he hilt of his sword-knife he
smashed his way into the house, to course swiftly through the rooms
to the lower floor, and find the entrance to the garden.

Facing that briary jungle on the ground level was a little daunting.
To get through it would be a matter of cutting his way. Could he do it
and escape that bobbing, shrilling thing in the air? A trace of
pebbled path gave him a ghost of a chance, and he knew that these
shrubs tended to grow upward and not mass until they were several feet
above the ground.

Trusting to luck, Dalgard burrowed into the green mass, slashing with
his knife at anything which denied him entrance. He was swallowed up
in a strange dim world wherein dead shrubs and living were twined
together to form a roof, cutting off the light and heat of the sun.
From the sour earth, sliming his hands and knees, arose an
overpowering stench of decay and disturbed mold. In the dusk he had to
wait for his eyes to adjust before he could mark the line of the old
path he had taken for his guide.

Fortunately, after the first few feet, he discovered that the tunneled
path was less obstructed than he had feared. The thick mat overhead
had kept the sun from the ground and killed off all the lesser plants
so that it was possible to creep along a fairly open strip. He was
conscious of the chitter of insects, but no animals lingered here.
Under him the ground grew more moist and the mold was close to mud in
consistency. He dared to hope that this meant he was either
approaching the river or some garden stream feeding into the larger
flood.

Somewhere the squeal of the hunter kept up a steady cry, but, unless
the foliage above him was distorting that sound, Dalgard believed that
the box was no longer directly above him. Had he in some way thrown it
off his trail?

He found his stream, a thread of water, hardly more than a series of
scummy pools with the vegetation still meeting almost solidly over it.
And it brought him to a wall with a drain through which he was sure
he could crawl. Disliking to venture into that cramped darkness, but
seeing no other way out, the scout squirmed forward in slime and muck,
feeling the rasp of rough stone on his shoulders as he made his worm's
progress into the unknown.

Once he was forced to halt and, in the dark, loosen and pick out
stones embedded in the mud bottom narrowing the passage. On the other
side of that danger point, he was free to wriggle on. Could the box
trace