ring to leave the plain, for the
night was made hideous with the noise of the battling monsters
throughout the forest. They made war incessantly upon one another. Yet
they came not into the plain.

"The people of the city shut their gates and shot arrows at our people
from the walls. The Tlazitlans were imprisoned on the plain, as if the
ring of the forest had been a great wall; for to venture into the woods
would have been madness.

"That night there came secretly to their camp a slave from the city, one
of their own blood, who with a band of exploring soldiers had wandered
into the forest long before, when he was a young man. The dragons had
devoured all his companions, but he had been taken into the city to
dwell in servitude. His name was Tolkemec." A flame lighted the dark
eyes at mention of the name, and some of the people muttered obscenely
and spat. "He promised to open the gates to the warriors. He asked only
that all captives taken be delivered into his hands.

"At dawn he opened the gates. The warriors swarmed in and the halls of
Xuchotl ran red. Only a few hundred folk dwelt there, decaying remnants
of a once great race. Tolkemec said they came from the east, long ago,
from Old Kosala, when the ancestors of those who now dwell in Kosala
came up from the south and drove forth the original inhabitants of the
land. They wandered far westward and finally found this forest-girdled
plain, inhabited then by a tribe of black people.

"These they enslaved and set to building a city. From the hills to the
east they brought jade and marble and lapis lazuli, and gold, silver and
copper. Herds of elephants provided them with ivory. When their city was
completed, they slew all the black slaves. And their magicians made a
terrible magic to guard the city; for by their necromantic arts they
re-created the dragons which had once dwelt in this lost land, and whose
monstrous bones they found in the forest. Those bones they clothed in
flesh and life, and the living beasts walked the earth as they walked it
when Time was young. But the wizards wove a spell that kept them in the
forest and they came not into the plain.

* * * * *

"So for many centuries the people of Xuchotl dwelt in their city,
cultivating the fertile plain, until their wise men learned how to grow
fruit within the city--fruit which is not planted in soil, but obtains
its nourishment out of the air--and then they let the irri