The boundaries of the Marinoid domain presented themselves as almost perpendicular cliffs—dark, jagged rock, with slabs and banks of black clay, mounds of coral, red, black and white, or a tangle of slimy vegetation. Openings which were caves—a cliff-face honeycombed with them. And the ceiling was of similar character.
One of the boundaries—the one nearly opposite to where Nona and I had entered this world—was somewhat different. Here the cliff-face rose to over three thousand feet. But here also, the ceiling was even higher, so that between them there was left an opening a hundred feet or more in height, and a mile, at least, in horizontal width. It was a fearsome opening. Its floor seemed to extend backward and downward. The water in there was black; a thick slimy ooze was under it. And there seemed to be in it the suggestion of a noisome stench that lay beyond.
This was the entrance to another region, of unknown extent—the Water of Wild Things as the Marinoids called it. What might lie in there, none could say. A few had penetrated into it a short distance, and returned with lurid tales which none believed. And others had gone and never come back.
But that there were half-savage humans living there, everyone believed. Og was bred of them, some said; and now that he had voluntarily gone there to live, as rumor had it, so much seemed a certainty.
Strange animals occasionally came from the Water of Wild Things. A sea-monster had come once. But that was in the dim past, remembered only by legend. The monster had all but overcome the cloud of Marinoids who had desperately set upon it.
Such were the conditions under which we, at Rax, were living.
And now I am ready to tell you of that series of incidents which awakened us to our danger. They did not at first concern me personally, and so I paid them little heed. That is a commentary upon your own life, is it not? Soon the thing struck home to me with its tragedy. Ah, then how different it seemed! We can bear the grief of our friend so much more philosophically than our own!
The first of these incidents in Rax came when Boy was about two months old. A young virgin, the daughter of one of Caan’s worker, disappeared. She was a girl somewhat younger than Nona. She was beautiful, in Marinoid fashion. To you, all these Marinoids must seem grotesque—unhuman perhaps. But beauty is not universally standardized—only locally. We admire our own kind. Your natives of Zanzibar think their own black-skinned, thick-lipped belles the most beautiful on Earth. And as I have said once before, in the Marinoid world the Marinoid women were the standard of beauty. Nona, so different, was the exception, the abnormality.
This girl who disappeared had been with one of Caan’s scattered parties working on the sea-bottom, gathering shell-food. She had wandered away from the others, and when the time came to return to Rax, she was missing. We thought she might have become ill and gone home.