He was drifting quietly along on the surface of a placid stream. A few moments ago all had been broad daylight, but now all was dark as a Porovian night. Every ripple of the water echoed above and to both sides, thus leading Cabot to infer that he was in some subterranean grotto. So he struck out for the shore.
The shore proved to be a precipitous wall; but finally, after groping along it for a way, he came to a ledge about a foot above the surface, and onto this ledge he pulled himself. Shedding his toga, he wrung it out, and finally massaged himself with it into a state resembling dryness. But his wings and false antennae were gone, and his radio apparatus seemed to be a hopeless mess.
At any rate, the air was fortunately not cold in the cave, so he lay down on the ledge and slept.
[VIII]
BEASTS OF THE DARK
So Cabot lay and slept on the narrow ledge about a foot above the surface of the subterranean stream of the caves of the lost river of Kar. His sleep was fitful and troubled by dreams, through which there stalked Formians, and ant-bears, and Prince Yuri, and dead Cupian babies.
Often he would awake with a shriek of horror as some one of the nightmare figures became too realistic. His cry would echo and reverberate throughout distant vaulted arches of the cave, until finally it would vanish amid the dripping and rippling of the waters, and all would be silence again. Then Cabot would drift off once more into troubled sleep.
One of his dreams was that he was lying in the Stillman infirmary at Harvard with cancer of the foot. His was an unusually rapid case, for he could actually watch the progress of the disease. At first the sensations were rather pleasant, as though some one were massaging the foot, while he could see the skin peel off and gradually disappear. But, as the disease worked its way deeper into the tissues, the feeling gradually changed to a mild pain. A heavy weight seemed to be holding his leg motionless, although he could see nothing on the hospital cot to account for it. The bones of his foot now lay exposed, and the blood oozed out between them as though it were being sucked by a vacuum cleaner.
Then suddenly such an intense pain shot through his leg as to cause him to wake with a start, and to jerk his leg and shake it violently as though to rid his foot of the disease. The result was a loud splash in the water close by. Quite evidently some creature had been suckling and gnawing his foot, and had been kicked by him into the quiet stream.