But if Matthew Breen could not hear, he could see. The slightest inattention at his guard duty at that second would have resulted in two deaths. But he was on the alert.
Jim saw the sun blotted out swiftly, saw a huge, pinkish-gray wall swoop down between him and Denny, and the deadly horde of termites pursuing them. Then he saw another pinkish-gray wall, in which was set something—a shallow, regular, hollowed plateau—that looked familiar. The patty-dish in which he and Denny had been carried to this place of death and horror.
Jim knew he could not clamber into that great plateau; he was too exhausted. But the necessity was spared him.
The patty-dish scooped down under him, uprooting huge trees, digging up square yards of earth all around him. He was flung from his feet to roll helplessly beside the unconscious Dennis, as men and earth and all were shifted from the dish's rim to its center.
Like gigantic express elevator the dish soared dizzily up in the tremendous hand that held it, over the vast pile of the mound city, over all the surrounding landscape, and was borne back toward Matt's automobile—and toward the laboratory where the bulk of their bodies waited, in protoplasmic form, in the dome of the glass bell.
CHAPTER XI
Back to Normal
"I think," said Jim, loading his pipe, "that now I really will settle down. No other adventures could seem like much after the one"—he repressed a shiver—"we've just passed through."
"And I think," said Dennis, following his own line of thought, "that as far the world of science goes, my exploring has been for nothing. Try to tell sober scientists of the specially evolved, huge-brained thing that rules the termite tribe and forms and holds the marvelous organization it has? Try to tell them—now that Matt has to stubbornly decided to keep secret his work with element eighty-five—that we were reduced to a quarter of an inch in height, and that we went through a mound and saw at first hand the things we describe? They'd shut me in an asylum!"
The two were sitting in Denny's apartment, once more conventionally clothed, and again their normal five feet eleven, and six feet two.