, I kept them fixed on its water, spell-bound. It
might be ten or fifteen minutes, to me it seemed ages, before the still
surface, gleaming under the lamplight, began to be agitated towards
the centre. At the same time the shoals of fish near the margin evinced
their sense of the enemy's approach by splash and leap and bubbling
circle. I could detect their hurried flight hither and thither, some
even casting themselves ashore. A long, dark, undulous furrow came
moving along the waters, nearer and nearer, till the vast head of the
reptile emerged--its jaws bristling with fangs, and its dull eyes fixing
themselves hungrily on the spot where I sat motionless. And now its fore
feet were on the strand--now its enormous breast, scaled on either
side as in armour, in the centre showing its corrugated skin of a dull
venomous yellow; and now its whole length was on the land, a hundred
feet or more from the jaw to the tail. Another stride of those ghastly
feet would have brought it to the spot where I sat. There was but a
moment between me and this grim form of death, when what seemed a flash
of lightning shot through the air, smote, and, for a space of time
briefer than that in which a man can draw his breath, enveloped
the monster; and then, as the flash vanished, there lay before me a
blackened, charred, smouldering mass, a something gigantic, but of which
even the outlines of form were burned away, and rapidly crumbling into
dust and ashes. I remained still seated, still speechless, ice-cold with
a new sensation of dread; what had been horror was now awe.

I felt the child's hand on my head--fear left me--the spell was
broken--I rose up. "You see with what ease the Vril-ya destroy their
enemies," said Taee; and then, moving towards the bank, he contemplated
the smouldering relics of the monster, and said quietly, "I have
destroyed larger creatures, but none with so much pleasure. Yes, it IS
a Krek; what suffering it must have inflicted while it lived!" Then he
took up the poor fishes that had flung themselves ashore, and restored
them mercifully to their native element.

Chapter XIX.

As we walked back to the town, Taee took a new and circuitous way,
in order to show me what, to use a familiar term, I will call the
'Station,' from which emigrants or travellers to other communities
commence their journeys. I had, on a former occasion, expressed a wish
to see their vehicles. These I found to be of two kinds, one for lan