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sight.
    And the sky was not blue, but a peculiar shade of golden green, like nothing I have ever seen before. I looked up—
    And there was a hole in the sky.
    It was almost directly overhead. Round and ragged-edged, and blurry, as if the intervening atmosphere were thick with steamy vapors.
    Of course, I knew what it was.
    The end of the volcanic shaft…
    I looked down at my feet. My boots were sunk in wet loam. Farther up the slope, thick blue moss grew, starred with fleshy blossoms startlingly colored. Salmon pink and sulphur yellow they were, and they resembled sea anemones more than any flowers I had ever seen.
    I raised my eyes.
    Babe lay half sunk in the shoulder of the slope, one of her rotors snapped off near the hub, and the rotorshaft itself still revolving with a flap-flap sound. Her plexiglass cabin was severely dented and cracked by collision with the ground, and one of the two cabin doors was dangling open on broken hinges. That must have been the one I was thrown out of.
    I looked around.
    The chopper had crashed in the slope of a rounded hill near the edge of a wide river or perhaps a lagoon.
    The water was murky, dull green, and bubbly with froth. The fringe of sand about it was dun colored, littered with pebbles and broken shells and bits of wood. The hill rose behind where Babe had come to rest to greet the margin of a forest. It was a most queer looking forest, indeed, made up of tall, feathery trees which looked like an odd cross between bamboo and willow.
    Tree ferns? I thought, my mind spinning crazily.
    The forest was a veritable jungle, and the trees seemed rooted in glaucous, slimy mud. Some of the trees seemed familiar enough—hemlocks and cypresses and soaring redwoods—not too much different from the varieties known to me. But other trees were like nothing known to me: there was a very common broadleafed tree rather resembling a gingko, its little fan-shaped leaves close-set on thick, squirming boughs like the tentacles of an octopus.
    The air was steamy, moist and humid. And rank with the odors of the lagoon, stale mud, stagnant water, rotting vegetation. The ground was thick with moss, but I saw nothing in sight resembling ordinary grass or bushes or flowers.
    From the slight elevation on which I stood, I could see that the cavern world, if such indeed it was—and such indeed it was —was of enormous, virtually unlimited extent.
    I could see no horizon; the steamy air thickened, blurring far details. A ragged line of blue-green trees marked a jungle beyond the little lagoon, with dim hills beyond that, and then—vision ended.
    I had a sudden crazy hunch that this was a land that time had forgotten—a leftover from the prehistoric past! Memories of Burroughs’ Pellucidar, the world at the earth’s core, spun dizzily through my brain.
    Then the mud stirred and a clumsy shape came shouldering between the tall trees, and I stared into a grinning, lipless mouth lined with bristling fangs.
    And the world went mad.
    * * * *
    The thing was only, I suppose, about three or four feet long; but, then, so’s a king cobra. It was squat and bowlegged and built low to the ground and it walked with an odd, lurching waddle of a gait because its hind legs were longer than its forelegs. It was a mossy dark green all over its warty, armored hide, except in throat and belly, where the color paled to a muddy yellow. It had two rows of bony plates down its back and along the length of its thick, alligator-like tail.
    But its head wasn’t much like an alligator’s, being neckless and snubby in the snout. Under bony brows, its eyes were unwinking pits of bright ferocity, unnervingly scarlet. When it grinned, both jaws proved lined with sharp white fangs longer than my fingers.
    There were an awful lot of them, those fangs.…
    It gave me a long, unwinking gaze, then waddled around behind the wrecked helicopter. I heard a pounce, a squeal; and it emerged into view chewing on something that dribbled raw crimson