The light was no longer in masses but in streams—streams that crawled and shivered and shook, as though in it spirit things were immersed and were struggling to break from it. The fungal growths were everywhere now. There were mushrooms with pilei bigger than umbrellas. Shapes as grotesque as if seen through the eyes of madness. There were growths, too, that one could almost think beautiful, and masses hideous and slimy as so much octopi. A strong and most unpleasant odor filled the place. And here and there, almost everywhere in the strange fungoid growth, were things creeping, crawling—things for which I can find no name, and for some of them I am glad that I can not.
It was a weird scene, an indescribable scene, one horrible, mysterious and yet strangely wonderful too. A place gloomy and weird as any ever conceived by Dante or Doré. And through it human forms were moving, and its stillness was broken by human voices, raised in song; and moving with these human beings, these inhabitants of a world as alien as that of Venus or of Mars, were Rhodes and I, we two modern men from the great modern world above—the wonderful, the awful world of the sun.
Of a sudden an exclamation rang out—an exclamation that stilled the song on the instant, brought the party to an abrupt halt and the bow of Narkus and that of Thumbra from the quivers.
The exclamation had broken from Rhodes; he was pointing into the gloom off to our right, a tense, expectant look on his face.
I peered with straining eyes but could see nothing there. A few moments passed, and nothing was seen. I then turned to Rhodes to ask him what it was; but the words I was about to speak were never uttered. Instead, I gave something like a cry and whirled round. For a sound had come from out the fungoid growth and the darkness behind us—a sound as of a slimy thing moving, slipping.
Nothing, however, was to be seen there, and silence, utter silence had fallen upon the spot—silence suddenly broken by another exclamation from Rhodes.
"Great heaven!" I cried as I whirled back to the direction in which he was pointing. "They are all around us!"
"Look, Bill—look at that!"
I saw nothing for a second or two. And then, off in the darkness beyond the reach of our lights, it was as though, in one spot, the darkness itself was moving—yes, the darkness itself.
"See that, Bill?"
I saw it. And the next instant I saw two great eyes, eyes that were watching us—and moving.
Chapter 31
"Gogrugron!"
They were visible for a second or two only—those great eyes burning with a greenish fire.
"Where did they go?" exclaimed Rhodes.
"And," said I, "what can it be? An ape-bat?"
"That is no ape-bat."
He turned to Narkus.
"Loopmuke?" he queried.
No; it was not a loopmuke. But what it was neither Narkus' pantomime nor Drorathusa's could tell us.
"I don't think," Milton said, "that they know what it is themselves."
"There!" I cried, whirling round. "There's that other thing again—the thing behind us!"
"I heard nothing."
"I heard something, I tell you. That mystery with the eyes is not the
