Abruptly and without slackening its pace the hairy thing uttered a piercing shriek like nothing Dylara had ever heard before. Twice more the awful sound rang out; and then, far ahead, came an answering cry faint and wavering.
Instantly the creature put on an added burst of speed, rocketing through the branches in dizzying bounds that threatened to tear away Dylara's none too certain hold. So swift was the pace now that within a few minutes a wide clearing loomed ahead and her captor began to slip groundward.
Suddenly the hairy creature halted on a wide limb bordering the clearing as a host of shadowy forms rose around him. There was not enough light for Dylara to make use of her eyes but she sensed these were the figures of creatures similar to the one which held her.
They chattered shrilly among themselves in a completely unfamiliar tongue for several moments, then all of them moved ahead a short distance until the clearing itself was reached.
Dylara was expecting the entire party to descend to the ground. But instead they began to climb higher and higher. At last the one carrying her came to a halt well within the embrace of a jungle patriarch; and at that moment Uda, the moon, appeared from behind a cloud and poured her silver rays into the clearing.
For the first time since her capture she was able to see well enough to distinguish objects. She was surrounded by a group of some ten or twelve man-like beings—but beings like nothing she had ever dreamed of!
All were well over six feet in height, but so thin in body they seemed much taller. All were naked except for girdles of grass about their hips, the rest of their bodies being covered with monkey-like hair. Their arms and legs were incredibly long and thin, their toes long and prehensile. Each face was hairless and almost perfectly round, containing small beady eyes, a brief blob of nose, a tiny lipless mouth and almost no chin at all. It was more the face of some particularly repellent insect—a comparison that leaped to Dylara's mind at sight of the long hairy limbs, the thin torsos pinched in deeply at the waist and the quick, jerky way in which they moved restlessly about her.
The one holding her let her slide from its back and the others moved closer, reaching out to pluck at her tunic with abnormally long nailless fingers, their voices like the rising skirl of an insect swarm.
Angrily she pushed away the exploring fingers. "Who are you?" she cried, "and what do you want of me?"