ransparent, glistened in varying colors to indicate that they contained
various liquids whose purpose could only be guessed at.

Living cisterns, never to move, never to know life even in the
monotonous, joyless way of the normal worker, they hung there to be
dipped into whenever the master that reigned over this inferno, or his
immediate underlings, desired some of their contents!

* * * * *

In addition, there were several each of two forms of termite soldier
such as they had not seen before, standing rigidly at attention about
the place.

At the door, of course, were the two creatures with the enormous
mandibles that had escorted the pigmy men to the larder. But these
others were as different as though they belonged to a different race.

Three had heads that were hideously bulbous in form, and which were
flabby and elastic instead of armored with thick horn as were the heads
of the usual soldiers. Like living syringes, these heads were;
perambulating bulbs filled with some defensive or offensive liquid to be
squirted out at the owner's will.

The third kind of soldier was represented in the spectacle of termites
with heads that were huge and conical, resembling bungs, or the tapered
cylindrical corks with which one plugs a bottle. These, Denny knew from
his studies, had been evolved by termite biology for the purpose of
temporarily stopping up any breach in termitary mound-wall or tunnel
while the workers could assemble and repair the chink with more solid
and permanent building material.

* * * * *

But how fantastically, gruesomely different these colossal figures
looked, here in the deepest stronghold of termitedom, than as scurrying
little insects viewed under an entomologist's glass! And how appallingly
different was the viewpoint from which they were now being
observed--here where the human observers were equal in size, and doomed
at any moment perhaps to be paralyzed and piled with the helpless live
things that made up the rest of the "larder"!

And the presiding genius of this mysterious, underground
storeroom--where was it? Denny and Jim looked about over the rows of
live food, and among the termite soldiers with their odd heads, in vain
for a creature that might conceivably be the super-insect that so
omnipotently ruled the mound.

Off in a corner they saw two more termites--standard worker types,
standing motionless side by side, wit