Now the guards rose from me, leaving me lying motionless and rigid, and turned toward Korus Kan, who was being held down by others. His metal body seemed to puzzle them for an instant, and then they solved the problem by injecting the needle of green fluid into the nerve-tissues at the edge of his eyes, from which it would spread instantly to the other living organs cased by his metal body. Another moment and he too lay like me, rigid and powerless to move, our eyes meeting in an unchanging, stony stare. Within minutes more the green fluid had been injected into the last of our score of followers, and we had all become but rigid living statues, our consciousness and senses alone unaffected. Then by the serpent-creatures we were set into the transparent case from which the double-headed insect-thing had been moved to make way for us, were placed in a sitting position with backs against the case's sides, and then it was closed and the guards passed out of the big hall, leaving in it only the two serpent-creatures who were its custodians. Rigid, unmoving, unbreathing, yet with consciousness, mind and senses as clear as ever, living brains cased in bodies that were helpless and motionless, I think that no position of any in all time could have been more terrible than ours. Had consciousness been suspended also, with the powers of our bodies, the captivity we suffered would have been but a dreamless sleep, at least; but to allow our consciousness and intelligence to remain, our bodies severed from our control--that was a torture that surely none other could ever equal. Statue-like we sat there, while hour followed hour, gazing always in the same direction with unmoving and unwinking eyes. Certainly no wonder would it have been had we gone mad in the first hours of that ghastly, terrible imprisonment. As the hours, the days, dragged past, though, I bent all my mental efforts toward the keeping of my sanity, and though at times my brain reeled beneath our terrible predicament, I desperately forced my thoughts into other channels. From where I sat I could gaze out into the great corridor outside the room, and that at least gave me something moving to contemplate, as through it swept the never-ceasing hordes of the serpent-people, a rush of activity that dwindled never until the rising of the darkest of the three suns marked the coming of the night, the sleep-period of the serpent-people. The light of that darker sun was so far dimmer than that of the other two that as this world turned between the three one-third of each day was spent in a dusky red darkness, a strange night in which all activity in the vast serpent-city about us seemed to cease, only our room's two serpent-guards and some others here and there outside remaining alert, our two room-guards being replaced at the beginning of each night by two others who alternated with them in their duties.