Leaving the vehicle, Tarrano commanded Elza to follow him; and he began picking his way through the jungle. A light was in his hand; it penetrated but a short distance. A quivering beam of yellow light; then Elza saw that upon occasion, as Tarrano's finger slid a lever, the beam narrowed, intensified to a bright lavender. And now where it struck, the vegetation withered. Blackened, sometimes burst into tiny flame, and parted thus before them as they advanced. The jungle was silent; yet, as Elza listened, beneath the crackle of the burning twigs she could hear the tiny myriad voices of insect life. Startled voices as the heat of Tarrano's beam struck them. Rustling leaves; breaking twigs; things scurrying and sliding away, unseen in the darkness. Once or twice a crashing--some monster disturbed in his rest plunging away. Again, a slithering bulk of something, undulating its path through the thickets. All unseen. Save once. Looking upward, Elza caught a gleam of green eyes overhead. A triangle of three baleful spots of phosphorescent green. Her murmur of fright caused Tarrano to glance upward. His lavender, beam, grown suddenly larger, swung there with a hiss. Falling from above came a pink body. A bloated body, square, with squat, twisted legs; a thing larger than a man. A grotesque naked monstrosity almost in human form. A travesty--gruesome mockery of mankind. A face, three-eyed... The thing lay writhing in the underbrush, mouthing, mumbling and then screaming--the shrill scream of death agony. And the horrible smell of burning flesh as Tarrano's light played upon it... "Come away, Lady Elza. I'm sorry. I had hoped to avoid an affair such as this." Sickened, shuddering, Elza clung close to Tarrano as he led her onward. An hour or more; and now Elza could see in the distance the lights of the Great City. _"Jac! Danger! Jac! Danger!"_ The idea of thought-transference had come to her. With all the power of her mind she was thinking her warning to me, praying that it might reach me. "Single-handed, Lady Elza. You shall see now how, single-handed, I make impossible any attack upon Tarrano." In her abstraction Elza had almost forgotten herself and Tarrano; his voice reached her--his voice grim and with a gloating, sinister triumph in it. He was bending to the ground. Elza saw that they had come to an open space--an eminence rising above the forest. Underfoot was a stony soil; in places, bare black rock with an outcropping of red, like the cinnabar from which on Earth we melt the _Heavy-metal_.[23] [Footnote 23: Quicksilver.] Tarrano faced her. "Nature, my Lady Elza, is fair to my purpose. I knew I would find some such deposit as this." He turned his face to one side attentively, and darted his light--harmlessly yellow now--to where a lone tree showed its great leaves beginning to waver in a night breeze. "Nature is with us! See there, my Elza! A wind is coming--a wind from us to--them!"