For some time he nursed his aching head. As his senses recovered from the shock, he realized that he had fallen through the mouth of a small tunnel which led away at right angles from the river. So into this tunnel he crawled.
In spite of being on his hands and knees, he made faster progress than he had along the ledge, for now there was no danger of falling off into the river, and hence no need of feeling his way so carefully. Thus he pressed rapidly on for quite a distance, in fact until the passageway enlarged and he was able once more to stand erect.
“Yahoo!” he shouted, and the reverberations of his voice showed him that he was in a large vaulted cave, very similar to that through which flowed the river Kar, except that here there was no river. The reverberations were followed by a fluttering noise, like that of a flurry of dried leaves before an October storm. It was as though his earthly voice had had some tangible physical effect in stirring up a disturbance in this grotto. But the exact nature of the disturbance he could not imagine. He did not need to imagine it, however, for in a moment it burst upon him, a fluttering shower of winged creatures about the size of sparrows. But their wings, as they brushed his face—and his hands, which promptly tried to ward them off—appeared to be leathery and cold, rather than warm, and covered with feathers.
“Bats!” exclaimed Cabot, as he reached out and snatched one of the small creatures from the air. But his immediate reward was a sharp bite across one of his fingers, which caused him to drop his captive with an “Ow!”
As he again fell to work defending his head, he noted—ever the scientist—that the teeth marks on his injured finger felt as though they extended clear across the two rows on each side. This was not the localized bite of the incisors of a bat. What could these creatures be?
To satisfy his curiosity, he grabbed another one of them from the air, and encircled its jaws with his left hand before it had time to bite him very badly. Then holding it firmly by the head, as it struggled wildly to escape, he ran the fingers of his right hand appraisingly over its body.
Its head was long and rectangular, and much too large for its body, judged by the make-up of earthly flying creatures. Its skin was cold and scaly like that of a lizard. Its wings were bat-like, except that the skin was stretched on a single long finger, instead of on four. The other fingers were short and free, and equipped with sharp claws. The back of the wing, along the arm part, was covered with long feathery scales. The tail was as out of proportion as the head, and sported a fan of scales at its tip. The smell was nauseatingly like that of a snake.
It was evident that he held in his hand a small variety of pterodactyl, apparently similar in every respect to the reptilian forerunners of birds on our own planet. But its companions were becoming altogether too numerous and troublesome to leave him any leisure for further scientific investigation of his captive. So, casting it from him, he set about defending himself.
A perfect swarm of the filthy little creatures now encompassed him in the pitch darkness of the cave. They battered against him, and tore at his naked body with their sharp claws and teeth. More and more of them kept arriving, so that it soon became evident that he must escape from them in some way and in some haste, in order to avoid being overpowered.