Finally one of the females raised up her forward body, and began moving it back and forth like an impatient cobra. The male closest to her ---it seemed to Simin the largest he had seen---broke away and came forward, moving toward the dry canal where the intruder stood waiting. Unlike the others it showed no outward fear. It advanced without hesitation, or thought, or much of anything except the blind mating aggression of its kind. It stopped only once, looking back at the female from the lip of the sunken path, then came forward with only one impulse in its mind. Kill him. Simin had only a short time to plan his fight. As the creature drew nearer he opened his wings instinctively and strafed the air with his foreclaws. His wings! In all the time since finding the abyss he had forgotten them, first from the weak amnesia of near-death, then from simple disuse. With no more time to marvel he moved in a quick half-circle to avoid the lumbering bulk, then flitted up behind it onto the slanting edge of the rift. These short bursts of flight he repeated several times (the thought that he could fly to safety and forget this fight never occurred to him), searching for a weakness. Though filled with a sullen rage, he knew there could be no mistakes. Rising higher, he hovered briefly above his baffled foe, then swept down onto its back, and in three quick motions of jaws and foreclaw, tore off its head and left it to die. Still full of bitter and unused anger he landed again on the plain closest to the female, clawing the rock as if clinging to a rope, as his blurring wings drummed threateningly. Then letting go he flew directly over her, and left the sorry massacre behind. With this action his patience expired. Landing as the far side of the chamber grew shallow, he walked on through a curving length of tunnel for some miles, until confronted by a three-directional branching of the passageway. He followed the right-hand way first, and for a short time made good progress. But then it doubled back on him and finally ended, died, into a narrowing of stone through which he could not pass. Furious, he worked his way back to the starting point, taking this time the central shaft, leading downward. The result was the same, though it took him much longer to realize. Returning again to the meeting of ways was now difficult, since in his haste he had been forced to take and re-take several turns in a compact but puzzling labyrinth, that he found in the end took him nowhere.