They found a cave. It was small, so that it would be crowded with all of
them in it, but as it turned out, this was fortunate. At some time it
had been occupied by some other creature, but the dirt which floored it
had settled flat and showed no tracks. It retained faint traces of a
smell which was unfamiliar but not unpleasing,--it held no connotation
of danger. Ants stank of formic acid plus the musky odor of their
particular city. One could identify not only the kind of ant, but its
home city, by sniffing at an ant-trail. Spiders had their own
hair-raising odor. The smell of a praying-mantis was acrid, and all
beetles reeked of decay. And of course there were those bugs whose main
defense was an effluvium which tended to strangle all but the smell's
happy possessor. This faint smell in the cave was different. The humans
thought vaguely that it might possibly be another kind of man.
Actually, it was the smell of a warm-blooded animal. But Burl and his
fellows knew of no warm-blooded creature but themselves.
They had come above the clouds a bare two hours before sunset,--of which
they knew nothing. For an hour they marveled, staying close together.
They were especially astounded by the sun, since they could not bear to
look at it. But presently, being savages, they accepted it
matter-of-factly.
They could not cease to wonder at the vegetation about them. They were
accustomed only to gigantic fungi and the few straggling plants which
tried so desperately to bear seed before they were devoured. Here they
saw many plants and no fungi,--and they did not see anything they
recognized as insects. They looked only for large things.
They were astounded by the slenderness and toughness of the plants.
Grass fascinated them, and weeds. A large part of their courage came
from the absence of debris upon the ground. The hunting-grounds of
spiders were marked by grisly remnants of finished meals, and where
mantises roamed there were bits of transparent beetle-wings and sharp
spiny bits of armor not tasty enough to be consumed. Here, in the first
hour of their exploration, they saw no sign that an insect like
the lowland ones had ever been in this place at all. But they
could not believe the monsters never came. They correctly--and
pessimistically--assumed that their coming was only rare.
The cave was a great relief. Trees did not grow close enough to give
them a feeling of safety,--though they were ludicrously amazed at the
invincible hardness of tree trunks. They had never known anything but
insect-armour and stone which was as hard as the trunks of those
growing things. They found nothing to eat, but they were not yet
hungry. They did not worry about food while they still had remnants from
their climb.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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