"Why, good Lord, Lea," he gasped. "There could have been more red ants on us. One of them dropped off while we were getting small—then while we slept it found us and attacked us! That was the monster that nearly got us!"
Just an ant! What an amazing difference size could make!
Surely they still had much to learn about this weird traveling!
Carter could see that the cliffs here were honeycombed with tunnel-passages and cave-mouths. After resting a while they took more of the drug and went on.
They merely touched the pellet to the tongue. The dim landscape began slowly opening; and at intervals they repeated the tiny doses of the drug. They were walking forward, Lea eagerly leading now. To Carter it seemed that they had mounted a hill, topped a rise—emerged at last into the open. He stood amazed. The void of sky here suddenly showed infinite distance—a gigantic black firmament. In a great dome, myriads of stars were glittering—gems strewn upon the black velvet of the heavens, with faint effulgent patches of remote nebulæ, star-dust strewn across the sky!
"There—the sky of my world," Lea murmured. "We need more of the drug now, George. Still, we are so very big—it would be dangerous to go forward in a size like this."
They tasted the drug several times. Lea would not let him move more than a few steps each time down the small declivity. Then they came to where the ground now seemed fairly level. It slowly shifted and crawled under their feet as they dwindled. And suddenly, as they walked slowly forward, Carter was aware that the ground wasn't rocky under them now. It was softer, with little scrunching ridges and lumps which he could feel through the battered soles of his shoes.
"There is the lake," Lea said presently. Her hand flung out with a gesture. He stared to one side with a new awe. Twenty or thirty feet away he had noticed a little patch of yellow sheen on the ground. But it was hundreds of feet away now—a pool of shimmering water with a path of glowing starlight upon its rippled surface. Behind it there seemed to be wooded hills ... tiny trees....
Quite suddenly—so suddenly indeed that the thing momentarily made Carter's head reel—his viewpoint changed. As though his eyes were thousands of feet in the air, he felt himself dizzily staring down at a little town of streets and buildings that clustered along the nearer lakeshore. He saw himself as he actually was, a monstrous Titan, standing here with his head reared thousands of feet into the sky and Lea's world shimmering peacefully in the starlight almost at his feet!