ng in the air, and, scarcely
realizing that he moved, he had turned toward the source of that
calling, stumbling blindly over the flowery sward with no thought in his
music-brimmed mind but the need to answer that lovely, power-vibrant
summoning.

Past him as he went on moved other shapes, little and dark-skinned and
ecstatic, gripped like himself in the hypnotic melody. The tree-folk had
forgotten even their inbred fear at Thag's calling, and walked boldly
through the open twilight, lost in the wonder of the song.

Smith went on with the rest, deaf and blind to the land around him,
alive to one thing only, that summons from the siren tune.
Unrealizingly, he retraced the course of his frenzied flight, past the
trees and bushes he had blundered through, down the slope that led to
the Tree's hollow, through the thinning of the underbrush to the very
edge of the last line of foliage which marked the valley's rim.

* * * * *

By now the calling was so unbearably intense, so intolerably sweet that
somehow in its very strength it set free a part of his dazed mind as it
passed the limits of audible things and soared into ecstasies which no
senses bound. And though it gripped him ever closer in its magic, a sane
part of his brain was waking into realization. For the first time alarm
came back into his mind, and by slow degrees the world returned about
him. He stared stupidly at the grass moving by under his pacing feet. He
lifted a dragging head and saw that the trees no longer rose about him,
that a twilit clearing stretched away on all sides toward the forest rim
which circled it, that the music was singing from some source so near
that--that----

The Tree! Terror leaped within him like a wild thing. The Tree,
quivering with unbearable clarity in the thick, dim air, writhed above
him, blossoms blazing with bloody radiance and every branch vibrant and
undulant to the tune of that unholy song. Then he was aware of the
lovely, luminous whiteness of the priestess swaying forward under the
swaying limbs, her hair rippling back from the loveliness of her as she
moved.

Choked and frenzied with unreasoning terror, he mustered every effort
that was in him to turn, to run again like a mad-man out of that
dreadful hollow, to hide himself under the weight of all space from the
menace of the Tree. And all the while he fought, all the while panic
drummed like mad in his brain, his relentless body plod