Doggo carried me aboard, and we started, Satan at the levers and Doggo standing guard over me. But whether this was to protect me from Satan, or to keep me from falling out again, I could not say.
We cruised along for several hours over much the same sort of country as I had seen before, except that we crossed several rivers, and once a small lake.
At last the ship hovered and landed on top of what seemed to be a helter-skelter pile of exaggerated toy building blocks, exactly in keeping with the size of the ants. As far as the eye could see on all sides, these blocks were heaped. They resembled a group of Pueblo Indian dwellings.
Doggo and the fierce ant-man whom I called Satan now picked me up in their jaws, the former gently and the latter not so gently, and carried me out of the airplane and down an inclined runway into the interior of the edifice. The passage was long, narrow, dark and winding, but presently we emerged into a room about thirty feet square by ten feet high, lighted by narrow windows opening toward the western sky. That is, I call it “western,” for it was in this direction that the sky turned pink at eventide.
In this room I was laid on the floor. The unpleasant ant-man departed, and Doggo placed himself on guard in the doorway.
Presently two strange ant-men entered, carrying a couch, which they set down in one corner of the room. Then they walked several times around me, viewing me from all sides with evident interest, until, at a stiffening and quivering of Doggo’s antennae, they hurriedly left the room. I noticed that Doggo no longer carried the green weapon, which seemed strange, as he was evidently on guard.
Then I fell to wondering about the couch. It was a simple affair, and yet quite evidently intended for a bed. Upholstered with some kind of dark blue cloth, at that!
“What need have ants of a bed?” I mused. “Certainly they cannot lie down; and, even if they could, such a couch as this would be of little use to one of them, for this is only a man-size couch, whereas these ants are about ten feet in length!”
My perplexity was tinged with a hope that there might be human beings here.
My perplexity and my hope were both increased by the return of one of the ants who had brought the couch, this time bearing a sleeveless shirt or toga of white matted material, like very thin silk felt, reaching about to my knees, with a Grecian wave design in light blue around the bottom edge and around the neck and armholes. But what increased my perplexity still further, and at the same time destroyed most of my hope, was the presence of two vertical slits, with the same blue trimming, in the upper part of the back.