Communing thus with our thoughts and quite indescribably stirred, Hopkins cried out, “Beat it. Here they are again,” and there, rising gently from the depth below our elevation came the little flotilla of bobbing manikins, announced even before they were seen, by a shrill chatter, and squealy laughter, which consorted naturally with their queer, aged, wrinkled faces, the fluttering tunics entangling their pipe-stem legs, and the odd diaphaneity of their bodies.
I am not a naturalist, Mr. Link, and there are some things in nature I cannot reconcile myself to: snakes, caterpillars and BUGS.
We were under our coverts in a jiffy; the celerity of our movement was something like the noiseless tail-up concealment in the ground of prairie dogs. And our eyes became as active as our legs; not an optic nerve but was strained to the full extent of its reportorial powers. One feature of their machinery, I had not noticed before. Flexible tubes tied the balloons to their bodies, and these again were connected under the sleeves of their tunics with the lengths of pipe they carried in their hands. The swelling and deflation of these balloons seemed most delicately under their control, and at times they would, like a swarm of flies, rise and fall, in a perfect mimicry of a fly’s uneven and dancing undulations. It was most curious and utterly inexplicable, and then too when they moved to and fro or advanced, the tubes were held behind them, and some propulsion ensued which carried them on their flight, though it was quite evident that any volition on their part was quite overcome by the prevalent currents of air. The latter they avoided by rising above or sinking below it, and at the moment, as we gazed, they surrendered themselves to the wind blowing about us at our elevation, and were tossed along it, in shrill enjoyment, and vanished westward. They were absorbed in misty veils that were drawn between us.
Once more we came out of our hiding with a ludicrous astonishment painted on our faces. Hopkins looked the least bit scared. Almost instantly he expressed his feelings.
“They certainly have me guessing. Old guys, all of ’em. Perhaps they’re terribly old, and perhaps that’s the way up here—everything very old shrinks, wrinkles and wears glasses.”
“Glasses,” called out Goritz. “Yes! I saw that, and do you know for more than a week my eyes have ached. It’s something to do with this strange light.”
Then came the confession from all of us, that we had each been bothered with our eyes. Shooting pains, blurry outlines, whizzing sensations in our heads, and a sense of dryness of the eyelids, as though they had been overheated by a mild exzema of the skin. It was surprising, the moment we attended to the matter, how urgent our complaints became, and how communicative we were about it.
“I feel sure,” said Goritz, “that we are bewitched by this light. These odd creatures have become crinkled and gnarled by it. They’re a race of dwarfs, prematurely aged and megalocephalic.”
This last daring incursion into the Professor’s domain of reserved scientific language rather startled us. “’Peaching on the Professor’s preserves,” whispered Hopkins. But the Professor did not resent it. It was some minutes later, after an expectant silence, that he very demurely suggested that we all put on our snow goggles. And we did. It seemed to help.
Of course, considerably flustered over the unexpected appearance in this utterly unexpected manner of the aboriginals of this enigmatical region, we undertook to examine the narrow and deep little valley into which our visitors had descended. It was a rough scramble, as the sides of the pit proved not only very steep but unreasonably rocky, sharp and precipitous. When we finally reached the bottom, and the Professor exultantly told us the rock was a dolomite, that it contained coral remains and brachiopodous shells that were Devonian, we found ourselves in a peculiar place.