap-meat placed by the
+investigators had remained untouched for days.
+
+Conditions had changed in thirty thousand years. The ever-present ants
+and the sharp-eyed flies were keen rivals of the brightly arrayed
+beetles. Usually the tribes of creatures who worked in the darkness
+below ground came after the ants had taken their toll, and the flies
+sipped daintily.
+
+When Saya fell unconscious upon the ground, however, it was the one
+accident that caused the burying-beetle to find her first, before the
+ants had come to tear the flesh from her slender, soft-skinned body. She
+breathed gently and irregularly, her face drawn with the sorrow of the
+night before, while desperately hurrying beetles swarmed beneath her
+body, channeling away the earth so that she would sink lower and lower
+into the ground.
+
+An inch, and a long wait. Then she sank slowly a second inch. The
+bright-red tufts of thread appeared again, and a beetle made his way to
+the open air. He moved hastily about, inspecting the progress of the
+work. He dived below again. Another inch, and after a long time another
+inch was excavated.
+
+Burl stepped out from a group of over-shadowing toadstools and halted.
+He cast his eyes over the landscape, and was struck by its familiarity.
+It was, in point of fact, very near the spot he had left the night
+before, in pursuit of a colossal wounded beetle.
+
+Burl moved back and forth, trying to account for the sensation of
+recognition, and then trying to approximate the place from which he had
+last seen it.
+
+He passed within fifty feet of the spot where Saya lay, now half buried
+in the ground. The loose earth cast up about her body had begun to fall
+in little rivulets upon her. One of her shoulders was already screened
+from view.
+
+Burl passed on, unseeing. He was puzzling over the direction from which
+he had seen the particular section of countryside before him. Perhaps a
+little farther on he would come to the place. He hurried a little. In a
+moment he recognized his location. There was the great edible mushroom,
+half broken away, from which the tribe had been feeding. There were the
+mining bee burrows.
+
+His feet stirred up a fine dust, and he stopped short. A red mushroom
+had covered the earth with a thin layer of its impalpable, deadly
+powder. Burl understood why the tribe had gone, and a cold sweat came
+upon his body. Was Saya safe, or had the whole tribe succumbed to the
+poisonous stuff? Had they all, men and women and children, died in
+convulsions of gasping strangulation?
+
+He hurried to retrace his footsteps. There was a fragment of mushrooms
+on the ground. Here was a spear, cast away by one of the tribesmen in
+his flight. Burl broke into a run.
+
+The little excavation into which Saya was sinking, inch by inch, was all
+of twenty-five feet to the right of the path. Burl dashed on, frantic
+with anxiety about the tribe, but most of all about Saya. Saya's body
+quivered and sank a fraction more into the earth.
+
+Half a dozen little rivulets of dirt were tumbling upon her body now. In
+a matter of minutes she would be hidden from view. Burl ran madly past
+her, too busy searching the mushroom thickets before him with his eyes
+to dream of looking upon the ground.
+
+Twenty yards from a huge toadstool thicket a noise arrested him sharply.
+There was a crashing and breaking of the brittle, spongy growths. Twin
+tapering antennæ appeared, and then a monster beetle lurched into the
+open space, its horrible, gaping jaws stretched wide.
+
+It was all of eight feet long, and its body was held up from the ground
+by six crooked, saw-toothed limbs. Its huge multiple eyes stared with
+machinelike preoccupation at the world.
+
+It advanced deliberately, with a clanking and clashing as of a hideous
+machine. Burl fled on the instant, running as madly away from the beetle
+as he had a moment before been running toward it.
+
+A little depression in the earth was before him. He did not swerve, but
+made to leap it. As he shot over it, however, the glint of pink skin
+caught his eye, and there was impressed upon his brain with photographic
+completeness the picture of Saya, lying limp and helpless, sinking
+slowly into the ground, with tiny rills of earth falling down the sides
+of the excavation upon her. It seemed to Burl's eye that she quivered
+slightly as he saw.
+
+There was a terrific struggle within Burl. Behind him the colossal
+meat-eating beetle. Beneath him Saya, whom he loved. There was certain
+death lurching toward him on evilly glittering legs, and there was life
+for his race and tribe lying in the shallow pit.
+
+He turned, aware with a sudden reckless glow that he was throwing away
+his life, aware that he was deliberately giving himself over to death,
+and stood on the side of the little pit nearest the great beetle, his
+puny spear held defiantly at the ready. In his left hand he held just
+such a leg as those which bore the living creature toward him. He had
+torn it from the body of just such a monster but a few hours ago, a
+monster in whose death he had had a share. With a yell of insane
+defiance, he flung the fiercely toothed limb at his advancing opponent.
+
+The sharp teeth cut into the base of one of the beetle's antennæ, and it
+ducked clumsily, then seized the missile in its fierce jaws and crushed
+it in frenzy of rage. There was meat within it, sweet and juicy meat
+that pleased the beetle's palate.
+
+It forgot the man, standing there, waiting for death. It crunched the
+missile that had attacked it, eating the palatable contents of the horny
+armor, confusing the blow with the object that had delivered it, and
+evidently satisfied that an enemy had been conquered and was being
+devoured. A moment later it turned and lumbered off to investigate
+another mushroom thicket.
+
+And Burl turned quickly and dragged Saya's limp form from the grave that
+had been prepared for it by the busy insect scavengers. Earth fell from
+her shoulders, from her hair, and from the mass of yellow fur about her
+middle, and three little beetles with black and red markings scurried in
+terrified haste for cover, while Burl bore Saya to a resting-place of
+soft mold.
+
+Burl was an ignorant savage, and to him Saya's deathlike unconsciousness
+was like death itself, but dumb misery smote him, and he laid her down
+gently, while tears came to his eyes and he called her name again and
+again in an agony of grief.
+
+For an hour he sat there beside her, a man so lately pleased with
+himself above all creatures for having slain one huge beetle and put
+another to flight, as he would have looked upon it, now a
+broken-hearted, little pink-skinned man, weeping like a child, hunched
+up and bowed over with sorrow.
+
+Then Saya slowly opened her eyes and stirred weakly.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+The Forest of Death
+
+
+They were oblivious to everything but each other, Saya resting in still
+half-incredulous happiness against Burl's shoulder while he told her in
+little, jerky sentences of his pursuit of the colossal flying beetle, of
+his search for the tribe, and then his discovery of her apparently
+lifeless body.
+
+When he spoke of the monster that had lurched from the mushroom thicket,
+and of the desperation with which he had faced it, Saya pressed close
+and looked at him with wondering and wonderful eyes. She could
+understand his willingness to die, believing her dead. A little while
+before she had felt the same indifference to life.
+
+A timid, frightened whisper roused them from their absorption, and they
+looked up. One of the tribesmen stood upon one foot some distance away,
+staring at them, almost convinced that he looked upon the living dead. A
+sudden movement on the part of either of them would have sent him in a
+panic back into the mushroom forest. Two or three blond heads bobbed and
+vanished among the tangled stalks. Wide and astonished eyes gazed at the
+two they had believed the prey of malignant creatures.
+
+The tribe had come slowly back to the mushroom they had been eating,
+leaderless, and convinced that Saya had fallen a victim to the deadly
+dust. Instead, they found her sitting by the side of their chief,
+apparently restored to them in some miraculous fashion.
+
+Burl spoke, and the pink-skinned people came timorously from their
+hiding-places. They approached warily and formed a half-circle before
+the seated pair. Burl spoke again, and presently one of the bravest
+dared approach and touch him. Instantly a babble of the crude and labial
+language spoken by the tribe broke out. Awed questions and exclamations
+of thankfulness, then curious interrogations filled the air.
+
+Burl, for once, showed some common sense. Instead of telling them in his
+usual vainglorious fashion of the adventures he had undergone, he merely
+cast down the two long and tapering antennæ from the flying beetle that
+he had torn from its dead body. They looked at them, and recognized
+their origin. Amazement and admiration showed upon their faces. Then
+Burl rose and abruptly ordered two of the men to make a chair of their
+hands for Saya. She was weak from the effects of the blow she had
+received. The two men humbly advanced and did as they were bid.
+
+Then the march was taken up again, more slowly than before, because of
+Saya as a burden, but none the less steadily. Burl led his people across
+the country, marching in advance and with every nerve alert for signs of
+danger, but with more confidence and less timidity than he had ever
+displayed before.
+
+All that noontime and that afternoon they filed steadily along, the
+tribesfolk keeping in a compact group close behind Burl. The man who had
+thrown away his spear had recovered it on an order from Burl, and the
+little party fairly bristled with weapons, though Burl knew well that
+they were liable to be cast away as impediments if flight should be
+necessary.
+
+He was determined that his people should learn to fight the great
+creatures about them, instead of depending upon their legs for escape.
+He had led them in an attack upon great slugs, but they were defenseless
+creatures, incapable of more dangerous maneuvers than spasmodic jerkings
+of their great bodies.
+
+The next time danger should threaten them, and especially if it came
+while their new awe of him held good, he was resolved to force them to
+join him in fighting it.
+
+He had not long to wait for an opportunity to strengthen the spirit of
+his followers by a successful battle. The clouds toward the west were
+taking on a dull-red hue, which was the nearest to a sunset that was
+ever seen in the world of Burl's experience, when a bumble bee droned
+heavily over their heads, making for its hive.
+
+The little group of people on the ground looked up and saw a scanty load
+of pollen packed in the stiff bristles of the insect's hind legs. The
+bees of the world had a hard time securing food upon the nearly
+flowerless planet, but this one had evidently made a find. Its crop was
+nearly filled with hard-gathered, viscous honey destined for the hival
+store.
+
+It sped onward, heavily, its almost transparent wings mere blurs in the
+air from the rapidity of their vibration. Burl saw its many-faceted eyes
+staring before it in worried preoccupation as it soared in laborious
+speed over his head, some fifty feet up.
+
+He dropped his glance, and then his eyes lighted with excitement. A
+slender-bodied wasp was shooting upward from an ambush it had found in a
+thicket of toadstools. It darted swiftly and gracefully upon the bee,
+which swerved and tried to flee. The droning buzz of the bee's wings
+rose to a higher note as it strove to increase its speed. The more
+delicately formed wasp headed the clumsier insect back.
+
+The bee turned again and fled in terror. Each of the insects was
+slightly more than four feet in length, but the bee was much the
+heavier, and it could not attain the speed of which the wasp was
+capable.
+
+The graceful form of the hunting insect rapidly overhauled its fleeing
+prey, and the wasp dashed in and closed with the bee at a point almost
+over the heads of the tribesmen. In a clawing, biting tangle of
+thrashing, transparent wings and black bodies, the two creatures tumbled
+to the earth. They fell perhaps thirty yards from where Burl stood
+watching.
+
+Over and over the two insects rolled, now one uppermost, and then the
+other. The bee was struggling desperately to insert her sting in the
+more supple body of her adversary. She writhed and twisted, fighting
+with jaw and mandible, wing and claw.
+
+The wasp was uppermost, and the bee lay on her back, fighting in
+panic-stricken desperation. The wasp saw an opening, her jaws darted in,
+and there was an instant of confusion. Then suddenly the bee, dazed, was
+upright with the wasp upon her. A movement too quick for the eye to
+follow--and the bee collapsed. The wasp had bitten her in the neck where
+all the nerve-cords passed, and the bee was dead.
+
+Burl waited a moment more, aflame with excitement. He knew, as did all
+the tribefolk, what might happen next. When he saw the second act of the
+tragedy well begun, Burl snapped quick and harsh orders to his
+spear-armed men, and they followed him in a wavering line, their weapons
+tightly clutched.
+
+Knowing the habits of the insects as they were forced to know them, they
+knew that the venture was one of the least dangerous they could
+undertake with fighting creatures the size of the wasp, but the idea of
+attacking the great creatures whose sharp stings could annihilate any of
+them with a touch, the mere thought of taking the initiative was
+appalling. Had their awe of Burl been less complete they would not have
+dreamed of following him.
+
+The second act of the tragedy had begun. The bee had been slain by the
+wasp, a carnivorous insect normally, but the wasp knew that sweet honey
+was concealed in the half-filled crop of the bee. Had the bee arrived
+safely at the hive, the sweet and sticky liquid would have been
+disgorged and added to the hival store. Now, though the bee's journey
+was ended and its flesh was to be crunched and devoured by the wasp, the
+honey was the first object of the pirate's solicitude.[1] The dead
+insect was rolled over upon its back, and with eager haste the slayer
+began to exploit the body.
+
+[Footnote 1: The pirate is the _Philanthus Apivorus_.]
+
+Burl and his men were creeping nearer, but with a gesture Burl bade them
+halt for a moment. The wasp's first move was to force the disgorgement
+of the honey from the bee's crop, and with feverish eagerness it pressed
+upon the limp body until the shining, sticky liquid appeared. Then the
+wasp began in ghoulish ecstasy to lick up the sweet stuff, utterly
+absorbed in the feast.
+
+Many thousands of years before, the absorption of the then tiny insect
+had been noticed when engaged in a similar feat, and it was recorded in
+books moldered into dust long ages before Burl's birth that its rapture
+was so great that it had been known to fall a victim to a second bandit
+while engaged in the horrible banquet.
+
+Burl had never read the books, but he had been told that the pirate
+would continue its feast even though seized by a greater enemy, unable
+to tear itself from the nectar gathered by the creature it had slain.
+
+The tribesmen waited until the wasp had begun its orgy, licking up the
+toothsome stuff disgorged by its dead prey. It ate in gluttonous haste,
+blind to all sights, deaf to all sounds, able to think of nothing,
+conceive of nothing, but the delights of the liquid it was devouring.
+
+At a signal the tribesmen darted forward. They wavered when near the
+slender-waisted gourmet, however, and Burl was the first to thrust his
+spear with all his strength into the thinly armored body.
+
+Then the others took courage. A short, horny spear penetrated the very
+vitals of the wasp. A club fell with terrific impact upon the slender
+waist. There was a crackling, and the long, spidery limbs quivered and
+writhed, while the tribesmen fell back in fear, but without cause.
+
+Burl struck again, and the wasp fell into two writhing halves, helpless
+for harm. The pink-skinned men danced in triumph, and the women and
+children ventured near, delighted.
+
+Only Burl noticed that even as the wasp was dying, sundered and pierced
+with spears, its slender tongue licked out in one last, ecstatic taste
+of the nectar that had been its undoing.
+
+Burdened with the pollen-covered legs of the giant bee, and filled with
+the meat from choice portions of the wasp's muscular limbs, the tribe
+resumed its journey. This time Burl had men behind him, still timid,
+still prone to flee at the slightest alarm, but infinitely more
+dependable than they had been before.
+
+They had attacked and slain a wasp whose sting would have killed any of
+them. They had done battle under the leadership of Burl, whose spear had
+struck the first blow. Henceforth they were sharers, in a mild way, of
+his transcendent glory, and henceforth they were more like followers of
+a mighty chief and less like spineless worshipers of a demigod whose
+feats they were too timid to emulate.
+
+That night they hid among a group of giant puff-balls, feasting on the
+loads of meat they had carried thus far with them. Burl watched them now
+without jealousy of their good spirits. He and Saya sat a little apart,
+happy to be near each other, speaking in low tones. After a time
+darkness fell, and the tribefolk became shapeless bodies speaking in
+voices that grew drowsy and were silent. The black forms of the
+toadstool heads and huge puff-balls were but darker against a dark sky.
+
+The nightly rain began to fall, drop by drop, drop by drop, upon the
+damp and humid earth. Only Burl remained awake for a little while, and
+his last waking thought was of pride, disinterested pride. He had the
+first reward of the ruler, gratification in the greatness of his people.
+
+The red mushrooms had continued to show their glistening heads, though
+Burl thought they were less numerous than in the territory from which
+the tribe had fled. All along the route, now to the right, now to the
+left, they had burst and sent their masses of deadly dust into the air.
+
+Many times the tribefolk had been forced to make a detour to avoid a
+slowly spreading cloud of death-dealing spores. Once or twice their
+escapes had been narrow indeed, but so far there had been no deaths.
+
+Burl had observed that the mushrooms normally burst only in the daytime,
+and for a while had thought of causing his followers to do their
+journeying in the night. Only the obvious disadvantages of such a
+course--the difficulty of discovering food, and the prowling spiders
+that roamed in the darkness--had prevented him. The idea still stayed
+with him, however, and two days after the fight with the hunting wasp he
+put it in practise.
+
+The tribe came to the top of a small rise in the ground. For an hour
+they had been marching and counter-marching to avoid the suddenly
+appearing clouds of dust. Once they had been nearly hemmed in, and only
+by mad sprinting did they escape when three of the dull-red clouds
+seemed to flow together, closing three sides of a circle.
+
+They came to the little hillock and halted. Before them stretched a
+plain all of four miles wide, colored a brownish brick-red by masses of
+mushrooms. They had seen mushroom forests before, and knew of the
+dangers they presented, but there was none so deadly as the plain before
+them. To right and left it stretched as far as the eye could see, but
+far away on its farther edge Burl caught a glimpse of flowing water.
+
+Over the plain itself a dull-red haze seemed to float. It was nothing
+more or less than a cloud of the deadly spores, dispersed and
+indefinite, constantly replenished by the freshly bursting red
+mushrooms.
+
+While the people stood and watched a dozen thick columns of dust rose
+into the air from scattered points here and there upon the plain,
+settling slowly again, but leaving behind them enough of their finely
+divided substance to keep the thin red haze over the whole plain in its
+original, deadly state.
+
+Burl had seen single red mushrooms before, and even small thickets of
+two and three, but here was a plain of millions, literally millions upon
+millions of the malignant growths. Here was one fungoid forest through
+whose aisles no monster beetles stalked, and above whose shadowed depths
+no brightly colored butterflies fluttered in joyous abandon. There were
+no loud-voiced crickets singing in its hiding-places, nor bodies of
+eagerly foraging ants searching inquisitively for bits of food. It was a
+forest of death, still and silent, quiet and motionless save for the
+sullen columns of red dust that ever and again shot upward from the torn
+and ragged envelope of the bursting mushroom.
+
+Burl and his people watched in wonderment and dismay, but presently a
+high resolve came to Burl. The mushrooms never burst at night, and the
+deadly dust from a subsided cloud was not deadly in the morning. As a
+matter of fact the rain that fell every night made it no more than a
+sodden, thin film of reddish mud by daybreak, mud which dried and caked.
+
+Burl did not know what occurred, but knew the result. At night or in
+early morning, the danger from the red mushrooms was slight. Therefore
+he would lead his people through the very jaws of death that night. He
+would lead them through the deadly aisles of this, the forest of
+malignant growths, the place of lurking annihilation.
+
+It was an act of desperation, and the resolution to carry it through
+left Burl in a state of mind that kept him from observing one thing that
+would have ended all the struggles of his tribe at once. Perhaps a
+quarter-mile from the edge of the red forest three or four giant
+cabbages grew, thrusting their colossal leaves upward toward the sky.
+
+And on the cabbages a dozen lazy slugs fed leisurely, ignoring
+completely the red haze that was never far from them and sometimes
+covered them. Burl saw them, but the oddity of their immunity from the
+effects of the red dust did not strike him. He was fighting to keep his
+resolution intact. If he had only realized the significance of what he
+saw, however--
+
+The slugs were covered with a thick soft fur. The tribespeople wore
+garments of that same material. The fur protected the slugs, and could
+have made the tribe immune to the deadly red dust if they had only
+known. The slugs breathed through a row of tiny holes upon their backs,
+as the mature insects breathed through holes upon the bottom of their
+abdomens, and the soft fur formed a mat of felt which arrested the fine
+particles of deadly dust, while allowing the pure air to pass through.
+It formed, in effect, a natural gas-mask which the tribesmen should have
+adopted, but which they did not discover or invent.
+
+The remainder of that day they waited in a curious mixture of resolve
+and fear. The tribe was rapidly reaching a point where it would follow
+Burl over a thousand-foot cliff, and it needed some such blind
+confidence to make them prepare to go through the forest of the million
+deadly mushrooms.
+
+The waiting was a strain, but the actual journey was a nightmare. Burl
+knew that the toadstools did not burst of themselves during the night,
+but he knew that the beetle on which he had taken his involuntary ride
+had crashed against one in the darkness, and that the fatal dust had
+poured out. He warned his people to be cautious, and led them down the
+slope of the hill through the blackness.
+
+For hours they stumbled on in utter darkness, with the pungent, acrid
+odor of the red growths constantly in their nostrils. They put out their
+hands and touched the flabby, damp stalks of the monstrous things. They
+stumbled and staggered against the leathery skins of the malignant
+fungoids.
+
+Death was all about them. At no time during all the dark hours of the
+night was there a moment when they could not reach out their hands and
+touch a fungus growth that might burst at their touch and fill the air
+with poisonous dust, so that all of them would die in gasping, choking
+agony.
+
+And worst of all, before half an hour was past they had lost all sense
+of direction, so that they stumbled on blindly through the utter
+blackness, not knowing whether they were headed toward the river that
+might be their salvation or were wandering hopelessly deeper and deeper
+into the silent depths of the forest of strangled things.
+
+When day came again and the mushrooms sent their columns of fatal dust
+into the air would they gasp and fight for breath in the red haze that
+would float like a tenuous cloud above the forest? Would they breathe in
+flames of firelike torment and die slowly, or would the red dust be
+merciful and slay them quickly?
+
+They felt their way like blind folk, devoid of hope and curiously
+unafraid. Only their hearts were like heavy, cold weights in their
+breasts, and they shouldered aside the swollen sacs of the red mushrooms
+with a singular apathy as they followed Burl slowly through the midst of
+death.
+
+Many times in their journeying they knew that dead creatures were near
+by--moths, perhaps, that had blundered into a distended growth which
+had burst upon the impact and killed the thing that had touched it.
+
+No busy insect scavengers ventured into this plain of silence to salvage
+the bodies, however. The red haze preserved the sanctuary of malignance
+inviolate. During the day no creature might hope to approach its red
+aisles and dust-carpeted clearings, and at night the slow-dropping rain
+fell only upon the rounded heads of the mushrooms.
+
+In all the space of the forest, only the little band of hopeless people,
+plodding on behind Burl in the velvet blackness, callously rubbed
+shoulders with death in the form of the red and glistening mushrooms.
+Over all the dank expanse of the forest, the only sound was the dripping
+of the slow and sodden rainfall that began at nightfall and lasted until
+day came again.
+
+The sky began to grow faintly gray as the sun rose behind the banks of
+overhanging clouds. Burl stopped short and uttered what was no more than
+a groan. He was in a little circular clearing, and the twisted,
+monstrous forms of the deadly mushrooms were all about. There was not
+yet enough light for colors to appear, and the hideous, almost obscene
+shapes of the loathsome growths on every side showed only as mocking,
+leering silhouettes as of malicious demons rejoicing at the coming doom
+of the gray-faced, huddled tribefolk.
+
+Burl stood still, drooping in discouragement upon his spear, the
+feathery moth's antennæ bound upon his forehead shadowed darkly against
+the graying sky. Soon the mushrooms would begin to burst--
+
+Then, suddenly, he lifted his head, encouragement and delight upon his
+features. He had heard the ripple of running water. His followers looked
+at him with dawning hope. Without a word, Burl began to run, and they
+followed him more slowly. His voice came back to them in a shout of
+delight.
+
+Then they, too, broke into a jog-trot. In a moment they had emerged from
+the thick tangle of brownish-red stalks and were upon the banks of a
+wide and swiftly running river, the same river whose gleam Burl had
+caught the day before from the farther side of the mushroom forest.
+
+Once before Burl had floated down a river upon a mushroom raft. Then his
+journey had been involuntary and unlooked for. He had been carried far
+from his tribe and far from Saya, and his heart had been filled with
+desolation.
+
+Now he viewed the swiftly running current with eager delight. He cast
+his eyes up and down the bank. Here and there the river-bank rose in a
+low bluff, and thick shelf-growths stretched out above the water.
+
+Burl was busy in an instant, stabbing the hard growths with his spear
+and striving to wrench them free. The tribesmen stared at him,
+uncomprehending, but at an order from him they did likewise.
+
+Soon a dozen thick masses of firm, light fungus lay upon the shore where
+it shelved gently into the water. Burl began to explain what they were
+to do, but one or two of the men dared remonstrate, saying humbly that
+they were afraid to part from him. If they might embark upon the same
+thing with him, they would be safe, but otherwise they were afraid.
+
+Burl cast an apprehensive glance at the sky. Day was coming rapidly on.
+Soon the red mushrooms would begin to shoot their columns of deadly dust
+into the air. This was no time to pause and deliberate. Then Saya spoke
+softly.
+
+Burl listened, and made a mighty sacrifice. He took his gorgeous velvet
+cloak from his shoulders--it was made from the wing of a great moth--and
+tore it into a dozen long, irregular pieces, tearing it along the lines
+of the sinews that reinforced it. He planted his spear upright in the
+largest piece of shelf-fungus and caused his followers to do likewise,
+then fastened the strips of sinew and velvet to his spear-shaft, and
+ordered them to do the same to the other spears.
+
+In a matter of minutes the dozen tiny rafts were bobbing on the water,
+clustered about the larger, central bit. Then, one by one, the tribefolk
+took their places, and Burl shoved off.
+
+The agglomeration of cranky, unseaworthy bits of shelf-fungus moved
+slowly out from the shore until the current caught it. Burl and Saya sat
+upon the central bit, with the other trustful but somewhat frightened
+pink-skinned people all about them. And, as they began to move between
+the mushroom-lined banks of the river and the mist of the night began to
+lift from its surface, far in the interior of the forest of the red
+fungoids a column of sullen red leaped into the air. The first of the
+malignant growths had cast its cargo of poisonous dust into the
+still-humid atmosphere.
+
+The conelike column spread out and grew thin, but even after it had sunk
+into the earth, a reddish taint remained in the air about the place
+where it had been. The deadly red haze that hung all through the day
+over the red forest was in process of formation.
+
+But by that time the unstable fungus rafts were far down the river,
+bobbing and twirling in the current, with the wide-eyed people upon them
+gazing in wonderment at the shores as they glided by. The red mushrooms
+grew less numerous upon the banks. Other growths took their places.
+Molds and rusts covered the ground as grass had done in ages past.
+Mushrooms showed their creamy, rounded heads. Malformed things with
+swollen trunks and branches in strange mockery of the trees they had
+superseded made their appearance, and once the tribesmen saw the dark
+bulk of a hunting spider outlined for a moment upon the bank.
+
+All the long day they rode upon the current, while the insect life that
+had been absent in the neighborhood of the forest of death made its
+appearance again. Bees once more droned overhead, and wasps and
+dragon-flies. Four-inch mosquitoes made their appearance, to be fought
+off by the tribefolk with lusty blows, and glittering beetles and
+shining flies, whose bodies glittered with a metallic luster, buzzed and
+flew above the water.
+
+Huge butterflies once more were seen, dancing above the steaming,
+festering earth in an apparent ecstasy from the mere fact of existence,
+and all the thousand and one forms of insect life that flew and crawled,
+and swam and dived, showed themselves to the tribesmen on the raft.
+
+Water-beetles came lazily to the surface, to snap with sudden energy at
+mosquitoes busily laying their eggs in the nearly stagnant water by the
+river-banks. Burl pointed out to Saya, with some excitement, their
+silver breast-plates that shone as they darted under the water again.
+And the shell-covered boats of a thousand caddis-worms floated in the
+eddies and back-waters of the stream. Water-boatmen and
+whirligigs--almost alone among insects in not having shared in the
+general increase of size--danced upon the oily waves.
+
+The day wore on as the shores flowed by. The tribefolk ate of their
+burdens of mushroom and meat, and drank from the fresh water of the
+river. Then, when afternoon came, the character of the country about the
+stream changed. The banks fell away, and the current slackened. The
+shores became indefinite, and the river merged itself into a swamp, a
+vast swamp from which a continual muttering came which the tribesmen
+heard for a long time before they saw the swamp itself.
+
+The water seemed to turn dark, as black mud took the place of the clay
+that had formed its bed, and slowly, here and there, then more
+frequently, floating green things that were stationary, and did not move
+with the current, appeared. They were the leaves of water-lilies, that
+had remained with the giant cabbages and a very few other plants in the
+midst of a fungoid world. The green leaves were twelve feet across, and
+any one of them would have floated the whole of Burl's tribe.
+
+Presently they grew numerous so that the channel was made narrow, and
+the mushroom rafts passed between rows of the great leaves, with here
+and there a colossal, waxen blossom in which three men might have hidden
+and which exhaled an almost over-powering fragrance into the air.
+
+And the muttering that had been heard far away grew in volume to an
+intermittent, incredibly deep bass roar. It seemed to come from the
+banks on either side, and actually was the discordant croaking of the
+giant frogs, grown to eight feet in length, which lived and loved in the
+huge swamp, above which golden butterflies danced in ecstasy, and which
+the transcendently beautiful blossoms of the water-lilies filled with
+fragrance.
+
+The swamp was a place of riotous life. The green bodies of the colossal
+frogs--perched upon the banks in strange immobility and only opening
+their huge mouths to emit their thunderous croakings--the green bodies
+of the frogs blended queerly with the vivid color of the water-lily
+leaves. Dragon-flies fluttered in their swift and angular flight above
+the black and reeking mud. Green-bottles and blue-bottles and a hundred
+other species of flies buzzed busily in the misty air, now and then
+falling prey to the licking tongues of the frogs.
+
+Bees droned overhead in flight less preoccupied and worried than
+elsewhere flitting from blossom to blossom of the tremendous
+water-lilies, loading their crops with honey and the bristles of their
+legs with yellow pollen.
+
+Everywhere over the mushroom-covered world the air was never quite free
+from mist, and the steaming exhalations of the pools, but here in the
+swamps the atmosphere was so heavily laden with moisture that the bodies
+of the tribefolk were covered with glistening droplets, while the wide,
+flat water-lily leaves glittered like platters of jewels from the
+"steam" that had condensed upon their upper surfaces.
+
+The air was full of shining bodies and iridescent wings. Myriads of tiny
+midges--no more than three or four inches across their wings--danced
+above the slow-flowing water. And butterflies of every imaginable shade
+and color, from the most delicate lavender to the most vivid carmine,
+danced and fluttered, alighting upon the white water-lilies to sip
+daintily of their nectar, skimming the surface of the water, enamored of
+their brightly tinted reflections.
+
+And the pink-skinned tribesfolk, floating through this fairyland on
+their mushroom rafts, gazed with wide eyes at the beauty about them, and
+drew in great breaths of the intoxicating fragrance of the great white
+flowers that floated like elfin boats upon the dark water.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Out of Bondage
+
+
+The mist was heavy and thick, and through it the flying creatures darted
+upon their innumerable businesses, visible for an instant in all their
+colorful beauty, then melting slowly into indefiniteness as they sped
+away. The tribefolk on the clustered rafts watched them as they darted
+overhead, and for hours the little squadron of fungoid vessels floated
+slowly through the central channel of the marsh.
+
+The river had split into innumerable currents which meandered
+purposelessly through the glistening black mud of the swamp, but after a
+long time they seemed to reassemble, and Burl could see what had caused
+the vast morass.
+
+Hills appeared on either side of the stream, which grew higher and
+steeper, as if the foothills of a mountain chain. Then Burl turned and
+peered before him.
+
+Rising straight from the low hills, a wall of high mountains rose toward
+the sky, and the low-hanging clouds met their rugged flanks but half-way
+toward the peaks. To right and left the mountains melted into the
+tenuous haze, but ahead they were firm and stalwart, rising and losing
+their heights in the cloud-banks.
+
+They formed a rampart which might have guarded the edge of the world,
+and the river flowed more and more rapidly in a deeper and narrower
+current toward a cleft between two rugged giants that promised to
+swallow the water and all that might swim in its depths or float upon
+its surface.
+
+Tall, steep hills rose from either side of the swift current, their
+sides covered with flaking molds of an exotic shade of rose-pink,
+mingled here and there with lavender and purple. Rocks, not hidden
+beneath a coating of fungus, protruded their angular heads from the
+hillsides. The river valley became a gorge, and then little more than a
+cañon, with beetling sides that frowned down upon the swift current
+running beneath them.
+
+The small flotilla passed beneath an overhanging cliff, and then shot
+out to where the cliffsides drew apart and formed a deep amphitheater,
+whose top was hidden in the clouds.
+
+And across this open space, on cables all of five hundred feet long, a
+banded spider had flung its web. It was a monster of its tribe. Its
+belly was swollen to a diameter of no less than two yards, and its
+outstretched legs would have touched eight points of a ten-yard circle.
+
+It was hanging motionless in the center of the colossal snare as the
+little group of tribefolk passed underneath, and they saw the broad
+bands of yellow and black and silver upon its abdomen. They shivered as
+their little crafts were swept below.
+
+Then they came to a little valley, where yellow sand bordered the river
+and there was a level space of a hundred yards on either side before the
+steep sides of the mountains began their rise. Here the cluster of
+mushroom rafts were caught in a little eddy and drawn out of the swiftly
+flowing current. Soon there was a soft and yielding jar. The rafts had
+grounded.
+
+Led by Burl, the tribesmen waded ashore, wonderment and excitement in
+their hearts. Burl searched all about with his eyes. Toadstools and
+mushrooms, rusts and molds, even giant puff-balls grew in the little
+valley, but of the deadly red mushrooms he saw none.
+
+A single bee was buzzing slowly over the tangled thickets of fungoids,
+and the loud voice of a cricket came in a deafening burst of sound,
+reechoed from the hillsides, but save for the far-flung web of the
+banded spider a mile or more away, there was no sign of the deadly
+creatures that preyed upon men.
+
+Burl began to climb the hillside with his tribefolk after him. For an
+hour they toiled upward, through confused masses of fungus of almost
+every species. Twice they stopped to seize upon edible fungi and break
+them into masses they could carry, and once they paused and made a wide
+detour around a thicket from which there came a stealthy rustling.
+
+Burl believed that the rustling was merely the sound of a moth or
+butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, but was unwilling to take any
+chances. He and his people circled the mushroom thicket and mounted
+higher.
+
+And at last, perhaps six or seven hundred feet above the level of the
+river, they came upon a little plateau, going back into a small pocket
+in the mountainside. Here they found many of the edible fungoids, and no
+less than a dozen of the giant cabbages, on whose broad leaves many
+furry grubs were feeding steadily in placid contentment with themselves
+and all the world.
+
+A small stream bubbled up from a tiny basin and ran swiftly across the
+plateau, and there were dense thickets of toadstools in which the
+tribesmen might find secure hiding-places. The tribe would make itself a
+new home here.
+
+That night they hid among inextricably tangled masses of mushrooms, and
+saw with amazement the multitude of creatures that ventured forth in the
+darkness. All the valley and the plateau were illumined by the shining
+beacons of huge but graceful fireflies, who darted here and there in
+delight and--apparently--in security.
+
+Upon the earth below, also, many tiny lights glowed. The larvæ of the
+fireflies crawled slowly but happily over the fungus-covered
+mountainside, and great glow-worms clambered upon the shining tops of
+the toadstools and rested there, twin broad bands of bluish fire burning
+brightly within their translucent bodies.
+
+They were the females of the firefly race, which never attain to legs
+and wings, but crawl always upon the earth, merely enlarged creatures in
+the forms of their own larvæ. Moths soared overhead with mighty,
+throbbing wing-beats, and all the world seemed a paradise through which
+no evil creatures roamed in search of prey.
+
+And a strange thing came to pass. Soon after darkness fell upon the
+earth and the steady drip-drop of the rain began, a musical tinkling
+sound was heard which grew in volume, and became a deep-toned roar,
+which reechoed and reverberated from the opposite hillsides until it was
+like melodious and long-continued thunder. For a long time the people
+were puzzled and a little afraid, but Burl took courage and
+investigated.
+
+He emerged from the concealing thicket and peered cautiously about,
+seeing nothing. Then he dared move in the direction of the sound, and
+the gleam from a dozen fireflies showed him a sheet of water pouring
+over a vertical cliff to the river far below.
+
+The rainfall, gentle as it was, when gathered from all the broad expanse
+of the mountainside, made a river of its own, which had scoured out a
+bed, and poured down each night to plunge in a smother of spray and foam
+through six hundred feet of empty space to the swiftly flowing river in
+the center of the valley. It was this sound that had puzzled the
+tribefolk, and this sound that lulled them to sleep when Burl at last
+came back to allay their fears.
+
+The next day they explored their new territory with a boldness of which
+they would not have been capable a month before. They found a single
+great trap-door in the earth, sure sign of the burrow of a monster
+spider, and Burl resolved that before many days the spider would be
+dealt with. He told his tribesmen so, and they nodded their heads
+solemnly instead of shrinking back in terror as they would have done not
+long since.
+
+The tribe was rapidly becoming a group of men, capable of taking the
+aggressive. They needed Burl's rash leadership, and for many generations
+they would need bold leaders, but they were infinitely superior to the
+timid, rabbit-like creatures they had been. They bore spears, and they
+had used them. They had seen danger, and had blindly followed Burl
+through the forest of strangled things instead of fleeing weakly from
+the peril.
+
+They wore soft, yellow fur about their middles, taken from the bodies of
+giant slugs they had slain. They had eaten much meat, and preferred its
+succulent taste to the insipid savor of the mushrooms that had once been
+their steady diet. They knew the exhilaration of brave adventure--though
+they had been forced into adventure by Burl--and they were far more
+worthy descendants of their ancestors than those ancestors had known for
+many thousand years.
+
+The exploration of their new domain yielded many wonders and a few
+advantages. The tribefolk found that the nearest ant-city was miles
+away, and that the small insects would trouble them but rarely. (The
+nightly rush of water down the sloping sides of the mountain made it
+undesirable for the site of an ant colony.)
+
+And best of all, back in the little pocket in the mountainside, they
+found old and disused cells of hunting wasps. The walls of the pocket
+were made of soft sandstone with alternate layers of clay, and the wasps
+had found digging easy.
+
+There were a dozen or more burrows, the shaft of each some four feet in
+diameter and going back into the cliff for nearly thirty feet, where
+they branched out into a number of cells. Each of the cells had once
+held a grub which had grown fat and large upon its hoard of paralyzed
+crickets, and then had broken away to the outer world to emerge as a
+full-grown wasp.
+
+Now, however, the laboriously tunneled caverns would furnish a
+hiding-place for the tribe of men, a far more secure hiding-place than
+the center of the mushroom thickets. And, furthermore, a hiding-place
+which, because more permanent, would gradually become a possession for
+which the men would fight.
+
+It is a curious thing that the advancement of a people from a state of
+savagery and continual warfare to civilization and continual peace is
+not made by the elimination of the causes of strife, but by the addition
+of new objects and ideals, in defense of which that same people will
+offer battle.
+
+A single chrysalis was found securely anchored to the underside of a
+rock-shelf, and Burl detached it with great labor and carried it into
+one of the burrows, though the task was one that was almost beyond his
+strength. He desired the butterfly that would emerge for his own use.
+
+He preempted, too, a solitary burrow a little distant from the others,
+and made preparations for an event that was destined to make his plans
+wiser and more far-reaching than before.
+
+His followers were equally busy with their various burrows, gathering
+stores of soft growth for their couches, and later--at Burl's
+suggestion--even carrying within the dark caverns the radiant heads of
+the luminous mushrooms to furnish illumination. The light would be dim,
+and after the mushroom had partly dried it would cease, but for a people
+utterly ignorant of fire it was far from a bad plan.
+
+Burl was very happy for that time. His people looked upon him as a
+savior, and obeyed his least order without question. He was growing to
+repose some measure of trust in them, too, as men who began to have some
+glimmerings of the new-found courage that had come to him, and which he
+had striven hard to implant in their breasts.
+
+The tribe had been a formless gathering of people. There were six or
+seven men and as many women, and naturally families had come into
+being--sometimes after fierce and absurd fights among the men--but the
+families were not the sharply distinct agreements they would have been
+in a tribe of higher development.
+
+The marriage was but an agreement, terminable at any time, and the men
+had but little of the feeling of parenthood, though the women had all
+the fierce maternal instinct of the insects about them.
+
+These burrows in which the tribefolk were making their homes would put
+an end to the casual nature of the marriage bonds. They were homes in
+the making--damp and humid burrows without fire or heat, but homes,
+nevertheless. The family may come before the home, in the development of
+mankind, but it invariably exists when the home has been made.
+
+The tribe had been upon the plateau for nearly a week when Burl found
+that stirrings and strugglings were going on within the huge cocoon he
+had laid close beside the burrow he had chosen for his own. He cast
+aside all other work, and waited patiently for the thing he knew was
+about to happen. He squatted on his haunches beside the huge, oblong
+cylinder, his spear in his hand, waiting patiently. From time to time he
+nibbled at a bit of edible mushroom.
+
+Burl had acquired many new traits, among which a little foresight was
+most prominent, but he had never conquered the habit of feeling hungry
+at any and every time that food was near at hand. He had to wait. He had
+food. Therefore, he ate.
+
+The sound of scrapings came from the closed cocoon, caked upon its outer
+side with dirt and mold. The scraping and scratching continued, and
+presently a tiny hole showed, which rapidly enlarged. Tiny jaws and a
+dry, glazed skin became visible, the skin looking as if it had been
+varnished with many coats of brown shellac. Then a malformed head forced
+its way through and stopped.
+
+All motion ceased for a matter of perhaps half an hour, and then the
+strange, blind head seemed to become distended, to be swelling. A crack
+appeared along its upper part, which lengthened and grew wide. And then
+a second head appeared from within the first.
+
+This head was soft and downy, and a slender proboscis was coiled beneath
+its lower edge like the trunk of one of the elephants that had been
+extinct for many thousand years. Soft scales and fine hairs alternated
+to cover it, and two immense, many-faceted eyes gazed mildly at the
+world on which it was looking for the first time. The color of the whole
+was purest milky-white.
+
+Slowly and painfully, assisting itself by slender, colorless legs that
+seemed strangely feeble and trembling, a butterfly crawled from the
+cocoon. Its wings were folded and lifeless, without substance or color,
+but the body was a perfect white. The butterfly moved a little distance
+from its cocoon and slowly unfurled its wings. With the action, life
+seemed to be pumped into them from some hidden spring in the insect's
+body. The slender antennæ spread out and wavered gently in the warm air.
+The wings were becoming broad expanses of snowy velvet.
+
+A trace of eagerness seemed to come into the butterfly's actions.
+Somewhere there in the valley sweet food and joyous companions awaited
+it. Fluttering above the fungoids of the hillsides, surely there was a
+mate with whom the joys of love were to be shared, surely upon those
+gigantic patches of green, half hidden in the haze, there would be laid
+tiny golden eggs that in time would hatch into small, fat grubs.
+
+Strength came to the butterfly's limbs. Its wings were spread and
+closed with a new assurance. It spread them once more, and raised them
+to make the first flight of this new existence in a marvelous world,
+full of delights and adventures--Burl struck home with his spear.
+
+The delicate limbs struggled in agony, the wings fluttered helplessly,
+and in a little while the butterfly lay still upon the fungus-carpeted
+earth, and Burl leaned over to strip away the great wings of snow-white
+velvet, to sever the long and slender antennæ, and then to call his
+tribesmen and bid them share in the food he had for them.
+
+And there was a feast that afternoon. The tribesmen sat about the white
+carcass, cracking open the delicate limbs for the meat within them, and
+Burl made sure that Saya secured the choicest bits. The tribesmen were
+happy. Then one of the children of the tribe stretched a hand aloft and
+pointed up the mountainside.
+
+Coming slowly down the slanting earth was a long, narrow file of living
+animals. For a time the file seemed to be but one creature, but Burl's
+keen eyes soon saw that there were many. They were caterpillars, each
+one perhaps ten feet long, each with a tiny black head armed with sharp
+jaws, and with dull-red fur upon their backs. The rear of the procession
+was lost in the mist of the low-hanging cloud-banks that covered the
+mountainside some two thousand feet above the plateau, but the foremost
+was no more than three hundred yards away.
+
+Slowly and solemnly the procession came on, the black head of the second
+touching the rear of the first, and the head of the third touching the
+rear of the second. In faultless alignment, without intervals, they
+moved steadily down the slanting side of the mountain.
+
+Save the first, they seemed absorbed in maintaining their perfect
+formation, but the leader constantly rose upon his hinder half and waved
+the fore part of his body in the air, first to the right and then to the
+left, as if searching out the path he would follow.
+
+The tribefolk watched in amazement mingled with terror. Only Burl was
+calm. He had never seen a slug that meant danger to man, and he reasoned
+that these were at any rate moving slowly so that they could be
+distanced by the fleeter-footed human beings, but he also meant to be
+cautious.
+
+The slow march kept on. The rear of the procession of caterpillars
+emerged from the cloud-bank, and Burl saw that a shining white line was
+left behind them. No less than eighty great caterpillars clad in white
+and dingy red were solemnly moving down the mountainside, leaving a path
+of shining silk behind them. Head to tail, in single file, they had no
+eyes or ears for anything but their procession.
+
+The leader reached the plateau, and turned. He came to the cluster of
+giant cabbages, and ignored them. He came to a thicket of mushrooms, and
+passed through it, followed by his devoted band. Then he came to an open
+space where the earth was soft and sandy, where sandstone had weathered
+and made a great heap of easily moved earth.
+
+The leading caterpillar halted, and began to burrow experimentally in
+the ground. The result pleased him, and some signal seemed to pass
+along the eight-hundred-foot line of creatures. The leader began to dig
+with feet and jaws, working furiously to cover himself completely with
+the soft earth. Those immediately behind him abandoned their formation,
+and pressed forward in haste. Those still farther back moved more
+hurriedly.
+
+All, when they reached the spot selected by the leader, abandoned any
+attempt to keep to their line, and hastened to find an unoccupied spot
+in the open space in which to bury themselves.
+
+For perhaps half an hour the clearing was the scene of intense activity,
+incredible activity. Huge, ten-foot bodies burrowed desperately in the
+whitish earth, digging frantically to cover themselves.
+
+After the half-hour, however, the last of the caterpillars had vanished.
+Only an occasional movement of the earth from the struggle of a buried
+creature to bury itself still deeper, and the freshly turned surface
+showed that beneath the clearing on the plateau eighty great slugs were
+preparing themselves for the sleep of metamorphosis. The piled-up earth
+and the broad, white band of silk, leading back up the hillside until it
+became lost in the clouds, alone remained to tell of the visitation.
+
+The tribesmen had watched in amazement. They had never seen these
+creatures before, but they knew, of course, why they had entombed
+themselves. Had they known what the scientists of thirty thousand years
+before had written in weighty and dull books, they would have deduced
+from the appearance of the processionary caterpillars--or
+pine-caterpillars--that somewhere above the banks of clouds there were
+growing trees and sunlight, that a moon shone down, and stars twinkled
+from the blue vault of a cloudless sky.
+
+But the tribesmen did not know. They only knew that there, beneath the
+soft earth, was a mighty store of food for them when they cared to dig
+for it, that their provisions for many months were secure, and that
+Burl, their leader, was a great and mighty man for having led them to
+this land of safety and plenty.
+
+Burl read their emotions in their eyes, but better than their amazement
+and wonderment was a glance that had nothing whatever to do with his
+leadership of the tribe. And then Burl rose, and took the two
+snowy-white velvet cloaks from the wings of the white butterfly. One of
+them he flung about his own shoulders, and the other he flung about
+Saya. And then those two stood up before the wide-eyed tribesmen, and
+Burl spoke:
+
+"This is my mate, and my food is her food, and her wrath is my wrath. My
+burrow is her burrow, and her sorrow, my sorrow.
+
+"Men whom I have led to this land of plenty, hear me. As ye obey my
+words, see to it that the words of Saya are obeyed likewise, for my
+spear will loose the life from any man who angers her. Know that as I am
+great beyond all other men, so Saya is great beyond all other women, for
+I say it, and it is so."
+
+And he drew Saya toward him, trembling slightly, and put his arm about
+her waist before all the tribe, and the tribesmen muttered in
+acquiescent whispers that what Burl said was true, as they had already
+known.
+
+Then, while the pink-skinned men feasted on the meat Burl had provided
+for them, he and Saya went toward the burrow he had made ready. It was
+not like the other burrows, being set apart from them, and its entrance
+was bordered on either side by mushrooms as black as night. All about
+the entrance the black mushrooms clustered, a strange species that grew
+large and scattered its spores abroad and then of its own accord melted
+into an inky liquid that flowed away, sinking slowly into the ground.
+
+In a little hollow below the opening of the burrow an inky pool had
+gathered, which reflected the gray clouds above and the shapes of the
+mushrooms that overhung its edges.
+
+Burl and Saya made their way toward the burrow in silence, a picturesque
+couple against the black background of the sable mushrooms and the earth
+made dark by the inky liquid. Both of their figures were swathed in
+cloaks of unsmirched whiteness and wondrous softness, and bound to
+Burl's forehead were the feathery, lacelike antenna of a great moth,
+making flowing plumes of purest gold. His spear seemed cast from
+bronze, and he was a proud figure as he led Saya past the black pool and
+to the doorway of their home.
+
+They sat there, watching, while the darkness came on and the moths and
+fireflies emerged to dance in the night, and listened when the rain
+began its slow, deliberate dripping from the heavy clouds above.
+Presently a gentle rumbling began--the accumulation of the rain from all
+the mountainside forming a torrent that would pour in a six-hundred-foot
+drop to the river far below.
+
+The sound of the rushing water grew louder, and was echoed back from the
+cliffs on the other side of the valley. The fireflies danced like fairy
+lights in the chasm, and all the creatures of the night winged their way
+aloft to join in the ecstasy of life and love.
+
+And then, when darkness was complete, and only the fitful gleams of the
+huge fireflies were reflected from the still surface of the black pool
+beneath their feet, Burl reached out his hand to Saya, sitting beside
+him in the darkness. She yielded shyly, and her soft, warm hand found
+his in the obscurity. And Burl bent over and kissed her on the lips.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Red Dust, by Murray Leinster
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 41586 ***