They were on a boat, lying in its bottom, a small, narrow metal boat, six feet wide perhaps, and perhaps five or six times as long. Its gunwale curved up two or three feet over Jim’s head. They were lying in the narrowing of its bow. Farther astern, in the yellow moonlight, were figures, brown, hairy bodies—men; or were they giant gorillas? They had small bullet-like heads, faces flat-nosed, with receding forehead and receding chin, and two small eyes that blazed green. Jim very slowly sank back, but in a posture where he could see the length of the boat. The figures there were not animals; they were men of brute force and brute intelligence. Four of them, with powerful, hairy bodies, wide-shouldered, deep-chested, with short, thick legs and very long arms. They were clothed in what seemed trunks of animal skin, and a skin fastened over the bulging chest to one shoulder. And each had a broad, tightly drawn belt at his waist. To Jim came the memory of his capture. It was no fantasy, his memory of a hairy body, with a balloonlike, wobbling head. The four huge heads were here now, in a group near the center of the boat. Each was about four feet in diameter. A dead-white membrane, with bulging, distended veins on a forehead, over a grotesque flat face. Heads, belonging to these four bodies? Jim realized it was not that. These were separate living entities, which had been riding astride the shoulders of the four. Intelligent, reasoning beings—it seemed monstrous to call them men—beings which were nearly all brain, just as the others were nearly all body, heads so distended that they sagged of their own weight. As he regarded them, Jim became aware that to each of the great heads a shrunken semblance of body was attached. Two tiny arms, which came out directly from the sides of the head, and were now turned down, with hands pressing the boat to give balance. From the wide, convex face, beneath what might have been a bloated chin, a shriveled body dangled: a trunk and legs some two feet long. They lay shriveled beneath the heads. Useless appendage! But all of these shrunken, dangling bodies were clothed with colored fabric, and upon the breast of one was an ornate metal ornament. Jim whispered: “Ren?” “Yes.” “What happened?” “I don’t know. Something struck me. Then somebody, something was carrying me. Men! I heard their voices. I tried to scream; a hand went over my mouth. I knew we were captured. I thought—” “Hush! Not so loud! They’re here . . . with us now.” “I know. They were talking a while ago. They—hear them now, Jim?” Low, gutteral voices sounded back there—the brute men. The brains, the balloon heads, were talking also, low, suave voices in a foreign tongue.