ees towering over him a
creature that turns his blood cold--a gigantic praying mantis. Before he
has time to act, the monster springs at them!

CHAPTER VII

_Through the Inferno_

Fortunately, the monster miscalculated its leap. The huge legs, whirling
through the air, came within a few inches of Tommy's head, but passed
over him, and the mantis plunged into the stream. Instantly the water
was alive with leaping things with faces of such grotesque horror that
Tommy sat paralyzed in his rocking shell, unable to avert his eyes.

Things no more than a foot or two in length, to judge from the slender,
eel-like bodies that leaped into the air, but things with catfish heads
and tentacles, and eyes waving on stalks; things with clawlike
appendages to their ventral fins, and mouths that widened to fearful
size, so that the whole head seemed to disappear above them, disclosing
fangs like wolves'. Instantly the water was churned into phosphorescent
fire as they precipitated themselves upon the struggling mantis, whose
enormous form, extending halfway from shore to shore, was covered with
the river monsters, gnawing, rending, tearing.

Luckily the struggles of the dying monster carried it downstream instead
of up. In a few moments the immediate danger was past. And suddenly
Haidia awoke, sat up.

"Where are we?" she cried. "Oh, I can see! I can see! Something has
burned away from my eyes! I know this place. A wise man of my people
once came here, and returned to tell of it. We must go on. Soon we shall
be safe on the wide river. But there is another way that leads to here.
We must go on! We must go on!"

Even as she spoke they heard the distant rasping of the beetle-legs. And
before the shells were well in mid-current they saw the beetle horde
coming round the bend; in the front of them Bram, reclining on his shell
couch, and drawn by the eight trained beetles.

* * * * *

Bram saw the fugitives, and a roar of ironic mirth broke from his lips,
resounding high above the strident rasping of the beetle-legs, and
roaring over the marshes.

"I've got you, Dodd and Travers," he bellowed, as the trained beetles
hovered above the shell canoes. "You thought you were clever, but you're
at my mercy. Now's your last chance, Dodd. I'll save you still if you'll
submit to me, if you'll admit that there were fossil monotremes before
the pleistocene epoch. Come, it's so simple! Say it after me: 'The
ma