"Our children," he whispered softly, and her eyes dropped as purple spread slowly upward from her rounded firm neck.
She pressed his hand timidly; dropped it, and started up the rocky ledge that led from the lake's left-hand shore. And behind her climbed the frog men from the village of New Crayton.
Their canoes they had concealed in the tangled jungle growth. From here their feet would have to serve—their feet and the tough sandals of vallid hide that they now donned for the first time.
The sheer escarpment gave way to a vast level plain of jungle growth and swampy reeds. The jungle was almost impenetrable and so they decided to swim up the river. The eternal clouds of Venus seemed to have thinned as they climbed for now they stood within a grayish dome that extended a hundred feet or more on every hand.
As they approached the river they saw a huge raft of thidin bound about with sturdy vegetable withes and having a score of sturdy poles lashed to its rough surface. But for the increased range of their vision they would have missed the man-made little island.
Masson trimmed the green shoots that were already sprouting from the pole he had chosen. His bone knife broke as he hacked at a tough sprout.
"With our first iron," he said, "I will make an axe. The axe and the machete are the first tools of civilization."
Twice they climbed past mighty waterfalls again. They came, at last, to the fertile central plateau that stretched for three hundred miles away to the north and south and a third of that distance before them.
Four native villages they passed and four times Irene used her meager command of the Butrads' tongue to tell them that they were on pilgrimage to the God-From-The-Clouds, and that she was to be the god's bride. Apparently the ordinary inter-tribal warfare of the Butrads was held in abeyance where the God-From-The-Clouds was concerned.
They crossed park-like country, where beneath the pale-green trees a tough spear-bladed grass grew, and they slept at night in the shelter of broad-leaved trees that roofed over several acres of ground so completely that there were patches of dusty earth.