ble
land had he been so aware of the unleashed terrors nature could exert,
the forces against which all mankind's controls were as nothing.

Time could no longer be measured by any set of minutes or hours. There
was only darkness, the howling winds, and the salty rain which must be
in part the breath of the sea driven in upon them. The comforting fire
vanished, chill and dankness crept up to cramp their bodies, so that now
and again they were forced to their feet, to swing arms, stamp, drive
the blood into faster circulation.

Later came a time when the wind died, no longer driving the rain
bullet-hard against and through their flimsy shelter. Then they slept in
the thick unconsciousness of exhaustion.

A red-purple skull--and from its eye sockets the flying things--kept
coming ... going.... Shann trod on an unsteady foundation which dipped
under his weight as had the raft of the river voyage. He was drawing
nearer to that great head, could see now how waves curled about the
angle of the lower jaw, slapping inward between gaps of missing
teeth--which were really broken fangs of rock--as if the skull now and
then sucked reviving moisture from the water. The aperture marking the
nose was closer to a snout, and the hole was dark, dark as the empty eye
sockets. Yet that darkness was drawing him past any effort to escape he
could summon. And then that on which he rode so perilously was carried
forward by the waves, grated against the jawbone, while against his own
fighting will his hands arose above his head, reaching for a hold to
draw his shrinking body up the stark surface to that snout-passage.

"Lantee!" A hand jerked him back, broke that compulsion--and the dream.
Shann opened his eyes with difficulty, his lashes seemed glued to his
cheeks.

He might have been surveying a submerged world. Thin streamers of fog
twined up from the earth as if they grew from seeds planted by the
storm. But there was no wind, no sound from the peaks. Only under his
stiff body Shann could still feel that vibration which was the sea
battering against the cliff wall.

Thorvald was crouched beside him, his hand still urgent on the younger
man's shoulder. The officer's face was drawn so finely that his
features, sharp under the tanned skin, were akin to the skull Shann
still half saw among the ascending pillars of fog.

"Storm's over."

Shann shivered as he sat up, hugging his arms to his chest, his tattered
uniform soggy under that p