I recovered consciousness to find myself lying in a bed of mud in a dim, cave-like room. My first sensation was one of heat; the water I was breathing was hot, stifling. My head throbbed. Nona, Caan and Atar were gathered over me, waiting anxiously for me to recover my senses. Nona, hearing my weak voice, seeing my eyes open, threw herself down beside me. I was not greatly injured. Og had struck me on the head with the flat of his spear. It had cut my scalp and raised an ugly lump. Besides that, the flesh of my legs, arms and shoulders was torn by those fishes’ teeth as if by needles. The plight of Caan, Atar, and even my dear Nona, was similar—but with none of us was it serious. They told me now, that we were captives. Back there in the tunnel Og had called off his attacking fishes—called them from us or we would have been torn to ribbons. Then, floating me with them, the Maagogs under Og’s direction had brought us here to this small room adjacent to the main cave—and left us. I sat up, then swam a little. I was all right! Nona was all right—we were all safe and sound! My hopes revived. Why should we not now escape? But none of my companions reflected my jubilant mood. “Let him look around,” said Caan to Atar. Never had I heard Caan speak so sourly, so despondently. I did look around. We were in a black mud room some forty feet square and half as high. It was bare of furnishings; and lighted overhead by a crude sort of illuminated bladder that gave off a dull green glow. On one side against the black wall were beds, hollowed out of the mud. To _you_ they would have looked like shallow graves; and in one of them I had been lying. Across the room was a shelf of mud with a dozen clay seats on it—like a row of huge toadstools. A third side gave into a tunnel. I approached it eagerly; then drew back shuddering. That pack of blood-hound fishes was out there, circling back and forth, on guard. They saw me, and darted lazily forward. As I stopped, they seemed satisfied, and went back to their endless circling, following every twist and turn of two or three who seemed to lead them. Caan laughed cynically. “Not there, Nemo, you see.” My arms went protectingly about Nona, and she drew me wordlessly to the fourth side of the room. The wall here was gone. A grating of woven seaweed like prison bars, took its place. I stood on a precipice, gazing through the bars into a black void of water. Can I make you understand the shuddering fear that possessed me? This water out there was moving swiftly downward, like a torrent, or a subterranean waterfall. Its current, drawing the water out of the room, flattened me involuntarily against the bars.