re. The
ashes of the fire were undisturbed. Vale's sleeping bag looked as if
it had not been slept in, as if it had only been spread out for the
night before. Lockley went over the rock shelf inch by inch. No red
stains which might be blood. Nothing....

No. In a patch of soft earth between two stones there was a hoofprint.
It was not a footprint. A hoof had made it, but not a horse's hoof,
nor a burro's. It wasn't a mountain sheep track. It was not the track
of any animal known on earth. But it was here. Lockley found himself
wondering absurdly if the creature that had made it would squeak, or
if it would roar. They seemed equally unlikely.

He looked cautiously down at the lake which was almost half a mile
below him. The water was utterly blue. It reflected only the crater
wall and the landscape beyond the area where the volcanic cliffs had
fallen. Nothing moved. There was no visible apparatus set up on the
shore, as Vale had said. But something had happened down in the lake.
Trees by the water's edge were bent and broken. Masses of brushwood
had been crushed and torn away. Limbs were broken down tens of yards
from the water, and there were gullies to be seen wherever there was
soft earth. An enormous wave had flung itself against the nearly
circular boundary of the lake. It had struck like a tidal wave dozens
of feet high in an inland body of water. It was extremely convincing
evidence that something huge and heavy had hurtled down from the sky.

But Lockley saw no movement nor any other novelty in this wilderness.
He heard nothing that was not an entirely normal sound.

But then he smelled something.

It was a horrible, somehow reptilian odor. It was the stench of
jungle, dead and rotting. It was much, much worse than the smell of a
skunk.

He moved to fling himself into flight. Then light blinded him. Closing
his eyelids did not shut it out. There were all colors, intolerably
vivid, and they flashed in revolving combinations and forms which
succeeded each other in fractions of seconds. He could see nothing but
this light. Then there came sound. It was raucous. It was cacophonic.
It was an utterly unorganized tumult in which musical notes and
discords and bellowings and shriekings were combined so as to be
unbearable. And then came pure horror as he found that he could not
move. Every inch of his body had turned rigid as it became filled with
anguish. He felt, all over, as if he were holding a charged wire.