e hoppers all mangled.

"Not a snake-devil," Dalgard deduced. As far as he knew only the huge
reptiles or their smaller flying-dragon cousins preyed upon animals.
But a snake-devil would have left no remains of anything as small as a
hopper, one mouthful which could not satisfy its gnawing hunger. And a
flying dragon would have picked the bones clean.

"_Them_!" Sssuri's reply was clipped. "They hunt for sport."

Dalgard felt a little sick. To his mind, hoppers were to be treated
with friendship. Only against the snake-devils and the flying dragons
were the colonists ever at war. No wonder that hopper had run from
them back on the plain during yesterday's journey!

The buildings before them were not the rounded domes of the isolated
farms, but a series of upward-pointing shafts. They walked through a
tall gap which must have supported a now-disappeared barrier gate, and
their passing was signaled by a whispering sound as they shuffled
through the loose sand and soil drifted there in a miniature dune.

This city was in a better state of preservation than any Dalgard had
previously visited. But he had no desire to enter any of the gaping
doorways. It was as if the city rejected him and his kind, as if to
the past that brooded here he was no more than a curious hopper or a
fluttering, short-lived moth bird.

"Old--old and with wisdom hidden in it--" he caught the trail of
thought from Sssuri. And he was certain that the merman was no more at
ease here than he himself was.

As the street they followed brought them into an open space surrounded
by more imposing buildings, they made another discovery which blotted
out all thoughts of forbidden knowledge and awakened them to a more
normal and everyday danger.

A fountain, which no longer played but gave birth to a crooked stream
of water, was in the center. And in the muddy verge of the stream,
pressed deep, was the fresh track of a snake-devil. Almost full grown,
Dalgard estimated, measuring the print with his fingers. Sssuri
pivoted slowly, studying the circle of buildings about them.

"An hour--maybe two--" Dalgard gave a hunter's verdict on the age of
the print. He, too, eyed those buildings. To meet a snake-devil in the
open was one thing, to play hide-and-seek with the cunning monster in
a warren such as this was something else again. He hoped that the
reptile had been heading for the open, but he doubted it. This mass of
buildings would provide just the type o