till ran. He was beginning to suspect that
through countless ages of hiding and murmuring those voices must have
lost the ability to speak aloud. And he wondered with a little inward
chill what terror it was which had transformed a free and fearless
people into these tiny wild things whispering in the underbrush.

The little anxious voices had shrilled into vehemence now, all of them
chattering together in their queer, soft, rustling whispers. Looking
back later upon that timeless space he had passed in the hollow, Smith
remembered it as some curious nightmare--dimness and tapestried
blurring, and a hush like death over the whole twilight land, and the
timid voices whispering, whispering, eloquent with terror and warning.

He groped back among his memories and brought forth a phrase or two
remembered from long ago, an archaic rendering of the immemorial tongue
they spoke. It was the simplest version he could remember of the complex
speech now used, but he knew that to them it must sound fantastically
strange. Instinctively he whispered as he spoke it, feeling like an
actor in a play as he mouthed the ancient idiom,

"I--I cannot understand. Speak--more slowly----"

A torrent of words greeted this rendering of their tongue. Then there
was a great deal of hushing and hissing, and presently two or three
between them began laboriously to recite an involved speech, one
syllable at a time. Always two or more shared the task. Never in his
converse with them did he address anyone directly. Ages of terror had
bred all directness out of them.

"Thag," they said. "Thag, the terrible--Thag, the omnipotent--Thag, the
unescapable. Beware of Thag."

For a moment Smith stood quiet, grinning down at them despite himself.
There must not be too much of intelligence left among this branch of the
race, either, for surely such a warning was superfluous. Yet they had
mastered their agonies of timidity to give it. All virtue could not yet
have been bred out of them, then. They still had kindness and a sort of
desperate courage rooted deep in fear.

"What is Thag?" he managed to inquire, voicing the archaic syllables
uncertainly. And they must have understood the meaning if not the
phraseology, for another spate of whispered tumult burst from the
clustering tribe. Then, as before, several took up the task of
answering.

"Thag--Thag, the end and the beginning, the center of creation. When
Thag breathes the world trembles. The earth was