out of
the places where they had lain concealed, six mantises launched
themselves at their beetle prey.

Those awful bounds of the long-legged monsters, the scourges of the
insect world, carried them clear from one bank to the other--fortunately
for the occupants of the shells. In an instant the beetle-cloud
dissolved. And it had all happened in a few seconds. Before Dodd or
Tommy had quite taken in the situation, the mantises, each carrying a
victim in its grooved legs, had vanished like the beetles. There was no
sign of Bram. The three were alone upon the face of the stream, which
went swirling upward into renewed darkness.

Tommy saw Dodd bend toward Haidia as she lay on her shell couch. He
heard the sound of a noisy kiss. And he lay back in the hollow of his
shell, with the feeling that nothing that could happen in the future
could be worse than what they had passed through.

* * * * *

Days went by, days when the sense of dawning freedom filled their hearts
with hope. Haidia told Dodd and Tommy that, according to the legends of
her people, the river ran into the world from which they had been driven
by the floods, ages before.

There had been no further signs of Bram or the beetle horde, and Dodd
and Tommy surmised that it had been disorganized by the attack of the
mantises, and that Bram was engaged in regaining his control over it.
But neither of them believed that the respite would be a long one, and
for that reason they rested ashore only for the briefest intervals, just
long enough to snatch a little sleep, and to eat some of the shrimps
that Haidia was adept at finding--or to pull some juicy fruit
surreptitiously from a tree.

Incidents there were, nevertheless, during those days. For hours their
shells were followed by a school of the luminous river monsters, which,
nevertheless, made no attempt to attack them. And once, hearing a cry
from Haidia, as she was gathering shrimps, Dodd ran forward to see her
battling furiously with a luminous scorpion, eight feet in length, that
had sprung at her from its lurking place behind a pear shrub.

* * * * *

Dodd succeeded in stunning and dispatching the monster without suffering
any injury from it, but the strain of the period was beginning to tell
on all of them. Worst of all, they seemed to have left all the luminous
vegetation behind them, and were entering a region of almost total
darkness, in