And almost, he could hear thoughts, speaking in his mind. The age-old thoughts of the trees.
Farris felt a freezing dread. He did not want to listen to the thoughts of the trees.
And the slow, steady pulsing of darkness and light went on. Days and nights, rushing with terrible speed over the hunati.
Lys, stumbling along the trail beside him, uttered a little cry of terror. A snaky black vine had darted out of the bush at her with cobra swiftness, looping swiftly to encircle her body.
Farris swung his bolo, slashed through the vine. But it struck out again, growing with that appalling speed, its tip groping for him.
He slashed again with sick horror, and pulled the girl onward, on up the side of the plateau.
“I am afraid!” she gasped. “I can hear the thoughts — the thoughts of the forest!”
“It’s your own imagination!” he told her. “Don’t listen!”
But he too could hear them! Very faintly, like sounds just below the threshold of hearing. It seemed to him that every minute — or every minute-long day — he was able to get more clearly the telepathic impulses of these organisms that lived an undreamed-of life of their own, side by side with man, yet forever barred from him, except when man was hunati.