Epworth waited until several hundred soldiers were around them, and then gave orders to march forward with all their flash lights hurling flames ahead.
The cavern heretofore had been a long, narrow corridor. Now it suddenly flared out into an immense underground chamber, and at the entrance of this chamber, lying flat and the color of their bodies changing like variegated lizards to fit into their surroundings, were twelve round-bodied, scaly backed animals with polygonal plates covering their heads. They had their tongues sticking out, and their three red eyes glared savagely.
“Flash every light into their eyes,” Epworth shouted. “Blind them.”
Instantly a hundred flashes of steady crimson shot into the eyes of the ramphs, and their tails began to lash up and down on the gray floor. Their changing colors made this motion barely perceptible.
“Now let twenty chloroform guns shoot into their eyes and nostrils.”
The gas guns were long straight tubes that carried repeated shots of chloroform, and by the time the twenty guns had fired one shot each the twelve ramphs had dropped their heads.
“Glory be!” Joan cried. “It works.”
“Advance and use your spears.”
One hundred men rushed forward, and began to thrust at the doped reptiles. Their thrusts were seemingly useless, the hard gristle of the lizards turning the spears easily. For a moment Epworth was nonplussed. They could chloroform the Things but how could they kill them?
“Stab them in their eyes!” he commanded sharply, stepping up to one of the monsters, which was over a hundred feet long, and jabbing his own weapon into the monster’s middle eye. “Perhaps that will get them.”