The rushing water tore away his words. But I understood. I clung with my right hand to the sleigh; with my left arm crooked before my face, in the back-eddy of water behind it, I breathed again. And then I saw that all the others were doing the same. Had I not done it, I should have been drowned—as _you_ perhaps have choked a fish to death by towing it rapidly through water. We dashed onward, with the water roaring past. Then in a gentle arc we swung to the left and slackened to normal swimming speed. A mud-ooze floor was close under us; a ceiling came down overhead. We were in the slit, headed for the coral forest. The coral barrier! I gasped as I thought of it. How had the King come through that barrier with his sleigh? I was now crouching, clinging to the sleigh at Nona’s side. I asked the question, but no one heard me. They were all talking. The King had an arm about my Nona, paternally, affectionately. “I am glad you are safely returned, my child.” Atar was asking: “My father—what made you come for us?” The King answered very gravely: “Your mother—she was worried, Atar.” His eyes were laughing. “I had to slip away, unseen in the Time of Sleep. Our people would not like their monarch dashing off alone to possible danger. But though I am an old man, there is lust for fighting in me yet.” Then I made my question heard. The King sobered instantly. “Much is coming to pass in Rax—strange things I learn every hour—and all of danger to us and our people.” He told us then that upon the heels of our own departure into the Water of Wild Things (it had been two eating times before, as I well knew by the hunger which possessed me) the Marinoid guards had noticed an open swathe cut through the coral forest. They found it, and reported it to the King—a thirty-foot-wide lane. Evidently it had been recently done by the Maagogs. In our own hasty search for an entrance, we three had overlooked it. The King, hearing that, had decided to drive a short distance in to the Water of Wild Things and look for our return. As he spoke, our sleigh reached the coral forest. We passed along it a short distance, and arrived at a grating thirty feet square. The situation was now plain to us, and hastily we told the King what we had learned from the Maagogs. Og, sure of the coming war and his own leadership, was preparing to strike at once. He had this lane cut through the coral to give free passage to his Maagog army in its attack on Rax. This grating Og had put there to keep the monsters from wandering into Marinoid waters. He was going to conquer those waters—and he wanted no monsters there to harass the future of the victorious Maagogs. The grating was easily removable. The King had swung it aside to get his sleigh past; and we swung it now, to return. Soon we were speeding out across the cool, sweet Marinoid waters. They were dim with twilight. Peaceful, beautiful, a Garden of Paradise to us, returning now from that foul Water of Wild Things.