ory was proved right. None of the gigantic
insects tried to attack them. But even so that journey to the exit, a
distance of more than the length of a football field, was a ghastly
business.

On all sides the giant, armored bodies rushed and shoved. The clash of
horn breastplates against armored legs, of mandibles and granitic heads
against others of their kind, was ear-splitting. The monsters, in their
effort to indulge the cannibalistic instinct--at once so horrible to the
two humans, and so fortunate for them--were completely heedless of their
own welfare and everything else.

Like giant ice cakes careening in the break-up of a flood, they crunched
against each other; and like loose ice cakes in a flood, every now and
then one was forced clear up off its feet by the surrounding rush, to
fall back to the floor a moment later with a resounding crash.

It would seem an impossibility for any two living things as relatively
weak and soft as men to find a way through such a maelstrom. Yet--Jim
and Denny did.

Several times one or the other was knocked down by a charging, blind
monster. Once Denny was almost caught and crushed between two of the
rock-hard things. Once Jim only saved himself from a pair of terrific,
snapping jaws that rushed his way, by using his short spear as a pole
and vaulting up and over them onto the monster's back, where he was
allowed to slide off unheeded as the maddened thing continued in its
rush. But they reached the door!

There they gazed fearfully down the corridor, sure there would be
hundreds more of the soldiers crowding to answer the last call of their
ruling, master mind. But only a few stragglers were to be seen, and
these, called to the grim feast by some sort of instinct or perhaps some
sense of smell, rushed past with as little attempt to attack them as the
rest.

The two men ran down the tunnel, turned a corner into an ascending
tunnel they remembered from their trip in, raced up this, hearts
pounding wildly with the growing hope of actually escaping from the
mound with their lives--and then halted. Jim cursed bitterly,
impotently.

* * * * *

Branching off from this second tunnel, all looking exactly alike and all
identical in the degree of their upward slant, were five more tunnels!
Like spokes of a wheel, they radiated out and up; and no man could have
told which to take. They stopped, in despair, as this phase of their
situation, unthough