Even normally, a blight seems to spread swiftly. And to Farris and the other two, slowed down as they were, this blight was a raging cold fire of death.
It flashed up trunks and limbs and aerial roots of the majestic banyans, eating leaf and spore and bud. It ran triumphantly across the ground, over vine and grass and shrub, bursting up other trees, leaping along the airy bridges of lianas.
And it leaped among the vines that enmeshed the two men! In mad death-agonies the creepers writhed and tightened.
Farris felt the musty mould in his mouth and nostrils, felt the construction as of steel cables crushing the life from him. The world seemed to darken—
Then a steel blade hissed and flashed, and the pressure loosened. Lys’ voice was in his ears, Lys’ hand trying to drag him from the dying, tightening creepers that she had partly slashed through. He wrenched free. “My brother!” she gasped.
* * *
With the bolo he sliced clumsily through the mass of dying writhing snake-vines that still enmeshed Berreau.
Berreau’s face appeared, as he tore away the slashed creepers. It was dark purple, rigid, his eyes staring and dead. The tightening vines had caught him around the throat, strangling him.
Lys knelt beside him, crying wildly. But Farris dragged her to her feet.
“We have to get out of here! He’s dead — but I’ll carry his body!”