on that this section of the Dark Moon held
beasts more huge than the "Moon-pigs" he had killed: it was a disturbing
bit of knowledge. He caught Towahg's cautious, wary eyes and motioned
toward the branches high overhead.

"How about hanging ourselves up there for the night?" he asked, and the
gestures, though not the words, were plain, as the ape-man's quick
dissent made clear.

* * * * *

He motioned Chet to follow. Down they plunged, and always down. Towahg
gave Chet to understand that Kreiss had slept some distance beyond: they
would try to reach the same place. But the quick-falling dusk caught
them while yet among the black rubbery trees. And the dark showed Chet
why their branches might not be inviting as a sleeping place.

By ones and twos they came at first, occasional lines of light that
flowed swiftly and vanished through the black tangle of limbs. Chet
could hardly believe them real; they appeared and were lost from sight
as if they had melted.

But more came, and it seemed at last as if the roof above were alive
with light. The moving, luminous things glowed in hues that were never
still: were pure gold, were green, then red, melting and changing
through all the colors of the spectrum.

Living fireworks that were a blaze of gorgeous beauty! They wove an
ever-moving canopy of softest lights that raced dazzlingly to and fro,
that crossed and intertwined; that were dazing to his eyes while they
held his senses enthralled by their color and sheer loveliness ... until
one light detached itself and fell toward him where he stood spellbound
beside a giant fern.

It struck softly behind him, and its crimson glory flashed yellow as it
struck, then went black and in the dim light, on a great leathery leaf
with a spread of ten feet, Chet saw an enormous worm, whose head was a
thing of writhing antennae, whose eyes were pure deadliness, and whose
round corrugated body drew up the hanging part that the leaf could not
hold. It hunched itself into a huge inverted U and, before Chet could
recover from his horrified surprise, was poised to spring.

* * * * *

It was Towahg's strength, not his own, that threw him bodily down the
path. It was Towahg who poured a volley of grunted words and shrieks
into his ear, while he dragged him back. Chet saw the vicious head flash
to loveliest gold while it shot forward to the body's full twelve feet
of length--twelv