t seemed electrical apparatus of very
strange design, but neither he nor Milton nor Lanier paid it but small
attention in that first breathless moment. They were gazing in
fascinated horror at the scores of creatures who stood silent amid the
apparatus and at its switches, gazing back at them. Those creatures
were erect and roughly man-like in shape, but they were not human
men. They were--the thought blasted to Randall's brain in that
horror-filled moment--crocodile-men.

Crocodile-men! It was only so that he could think of them in that
moment. For they were terribly like great crocodile shapes that had
learned in some way to carry themselves erect upon their hinder limbs.
The bodies were not covered with skin, but with green bony plates. The
limbs, thick and taloned at their paw-ends, seemed greater in size and
stronger, the upper two great arms and the lower two the legs upon
which each walked, while there was but the suggestion of a tail. But
the flat head set on the neckless body was most crocodilian of all,
with great fanged, hinged jaws projecting forward, and with dark
unwinking eyes set back in bony sockets.

Each of the creatures wore on his torso a gleaming garment like a coat
of metal scales, with metal belts in which some had shining tubes.
They were standing in groups here and there about the mechanisms, the
nearest group at a strange big switch-panel not a half-dozen feet from
the three men. Milton and Lanier and Randall returned in a tense
silence the unwinking stare of the monstrous beings around them.

"The Martians!" Lanier's horror-filled exclamation was echoed in the
next instant by Randall's.

"The Martians! God, Milton! They're not like anything we know--they're
reptilian!"

* * * * *

Milton's hand clutched his shoulder. "Steady, Randall," he muttered.
"They're terrible enough, God knows--but remember we must seem just as
grotesque to them."

The sound of their voices seemed to break the great hall's spell of
silence, and they saw the crocodilian Martians before them turning and
speaking swiftly to each other in low hissing speech-sounds that were
quite unintelligible to the three. Then from the small group nearest
them one came forward, until he stood just outside the chamber in
which they were.

Randall felt dimly the momentousness of the moment, in which beings of
earth and Mars were confronting each other for the first time in the
solar system's histo