There were supplies of clothing in the ship—jackets, knee-length trousers, silken blouses, boots, and even snug-fitting, fashionable caps. Very unlike the ragged wanderers of the mountainous wastes were the three who stood safely to windward of a spouting fumerole.
Mud, coughed hoarsely from a hot throat, and green, billowing gas!—there was nothing now to show that here was the scene of a companion's last moments. With heads bared to the steady breeze that had been their undoing, they stood silent for long minutes.
Behind them, at a still safer distance, where no chance flicker of a fire-god's finger might strike him down as it had the white man, a black figure danced absurdly from foot to foot and indulged in unexpected gyrations of joy.
For did not Towahg hold in one hand a most marvelous weapon of shining, keen-edged metal, with a blade that was longer than his two hands? What member of the tribe had ever seen such an indescribably glorious thing? And, lacking the words even to propound that question, Towahg spun himself in still tighter spirals of ecstasy.
Then there was the ax! Not made of stone but fashioned from the same metal! And besides this a magic thing for which as yet there was not even a name! It made flashing reflections in the sun; and if one held it just so, and moved one's head before it, it showed a quite remarkably attractive face of a man who was more than half ape—though Towahg had never yet been able to catch that man beyond the magic that the white men called "mirror."
He was still enthralled in his grotesque posturing when Diane looked down from the floating ship.
"He'll be the Lord Chief Voodoo Man for the whole tribe," she said, and, for the first time since they had stood at the fumerole, she managed to smile. "And now," she asked, "are we off? What comes next?"
Chet's hand was on a metal ball in a crudely constructed cage of metal bars. He looked at Harkness, and, at the other's almost imperceptible nod, he moved the ball forward and up.