Then they were coming, and Nixon lay on his side, with his back to the wind and rain. For them there was shelter, here against the giant figure so that in a moment a hundred or more of them were huddling here. He lay tensed, motionless. Down his length he could dimly see the mass of tiny figures crouched in the lee of his body, with the choking mists and the rain whirling high above them. Presently he could feel the rivulets of water backing up against him, as though he were a monstrous dam stretched here. He realized that his body was blocking the water, keeping it from surging like a flood upon the Orites he was sheltering.
He said, "You're all right now, Nona? Better now?"
She was crouching against his chest. He heard her answering call. "Yes. Oh yes, giant."
He lay through an interval. And now through the storm came a burst of lightning—a crackling burst with a roar like thunder. But it was very different lightning from anything Nixon had ever seen! It seemed to strike one of the distant cliffs. There was a sustained crackling for a second or two, then an orange-green burst of light. It was like a bomb striking the cliff-face, with masses of rock hurled into the blur of the air. A chunk, perhaps as big as Nixon's forearm, fell clattering across the slope. Now he saw the meaning of the purple light-fire like a barrage around and above the pyramid-city. It was a barrage of some strange electronic nature, to act like a lightning rod. Presently a crackling bolt hit it—a great burst, a blob of pyrotechnics in the air above the city roof. It crackled for a second and then harmlessly was swept away, dissipating into the murk.
An hour passed, with the storm raging while Nixon lay taut with the crowd of Orites huddled against him. Then it seemed that the wind and rain were lessening. And presently a rift came in the wheeling orange clouds—a rift with a pallid opalescent light breaking through. The Orana moon. As the clouds at last wheeled and swung away, the firmament of stars was spread overhead—pin-points of fire in the Orana night-sky, with the moon a huge crescent of opalescent shimmer. It bathed the glistening wet slope, strewn with the tiny dead figures. It edged with pallid silver the frowning ramparts of the distant mountains....
Presently the daylight came. There was a swift, brightening twilight of flat, pale glow; and then all in a few minutes there was full daylight as the sun mounted above the cliffs. Out here beyond Mars, it was a sun small and pale. Nixon's first Orana day. The sunlight had warmth, a grateful warmth that soon was drying him. In it the bound Nixon lay quiet. Momentarily the giant was ignored. The wet slope was steaming in the sunlight. Nona and the Orites whom he had sheltered had fled into the city as soon as the storm abated. The barrage glow had gone from the pyramids. Gorts were carrying in the dead and wounded.
A queer ironic feeling of his helplessness was in Nixon as he lay waiting, wondering what these strange little captors would try to do to him next. This world of civilized humans all in miniature, so tiny, made it seem absurd that he should have to lie here, patiently waiting for what would happen to him. But every moment as he gazed around at the busy little Orite world, revealed by the daylight, his respect for it grew. Quite evidently these were a scientific people. A totally different science from anything on Earth, so that he could never grasp it. A science, compared to his own Earth-world, which in many ways was probably less advanced, yet in other ways more so.
Beyond the three pyramid-cities he could see tilled fields in which tiny things were growing. Little furrows ridged them. Gorts were working there, with miniature machines that scurried like bugs along the ground. Now after the storm, Orites were trudging in from the hills, a rural population living out in the recesses of the cliffs, and in huts along the ground. A few of their little dwellings were visible in the nearer distance, mounds about a foot high. Some of the people living out there came carrying those who had been hurt in the storm—for medical attention in the pyramid-cities, Nixon surmised. Others evidently came out of curiosity to see the giant from Earth. At a respectful distance which to Nixon was five or six feet away, a crowd of them was gathering. Men and women, and the young some of which were hardly more than an inch high, clinging to a mother as they stared at the prone giant. It was a jabbering, excited crowd, augmented now by Orites who streamed out from the cities.
The nearer cliff of the canyon-side, as Nixon saw it, was fairly close here. It rose sheer, shining green in the sunlight. There was another building over there against the cliff bottom—a building which looked like a small cairn of stones. It was about two or three feet high. Its tiny oval windows, even now in the daylight, had a violet light in them; and at a peak from the top of it, colored vapour was streaming up.