Over the plain itself a thin red haze seemed to float. It was simply a cloud of the deadly spores, dispersed and indefinite, but constantly replenished by the freshly bursting puffballs. While the tribesfolk stood and watched, thick columns of dust rose here and there and at the other place, too many to count. They settled again but left behind enough of the fine powder to keep a thin red haze over all the plain. This was a mass of literally millions of the deadly growths. Here was one place where no carnivorous beetles roamed and where no spiders lurked. There were nothing here but the sullen columns of dust and the haze that they left behind. And of course it would be nothing less than suicide to try to go back. _8. A FLIGHT CONTINUES_ Burl kept his people alive until darkness fell. He had assigned watchers for each direction and when flight was necessary the adults helped the children to avoid the red dust. Four times they changed direction after shrill-voiced warnings. When night settled over the plain they were forced to come to a halt. But the puffballs were designed to burst by day. Stumbled into, they could split at any time, and the humans did hear some few of the tearing noises that denoted a spore-spout in the darkness. But after slow nightly rain began they heard no more. Burl led his people into the plain of red puffballs as soon as the rain had lasted long enough to wash down the red haze still hanging in the air and turn the fallen spores to mud. It was an enterprise of such absolute desperation that very likely no civilized man would have tried it. There were no stars, for guidance, nor compasses to show the way. There were no lights to enable them to dodge the deadly things they strove to escape, and there was no possibility of their keeping a straight course in the darkness. They had to trust to luck in perhaps the longest long-shot that humans every accepted as a gamble. Quaintly, they used the long antennae of a dead flying-beetle as sense-organs for themselves. They entered the red plain in a long single file, Burl leading the way with one of the two feathery whips extended before him. Saya helped him check on what lay in the darkness ahead, but made sure not to leave his side. Others trailed behind, hand in hand. Progress was slow. The sky was utter blackness, of course, but nowhere in the lowlands is there an absolute black. Where fox-fire doesn't burn without consuming, there are mushrooms with glows of their own. Rusts sometimes shone faintly. Naturally there were no fireflies or glow-worms of any sort; but neither were there any living things to hunt the tiny tribe as it moved half-blindly in single file through the plain of red puffballs. Within half an hour even Burl did not believe he had kept to his original line. An hour later they realized despairingly that they were marching helpless through puffballs which would make the air unbreathable at dawn. But they marched on.