ed as he felt the thing turn and twist beneath his hand. It was
alive!--writhing!--cold as the body of a monster snake, and just as
vicious and savage in the way that it whipped down and about him in
the gloom of the starless night.

The thing was alive! It threw its coils around his body in an embrace
that left him breathless; a slender tendril was tightening about his
neck; his hands and arms were bound.

His ankle was grasped as he was whirled aloft--a human hand that gripped
him this time--and Sykes, forgetting discretion and the need for
silence, was shouting in the darkness that gave no clue to their
opponent. "Hang on!" he yelled. "I've got you, Mac!"

His shouts were cut short by another serpent shape that thrashed him and
smashed the softer growing things to earth that it might wrap this man,
too, in its deadly coils.

McGuire felt his companion's hold loosen as he was lifted from the
ground; there were other arms flailing about him--living, coiling things
that seemed to fight one with another for this prize. Abruptly,
blindingly, the scene was vividly etched before him: the strange trees,
the ferns, the writhing and darting serpent-arms! They were illumined in
a dazzling, white light!

He was in the air, clutched strangely in constricting arms; an odor of
rotted flesh was in his nostrils, sickening, suffocating! Beyond and
almost beneath him a cauldron of green gaped open, and he saw within it
a pool of thick liquid that eddied and steamed to give off the stench
of putrescence.

All this in an instant of vision--and in that instant he knew the death
they courted. It was a giant pod that held that pool--one of the growths
he had seen ranged out like a line of sentinels. But the terrible
tendrils that had been coiled and at rest were wrapped about him now,
drawing him to that reeking pool of death and the waiting thick lips
that would close above him. Sykes, too! The tendrils that had clutched
him were whisking his helpless body where another gaping mouth was
open--

* * * * *

And then, in the blazing light that was more brilliant than any light of
day in this world, the hold about McGuire relaxed. He saw, as he fell,
the thick, green lips snap shut; and the arms that had held him pulled
back into harmless, tight-wound coils.

Their bodies crashed to earth where a great fern bent beneath them to
cushion their fall. And the men lay silent and gasping for great choking
b