Several times Rurak lifted his rocket pistol and sent a bullet crashing through a savage Yzap's head. Every time the insect men hurled a volley of spears in return that always fell woefully short. But soon Jokar Ged saw that most of his men were weaponless, save for their stone knives and short knotted clubs, and he forbade them to waste any more spears uselessly. "Floating village," clicked Tis and they swept around an abrupt wedge of jungle growth and swung back toward the left into a widening of the river. "Big one," grunted Elko Sohm. "Twenty-odd huts and a central dome. Better hug the shore. Bad medicine, these swamp Yzaps." "Too late," Tis told them. "Already warriors in round boats coming to attack." A dozen bowl-shaped craft of reeds daubed with some sticky waterproof substance were shoving off from the U shaped island of buoyant, linked water plants. Before the conical low domes of slime-smeared reeds and branches there swarmed the mates and young of the hideous Yzaps, urging their warriors on to the attack of these two hapless dugouts from further upstream. The insect men paddled their clumsy-seeming boats swiftly across the path of the Martians and their two loyal Yzaps and then started to encircle them. They closed in. The insect men swung up their spears ready to hurl them into the bodies of their five victims and in that instant two things happened that saved the Martians from death beneath those bristling shafts. From far up the river a piercing challenge of hatred and savage challenge rolled up as the Yzaps of the renegade Martian swung into view, and beneath the dugouts of the trapped ones a vast saurian bulk, dulled-yellow-scaled and vast, heaved upward. * * * * * Rurak felt the hollow log spill over and in that instant caught a glimpse of the other boat in a like predicament. The bowl-boats of the Swamp Dwellers were scattered, racing madly away from the great shape emerging from the muddy thickness of the river. Then the foul scum of the water's surface closed over his head and he was fighting madly to reach the surface again. A long snaky neck, strangely pink and innocent of bony plates or scales, had sprouted from the saurian thing's vague bulk and vast ridged jaws were gaping wide just above one of the fleeing boats as Rurak's head broke through to the surface. The Yzaps whistled in wild terror and made as though to leap over the side but that enormous maw engulfed them and they disappeared from view. Only a few shreds of the bowl-boat dropped from the corners of the _thing's_ mouth. Then it was gone. The ten dugouts of Jokar Ged swept down upon the demoralized Swamp Dwellers and soon Yzap fought Yzap in hand-to-hand combat. "Nidan!" called Tis from nearby. Now Rurak could see four more heads in the muddy stream about him. They were all safe then! Tis was swimming toward the downstream side of the artificial floating island of the Yzaps.