ed for the clearing. His lungs seemed collapsed and both
ankles shattered. He did not care. Not when the ape screams were growing
louder with every step he took. Not when he heard Nini and Ivana pouring
down from their tree a continuation of the scorching fire he had
started.

Panting, his breath only half regained, but steeled to make the fight of
his life, he tore from the jungle into the clearing just in time to see
a twisting, pain-convulsed seventy-foot coil of white muscle lash up and
strike Naida's cage a blow which knocked it like a ball in the air.
Naida screamed and hung to the bars.

But she was all right. It was not against her that Quetzalcoatl was
venting his wrath: the blow had been blind accident. As Kirby stood at
the clearing's edge, he knew to a certainty that Quetzalcoatl's reaction
to sudden pain had been all he had dared hope.

In front of him forty or fifty ape-bodies lay in a crushed heap. While
yard after yard of the Serpent's bleached length streamed out of the
hole, the hundreds of feet of coils already in the clearing suddenly
whipped about a whole squadron of ape-men, and with a few constrictions
annihilated them as if they had been ants. Across the clearing, the
leperous head reared up as high as the trees and swooped down, fangs
gleaming. The howls of the ape-men trying to flee, the screams of those
who had been caught, rose until they became all one scream.

* * * * *

But Kirby had not left the safety of the tree merely to get a ringside
view of carnage. He faced his next, his final task unhesitatingly.
Straight out he leaped from the shadows of the jungle into the clearing,
out into the presence of the beleagured, screaming ape-men. Well enough
he knew that those creatures, despite their frenzy, might sight him and
fall upon him at any second; well enough he knew that a single flick of
the white coils all over the clearing could crush him instantly. But the
time to worry about those hazards would be when they beset him. With a
yell as piercing as any in the whole bedlam, Kirby rushed forward.

High up in the moonlit vault of the night, swaying between the two poles
which supported it, hung the white cage which was Naida's prison. By the
time Kirby had sprinted fifty yards, he knew that his yells had reached
Naida. For she staggered to her knees and looked straight at him. A
second later, though, he realized that the almost inevitable recognition
of h