When he looked downward he saw no land.
“Heavens,” he muttered, “we have dropped entirely through the moon, and are we now sailing out into space?”
They fell a mile before the interrogation was answered. Then the light grew brighter and they saw beneath them trees, rivers, green rolling hills.
“Heaven be praised!” Joan cried out with a shout of joy. “At last we are getting somewhere. It must be Moawha’s home. She was laughing, chattering, and cooing to me in an unknown tongue.”
They landed gently on a high hill overlooking a large valley but the moment she got out of the glider and looked around, Moawha lost her enthusiasm, and grasping Joan by the arm ran hurriedly to a dense thicket of undergrowth to hide.
“Come with us,” she called in a low tone to Epworth and Billy. “Hide the gliders and then hunt cover.”
They followed her instructions, and when they were hidden in the undergrowth, she caught Epworth by the arm, tiptoed to the edge of the thicket and pointed down into a part of the valley he had not seen. His eyes opened wide at what he saw.
Ten thousand pigmy men were marching across the field in military formation, drilling, shouldering arms, charging an imaginary foe, and practicing all the arts of war preparatory to engaging in a sham battle.
“Queen Carza’s soldiers,” Moawha explained briefly. “If we are captured we will be taken back to the cricket hive. Carza’s soldiers have succeeded in gaining a complete mastery over the crickets. They fight us, kill us, and give our bodies to the crickets to eat, and they pay the crickets by giving them fruits and vegetables. For thousands of years they have been doing this, and when they succeeded in kidnaping me they probably demoralized my fighting men, and are now preparing to make a bold attack on them. With the help of this great giant that came with you I am fearfully afraid they will make my people slaves, although there are not more than fifty thousand pigmies, and there are two million Selinites. With the crickets to aid them, however, they have a larger fighting force than we have.”
Without replying Epworth returned to the gliders, and pushed them deeper beneath the foliage of the thicket and planted limbs over, and around them.