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ore, while the world writhed and baked in the throes of the last great drought she had been compelled to venture into the unknown land. The streams and lagoons had dried; those of the animals that did not perish outright migrated, and Suma had followed the living stream as a matter of self-preservation for, without food and water, life could not be sustained. But the venture had proved painful in at least one respect for men dwelt along the border of the master river, and in the very first encounter with them Suma had suffered the loss of one ear--neatly shorn from her head by the broad, bamboo blade of a Cantana arrow. She was glad to escape even with such sacrifice; but she never forgot the injury. The haunts of the man-creatures were avoided thereafter, as well as their trails and everything else that savored of them. This dread she had tried to impart to her offspring. In the height of his powers, Warruk was ready to ignore the warning. Then, too, the sun now shone with an unusual brilliancy; fiery tongues from the sky seemed to lap up the water in the lakes and marshes, leaving nothing but vast areas of cracked and peeling mudflats sprinkled with brown, withered reeds that were a pitiful reminder of the waving expanses of green where the red-headed blackbirds had trilled their cheery song. The drying-up process was gradual, yet swift. The crocodiles sensed its coming and buried themselves deep in the mud to aestivate until the coming of the rainy season; also the lung-fishes, queer little creatures resembling tadpoles, which could live week after week under the hard crust with only a pinhole in the surface through which to breathe. As the water receded, the finny tribe proper imprisoned in the landlocked bodies became more and more crowded. They struggled in frantic masses, churning up the mud from the bottom so that the liquid in which they swam was thick and black. The smaller ones attacked one another savagely tearing at fin and tail; and the larger devoured their mutilated remains in the mad struggle to prolong life. But there came the day of complete annihilation when there was not water enough left to support the survivors; they slid feebly through the mire, threw themselves clear of it onto the sun-baked mudflats surrounding it, and then died. The hordes that perished were numberless. And the stench of the decaying masses that dotted the country for hundreds upon hundreds of miles hung over the pant
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