by normal human ears. "Matt!"

But if Matthew Breen could not hear, he could see. The slightest
inattention at his guard duty at that second would have resulted in two
deaths. But he was on the alert.

Jim saw the sun blotted out swiftly, saw a huge, pinkish-gray wall swoop
down between him and Denny, and the deadly horde of termites pursuing
them. Then he saw another pinkish-gray wall, in which was set
something--a shallow, regular, hollowed plateau--that looked familiar.
The patty-dish in which he and Denny had been carried to this place of
death and horror.

Jim knew he could not clamber into that great plateau; he was too
exhausted. But the necessity was spared him.

The patty-dish scooped down under him, uprooting huge trees, digging up
square yards of earth all around him. He was flung from his feet to roll
helplessly beside the unconscious Dennis, as men and earth and all were
shifted from the dish's rim to its center.

Like gigantic express elevator the dish soared dizzily up in the
tremendous hand that held it, over the vast pile of the mound city, over
all the surrounding landscape, and was borne back toward Matt's
automobile--and toward the laboratory where the bulk of their bodies
waited, in protoplasmic form, in the dome of the glass bell.

CHAPTER XI

_Back to Normal_

"I think," said Jim, loading his pipe, "that now I really will settle
down. No other adventures could seem like much after the one"--he
repressed a shiver--"we've just passed through."

"And I think," said Dennis, following his own line of thought, "that as
far the world of science goes, my exploring has been for nothing. Try to
tell sober scientists of the specially evolved, huge-brained thing that
rules the termite tribe and forms and holds the marvelous organization
it has? Try to tell them--now that Matt has to stubbornly decided to
keep secret his work with element eighty-five--that we were reduced to
a quarter of an inch in height, and that we went through a mound and
saw at first hand the things we describe? They'd shut me in an asylum!"

The two were sitting in Denny's apartment, once more conventionally
clothed, and again their normal five feet eleven, and six feet two.

The reassembling of Denny's body had done odd things. Jim had set the
broken bone with rough skill before stepping under the glass bell; and
the fracture had been healed automatically by the growing deposit of
protoplasmic substance resulting wh