The glare of light showed the water plainly—a brilliant, ghastly green. We reached the sea-bottom, turned and dashed forward. The Maagogs were there. They saw our light coming of course, long before we saw them. A crowd of them, confused, half-blinded, but they were standing their ground nevertheless.
Over the line of light-sleighs I saw that we had to deal here with perhaps five hundred Maagog men. They seemed armed with spears. They huddled heavily against the sea-bottom, some half a mile from the edge of the forest. The line of them stretched back there, and more were constantly coming out.
When our sleighs were no more than a few hundred yards away, I shouted at Atar. At his relayed signal, the sleighs shrouded their pods and turned upward, out of reach of the enemy. It left the water in semi-darkness—blackness it must have seemed to the Maagogs, with that blinding glare so suddenly extinguished.
And then we leaped at them.
It was a swirl of confusion, this hand-to-hand warfare. I held my dolphin resolutely above it, taking no part, but watching for every advantage into which I might hurl my men.
Looking down into the swirling water I could see the Maagogs fighting desperately to impale my swimmers with their spears. And my young Marinoids, darting over them, up and down, seeking to touch them head and legs simultaneously that the electric shock might kill them.
The fighting spread. Soon it was going on over a wide area. It was almost silent, uncanny fighting. The swish of the churning water—a shout, a death scream here and there. Bodies were dotting the sand. Maagogs, but Marinoids too. And the Maagogs in this first engagement outnumbered us two to one.
I was perhaps fifty feet above the sand, with the sleighs poised inactive immediately over me. Atar dashed up.
“How are they doing? Nemo, would it be better in the light?”
I had not thought of that. A trio of Maagogs, wounded and confused, came floundering up at us. Atar, from his dolphin, dispatched them easily with his sword.