he could
not guess why, though somehow the answer was hovering just out of reach
of his conscious mind. From that first glimpse of it his instincts
shuddered like a shying stallion, yet reason still looked in vain for an
answer.

* * * * *

Nor was the Tree merely a vegetable growth. It was alive, terribly,
ominously alive. He could not have said how he knew that, for it stood
motionless in its empty clearing, not a branch trembling, yet in its
immobility more awfully vital than any animate thing. The very sight of
it woke in Smith an insane urging to flight, to put worlds between
himself and this inexplicably dreadful thing.

* * * * *

Crazy impulses stirred in his brain, coming to insane birth at the
calling of the Tree's peril--the desperate need to shut out the sight of
that thing that was blasphemy, to put out his own sight rather than gaze
longer upon the perilous grace of its branches, to slit his own throat
that he might not need to dwell in the same world which housed so
frightful a sight as the Tree.

* * * * *

All this was a mad battering in his brain. The strength of him was
enough to isolate it in a far corner of his consciousness, where it
seethed and shrieked half heeded while he turned the cool control which
the spaceways life had taught him to the solution of this urgent
question. But even so his hand was moist and shaking on his gun-butt,
and the breath rasped in his dry throat.

Why--he asked himself in a determined groping after steadiness--should
the mere sight of a tree, even so fabulous a one as this, rouse that
insane panic in the gazer? What peril could dwell invisibly in a tree so
frightful that the living horror of it could drive a man mad with the
very fact of its unseen presence? He clenched his teeth hard and stared
resolutely at that terrible beauty in the clearing, fighting down the
sick panic that rose in his throat as his eyes forced themselves to
dwell upon the Tree.

Gradually the revulsion subsided. After a nightmare of striving he
mustered the strength to force it down far enough to allow reason's
entry once more. Sternly holding down that frantic terror under the
surface of consciousness, he stared resolutely at the Tree. And he knew
that this was Thag.

It could be nothing else, for surely two such dreadful things could not
dwell in one land. It must be Thag, and he could un