to
sparkle with a sort of fiendish intelligence.

"Tweel saw it, too, and let out a screech of anger, and the creature
rose on two pencil-thin legs and scuttled off with a half-terrified,
half defiant squeak. It darted past us into the darkness too quickly
even for Tweel, and as it ran, something waved on its body like the
fluttering of a cape. Tweel screeched angrily at it and set up a shrill
hullabaloo that sounded like genuine rage.

"But the thing was gone, and then I noticed the weirdest of imaginable
details. Where it had squatted on the floor was--a book! It had been
hunched over a book!

"I took a step forward; sure enough, there was some sort of inscription
on the pages--wavy white lines like a seismograph record on black sheets
like the material of Tweel's pouch. Tweel fumed and whistled in wrath,
picked up the volume and slammed it into place on a shelf full of
others. Leroy and I stared dumbfounded at each other.

"Had the little thing with the fiendish face been reading? Or was it
simply eating the pages, getting physical nourishment rather than
mental? Or had the whole thing been accidental?

"If the creature were some rat-like pest that destroyed books, Tweel's
rage was understandable, but why should he try to prevent an intelligent
being, even though of an alien race, from _reading_--if it _was_ reading? I
don't know; I did notice that the book was entirely undamaged, nor did I
see a damaged book among any that we handled. But I have an odd hunch
that if we knew the secret of the little cape-clothed imp, we'd know the
mystery of the vast abandoned city and of the decay of Martian culture.

"Well, Tweel quieted down after a while and led us completely around
that tremendous hall. It had been a library, I think; at least, there
were thousands upon thousands of those queer black-paged volumes printed
in wavy lines of white. There were pictures, too, in some; and some of
these showed Tweel's people. That's a point, of course; it indicated
that his race built the city and printed the books. I don't think the
greatest philologist on earth will ever translate one line of those
records; they were made by minds too different from ours.

"Tweel could read them, naturally. He twittered off a few lines, and
then I took a few of the books, with his permission; he said 'no, no!'
to some and 'yes, yes!' to others. Perhaps he kept back the ones his
people needed, or perhaps he let me take the ones he thought we'd