l cathedral of towering trunks.

It was rough and cheerless going. There were no trails. Once, toward
noon, while he was munching chocolate to appease his empty stomach, he
suddenly came upon a sort of runway, a beaten trail. He stepped into
this easier path but had taken but a few steps when he was startled by
the vicious rush of a swift object that whizzed up through the air and
tore through a fold of his loose riding breeches, then swung back
before his eyes to vibrate into stillness. It was a bamboo dagger,
sharpened to a keen edge and point, hardened by charring in a slow
fire. Fastened to a young sapling, it had been bent down over the
trail and secured by a trigger his foot had released in passing. Level
with his thigh, it had been designed to pierce the abdomen of the
Hillmen's natural foes. He bent to examine the glutinous material with
which the dagger was poisoned, and paled as he considered his close
escape. Such a death--in such a place....

After assuring himself that his skin had not been broken by the
_balatak_, he stepped gingerly off the trail and made his way upward,
carefully avoiding every inch of ground that appeared suspicious. With
each mile of ascent the way grew steeper, the forest deeper and
darker, the green ceiling reared higher on more massive trunks.

In mid afternoon he noticed that he was passing through a zone of
utter forest silence. There were no relieving sounds of voice or wing
or padded foot. It was appalling. Nothing in his vivid experiences
had approached the menace of these silent trees.

Pausing to rest in an area where an unusual amount of indirect light
filtered down through the lofty screen of leaves he looked about him,
found no tree he could identify, and felt the hostility that strange
growths radiate. His thoughts flew back to the security and
friendliness of the elms and maples of his boyhood haunts. As he
peered through the endless avenues of trunks that rose from the dark
slope, he learned what fear is. But he went on, faster.

An hour later, clambering over the trunk of a huge windfall that
blocked his path, he jumped down upon something that half pierced the
heel of his heavy shoe. Leaning back upon the big log he tugged till
the foot was released. He had landed upon a carpet of leaves which
concealed a number of sharpened bamboo stakes bedded deep in the
ground, point upward. Raking out the leaves with a stick, he uncovered
a nest of sixteen spearheads smeared