The others were hovering low, but in a moment Sam had submerged the machine, and we made for the shore under water. In five minutes we struck a soft, muddy bank. He shifted the caterpillar tread into gear. The machine waddled up the muddy slope through the fringe of strange plants, and broke into the weird jungle.
The unearthly radiance of the sky filtered through the jungle roof in a dull crimson light. In the vague, ominous twilight, huge and monstrous tree-trunks rose all about us, as much like great fungoid growths as like normal trees. We pushed through thickets of weird purples and strange metallic hues, under vast masses of hanging green vines, all hung with gigantic incredible blooms that were so bright they seemed to light the dusky forest with their vivid flames of crimson and yellow and blue!
For perhaps three miles the Omnimobile smashed her deliberate way like a gigantic reptilian monster through that strip of weird rotting jungle. Then we emerged on higher ground of a different vegetation.
CHAPTER XIV
The Prey of the Plant
We stopped the machine on the first little eminence of the open space, to survey the vastly different and unfamiliar region that lay before us. It was an open, park-like country. There were broad meadows and low hills covered with a fine turf of luxuriant green grass. There were scattering small groves and great solitary trees so profusely laden with vast purple blossoms that they seemed afire with purple flame.
It was a strange landscape, and not without a certain unearthly beauty. The rich, green plains and hills lay all about before us, scattered with clumps of brilliant purple woodland, and stretching up to the great blue cliffs in the misty distance. A lurid, melancholy weirdness was given to the scene by the awful scarlet glare of the sky.
Presently we rolled on again, across the broad level meadow, and over a little stream, and through a copse of flaming purple trees. We had gone another mile when Sam, still at the controls, shouted above the beating of the engine and the clatter of the machinery.
"Look, Mel! Get it! Shoot! North of us!"