ber. The two gigantic soldiers stopped on the
threshold behind them and took up their standard guard attitudes. The
men stared about them....

It was huge, this chamber, almost as huge as the nursery chamber they
had blundered into. The source of the light was not apparent. It seemed
to glow from walls and floor and ceiling, as though it were a box of
glass with sunshine pouring in at all six sides.

And now horror began to mingle with awed interest, as they took in more
comprehensively the sights in that place, and saw precisely what it
contained.

Denny's apprehensions had been only too well founded. For larder, food
storeroom, the chamber certainly was. But what a storeroom! And in what
state the "food" that stocked it was!

* * * * *

All along the vast floor were laid rows of inert, fantastic bodies.
Insects. The whole small-insect world seemed to be represented here. One
or more of everything that crawled, flew, walked or bored, seemed
gathered in this great room. Grubs, flies, worms, ants, things soft and
slimy and things grim and armored, were piled side by side like
cordwood.

These hulks, nearly all larger than the two quarter-inch men, lay stark
and motionless where they had been dropped. From them came the odor that
had stopped Jim and Denny on the threshold--the strange odor of blended
life and death. And the reason for the queer odor became apparent as the
two gazed more closely at the motionless hulks.

These things, like figures out of a delirium in their great size and
exaggerated frightfulness, were rigid as in death--but they were
nevertheless not dead! Helpless as so many lumps of stone, they were
still horribly, pitifully alive. Paralyzed, in some inscrutable termite
fashion, probably fully conscious of their surroundings, they could only
lie there and wait for their turn to come to be devoured by the
ferocious creatures that had dragged them down to this, the bowels of
the mound city.

Besides these things bound in the rigidity of death, there was more
normal life. There were termites in that vast storeroom, too; but they
were specialized creatures, such as termitary life abounds in, that were
so distorted as to be hardly recognizable as termites.

Along one wall of the place, hanging head down and fastened there for
life, was a row of worker termites whose function was obviously that of
reservoirs: their abdomens, so enormously distended as to be nearly
t