And presently, with tumultuously beating hearts, we three with only our slender spears, were approaching that dread black opening which marked the entrance to the Water of Wild Things.
CHAPTER XVII
We entered the opening, swimming in a group with Atar leading. It was already new territory for us. Our hunting expeditions had never taken us even as far as this; we were always content to remain in Marinoid waters. As we advanced, the rocky ceiling overhead was closing down on us, until soon there was no more than twice the length of our bodies between it and the floor.
On both sides the dark water stretched out as far as we could see into blackness also. We were descending now at an angle of perhaps forty-five degrees.
We had gone what you would call a mile possibly, when we came suddenly to a tangle of coral—a barrier that reached from floor to ceiling. I call it coral. It might have been a petrified vegetation. An all but impenetrable thicket—white like the frosted underbrush of your Northern winter forests—it seemed to bar our further progress.
We stopped; consulted, and swam to the left and right. But the tangle extended in both directions to the edges of the mile-wide passageway.
“It is this,” said Atar, “which keeps our own region free of monsters. They cannot easily pass a barrier like this.” He was smiling at Caan and me. “To this, perhaps we owe our safety.”
Caan was poking at the thicket, and we found after a moment that we could with difficulty force our way through it.
The realization that Atar’s words brought us was at once reassuring and alarming. If no creatures of the wild could pass this barrier, what then might lie on its other side?
Caan, older and more poised than either Atar or me, was wasting no time on such thoughts.