Led by Burl, the tribesmen waded ashore, wonderment and excitement in
their hearts. Burl searched all about with his eyes. Toadstools and
mushrooms, rusts and molds, even giant puff-balls grew in the little
valley, but of the deadly red mushrooms he saw none.
A single bee was buzzing slowly over the tangled thickets of fungoids,
and the loud voice of a cricket came in a deafening burst of sound,
reechoed from the hillsides, but save for the far-flung web of the
banded spider a mile or more away, there was no sign of the deadly
creatures that preyed upon men.
Burl began to climb the hillside with his tribefolk after him. For an
hour they toiled upward, through confused masses of fungus of almost
every species. Twice they stopped to seize upon edible fungi and break
them into masses they could carry, and once they paused and made a wide
detour around a thicket from which there came a stealthy rustling.
Burl believed that the rustling was merely the sound of a moth or
butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, but was unwilling to take any
chances. He and his people circled the mushroom thicket and mounted
higher.
And at last, perhaps six or seven hundred feet above the level of the
river, they came upon a little plateau, going back into a small pocket
in the mountainside. Here they found many of the edible fungoids, and no
less than a dozen of the giant cabbages, on whose broad leaves many
furry grubs were feeding steadily in placid contentment with themselves
and all the world.
A small stream bubbled up from a tiny basin and ran swiftly across the
plateau, and there were dense thickets of toadstools in which the
tribesmen might find secure hiding-places. The tribe would make itself a
new home here.
That night they hid among inextricably tangled masses of mushrooms, and
saw with amazement the multitude of creatures that ventured forth in the
darkness. All the valley and the plateau were illumined by the shining
beacons of huge but graceful fireflies, who darted here and there in
delight and--apparently--in security.
Upon the earth below, also, many tiny lights glowed. The larvæ of the
fireflies crawled slowly but happily over the fungus-covered
mountainside, and great glow-worms clambered upon the shining tops of
the toadstools and rested there, twin broad bands of bluish fire burning
brightly within their translucent bodies.
They were the females of the firefly race, which never attain to legs
and wings, but crawl always upon the earth, merely enlarged creatures in
the forms of their own larvæ. Moths soared overhead with mighty,
throbbing wing-beats, and all the world seemed a paradise through which
no evil creatures roamed in search of prey.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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