New lightnings streaked and blazed with red and green and orange coruscations as their long twisting lances zigzagged from wall to wall.
Speechless as deaf-mutes, Clay and I stared across at one another in horror. But in his startled eyes I read a message: "Come, let's go!" And his hand was motioning away down the gallery.
Gladly I would have followed his suggestion. But I was as if glued to the ledge. My panic-stricken muscles would not obey my will; I quivered, rose to my knees, and then dropped down full-length once more, terrified lest the heaving earth should pitch me over the cavern edge.
Yet terror could not subdue curiosity; I still gazed down at that fantastic cavern floor, over which the colored lightnings flickered. And what a ghastly discovery I made! Where were those orderly armies that had thronged across the abyss a minute before?
For a moment, I merely gaped wide-eyed, wondering if my senses were deceiving me. The armies had both vanished! In their place were multitudes of black specks strewn pell-mell about the cavern floor, in all manner of distorted positions, some of them bunched together in great dark heaps, some of them clustered amid little new-made crimson patches!
"Do you see? Do you see?" I exclaimed, when a lull in the thunder once more permitted conversation. "Shot to tatters, the whole lot of them!"
"Shot to tatters!" Clay echoed, his bruised face performing wry antics as he spoke. "Wonder what the whole infernal mess was all about."
"Marvelous, anyway, how they use their lightnings to kill," I commented.