t shoal
of the radiant shapes storm by, as if with the rainbow entangled in
their wings. He wondered upon what foray they were bent; and now for
the first time he realized, with a creeping of the flesh, what it was
that had overtaken the man whose skeleton he had found in the grass.
The shoal swept out over the lake a little way, and then down the
shore toward the left; and Grom drew a long breath as he assured
himself that their course was taking them far from the fires of A-ya
and Mo.

When Grom lowered his eyes to earth again he started. On the side of
the stump of a fallen tree, out in the glade not more than eight or
ten yards distant, clung one of the monsters, scintillating blue-green
and amethyst in the full blaze of the sun. Its wings, exquisitely
netted and of crystal transparency, were tinged with an ineffable
purple iridescence. Its jointed body, slightly longer than Grom's arm,
was nearly as thick as his wrist, and ended at the tail with a
formidable double claw. Its six legs, arranged in three pairs under
the thorax, were armed on the inner sides with powerful spines,
needle-pointed and steel hard, with which to grip and hold its
victims. The thorax, from the back of which sprouted the four great
wings, was of the thickness of Grom's forearm, while its head was as
big as Grom's two great fists put together. It was this head which
held Grom's fascinated gaze, giving him more of the sensation of cold
fear than he had ever known before. More than two-thirds of the head
consisted of a pair of huge, globose eyes, without pupil, ethereally
transparent, yet unfathomable. From the depths of them flamed a
ceaselessly changing radiance of blue-green, purple and violet. Grom
found the stare of those blank, pupilless eyes almost intolerable.

It was plainly straight at him, through the ineffectual screen of the
leafage, that the dreadful insect was staring. At first it stared with
the back of its head. Then, very deliberately, it turned its head
completely around, without moving its body a hair-breadth, till its
mouth was in the same plane with its back. This gave Grom a sense of
disgust, and his shrinking dread began to give way to a sort of rage.

Then he took note of the monster's mouth--and understood those great
cup-shaped wounds on the woman and the child. The mouth took up the
remaining third of the head, and seemed to consist of globular discs
working one over the other, so as either to cut cleanly or to gr