"Ten old females," went on Dolan. "Maybe they can carry twenty eggs apiece in their baskets." He whistled. "That'd be two hundred."
"How," asked Masson, "can you whistle with a mouth like that? I've tried dozens of times."
Dolan chuckled. "It's a gift," he said, and came to his hands and knees.
"Take your time," cautioned Masson. "Just so we keep them in sight."
The ravine narrowed and became a vertical-walled tunnel of thidin vines and scaly gray rock. Masson and Joe Dolan lost sight of the slow-moving party of Frogs at times as they moved along the rim of the deep slot. And as they followed, the floor of the ravine fell further away beneath them; they were climbing high into the stunted cliffs and peaks of Tular's interior.
Night came and they slept above the stopping place of the ten Butrad ancients. And with morning they pushed upward through the soupy fog again.
Abruptly the upward slanting slope ended. They looked out over a roughly oval bowl of slowly writhing mist and cloud.
Dimly they saw the floor of the cavity. Several hundred acres of jungle-clad raggedness. Miniature buttes, mesas, and cliffs split the bowl into a hell of broken terrain, and here and there, near the black pocks of caverns in the rimming cliff walls, there showed little huddles of Butrad huts.
"The Place of Birth," Masson said slowly. "All the tribes of the island must come here."
Dolan nodded and rubbed the palm of his hand over the whetted edge of his hunting knife. "Plenty of guards stationed around the only entrances," he said, "just as you expected. I'll have to kill them off."