Whipping around a corner of the hut, he had time for a quick squint at the chanters. Kho alone had looked weirdly alien. Two hundred like him—!
Led by a dozen bulgy figures in streaming robes, masked and decorated in brass, the natives were swarming over the sand toward the fugitives. They had evidently been busy. Above a distant cluster of low buildings, a column of smoke spiraled upward suggestively.
Kho led the way at a flowing gallop over a sandstone ridge and down a long slope toward what looked like the junction of two gullies.
"The canal," he wheezed. "With luck, we may find a boat."
A frenzied screech went up as the mob topped the ridge and regained sight of them. Charlie, having all he could do to breathe in the thin air, tried to shake his wrist loose. Now that they were descending the slope, he saw where the water was. They slid down a four-foot drop in a cloud of fine, choking dust, and were faced by several puntlike craft stranded on the mudflat beyond. The water was fifty feet further.
"We should have gone down-stream," said Kho, "but we can wade."
Their momentum carried them several steps into the mud before Charlie realized how wrong that was. Then, as they floundered about to regain the solid bank, it became apparent that they would never reach it in time.
"They are catching us," rasped Kho.
The howling crowd was scarcely a hundred yards away. The heat waves shimmered above the reddish desert sand until the Martians were blurred before Charlie's burning eyes. His feet churned the clinging mud, and he felt as if he were running in a dream.
"I'm sorry you're in it, too," he panted.