The bird swooped in a great descending arc, a great white bird like those which had drawn our platform. Mounted upon its back was the figure of a girl, her arms clinging about its neck. It soared with poised wings, descended to the beach near us. The girl leaped to the sand and called, “Sonya! Sonya!” They talked in their own language; then Sonya whirled to me. Her face had gone white. “Alta, this girl, lives very near Ren’s house in Kalima. I do not mean my home, his and mine. I mean that other house of his where you were living. Alta went there to see me.” She was talking swiftly. Alice and Dolores drew me to one side; a common feeling of disaster was upon us all. “Alta found the door open and went in. She read my message to Ren, that we had come here to the island. She was leaving. In the street outside she heard voices. From the window she saw Ren with your Jim. They were nearly to the house. “Then . . . a great black thing leaped upon them, a giant, with a great, wobbling head. What we saw, Leonard! The Nameless Horror! It leaped upon them, and there were two or three others of its kind. They seized my cousin and Jim. Lifted them up, carried them off! She . . . Alta, took one of my birds, and came here to tell us!” XI A MAN, TO PLAY A MAN’S PART I stood a moment, transfixed with horror. Alice’s face had become as white as Sonya’s. Dolores uttered a faint little cry, “Jim!” “Sonya—” I began. But she had turned to give orders to the girls. They sped away. I finished, “Sonya, get me back, at once!” “Yes,” she agreed. “But you can do nothing—a stranger—you cannot talk our language.” “I can, with you to interpret for me.” She whirled upon Alta with other questions, then back to me. “More than ever now, I must go through with our plans. Alta says the king is not dead. But dying, he will die at any moment. We must get back.” Down the beach the large platform was ready. A hundred girls or more were loading upon it. With a great flapping of the wings of the birds, it moved down the beach. Rose into the air. It had four strings of ten birds each, with others harnessed in tandem all along its sides. Magnificently, it sailed upward, turned in a broad arc, and passed us high overhead. From everywhere now the girls were rising. Another great platform, and still another. A score of smaller ones; and from the forest, a hundred or more individual birds, each with a lone rider. They flapped up from among the palms; circled overhead, with their numbers augmenting until they headed away. The first platforms were now mere blobs in the starlight. A thousand girls, I estimated, were up there in flight. We hurried to our platform. Again we were in the air. Below us still another platform was rising; around us, three or four mounted birds circled like a convoy. We took our place in the line and sped back to the city. “Is the king dead, Sonya?” “No. I do not think so.”