She picked up one of the short javelins from the floor, and balanced it thoughtfully on an outstretched finger. When she had turned it over, and looked at it carefully for some time, she threw it against the wall, watching its flight very closely. It turned once in the air, failed in its balance, and struck the wall with a slanting feeble stroke. Unperturbed, she collected six others, and threw them one by one, so quickly that the next was in the air before the first had fallen. Of these the two last struck the wall at the same spot, and with the full force of the throw. “I think I can play that game if they should ask it,” she laughed in her mind, and collected others to her hand. “Could you hit the same spot twice in succession?” I asked. “Surely,” she answered, “even you could not forget so quickly. But I myself forget that your body is not as mine. I understand that yours may do your will with exactness on one occasion, and on the next, though you have the same will, and it be equally capable, it may fail entirely. All the games of which you told me, in which your body is used, are based on this quality. But with us it is different. I know now that I can hit any spot at which I can aim, and as often as I attempt it. I will show you with these.” She picked up two of the javelins, and sent the first against the farther wall--but the second did not follow it. At the moment her hand was lifted, the stone beside us disappeared from sight, leaving a yard-wide gap, and as swift as thought itself her javelin was flung into the open pit beneath us. An outburst of whistling screams told us that it had carried no welcome message, but the next second we had our own troubles to deal with. Back into its place the stone shot upward, and with such force that certain things which had been placed upon it were thrown to the roof and fell scattering upon us. Four of them there were--four eight-foot lengths of living, writhing rope--but to me, at least, they seemed forty. I suppose that my companion, of cooler mind, and of quicker hands also, made no such error. I know that while I was struggling with one that had caught my leg and was thrusting upward for a more deadly grip, her mind reached mine with the quiet quickness of thought and buoyant gaiety of spirit that physical danger always waked within her. I had a feeling that the idea that she should be threatened by hostile violence always came to her as an absurdity, to be met with laughter. “We must watch the stone. Put your foot on its end. Jump to the left, or the other one will get you.” So she called to me, while she ripped one which had fallen round her own waist with a javelin point till it loosed her and fell squirming, and as it did so she flung the javelin, not at the next of them, though it was round her feet already, nor at the gap which showed again where the stone had left it, but at the lizard-forms, that were now twittering with excitement above us.