She did not see me until she was level with the gap from which I watched her, and when she did, she leapt sideways with incredible agility. The leap took her to the very edge of the opal way, and her left foot pressed for a second on the purple soil beyond. As it did so, with the speed of light itself, the nearest of the bright-green globes shot open in a score of writhing tentacles, of which one caught the slipping foot, and dragged its victim down. There came one scream, intense and dreadful, high and shrill, and then I watched a lithe furred human-seeming body which struggled against the clinging, twisting arm which dragged her in. The tentacles were very long and thin, and of a brick-red colour. The one which reached her first was not thicker, toward its end, than a man’s finger, but for a moment only was there any doubt of the issue. Then a stronger tentacle got a firm grip of its victim’s body, and as it did so the scream came again, but shriller, louder, and more exultant, and I realised that it was the plant that screamed, and not the prize it had captured. I don’t think I should have interfered but for that second scream of triumph, but there was something in its tone so hateful, so bestial, that an impulse of pity for its victim broke across the blank amazement of my mind, and with the feeling, as thought that answered thought, I knew that she was calling to me to help her. The axe lay ready to my hand on the cave-floor, and I picked it up and ran forward. I brought the blade down on the nearest tentacle with such force as would have severed a branch of a well-grown tree, but it only dented a skin that was soft and flexible, but tough, like rubber. As I swung the axe again, a long arm caught me round both ankles and pulled. Had I not been so strange to it, had it better gauged my strength and weight, or had it not been occupied with its earlier capture, I suppose that the next minute would have ended my experience, but as it was, the clutch only stirred me to a desperation of terror that brought the axe down with double force, and the severed limb fell quivering to the ground. As it did so, the creature screamed again. It was a cry of the most utter terror, abject and hellish beyond any possibility of words to tell it. And the forest answered. It answered in a hundred voices that screamed, and clamoured, and questioned, and replied. I had never known before the strength which panic and loathing may give to human muscles. Backward writhed the frightened tentacles, their victim dropped and forgotten, and every axe-stroke that followed gashed or severed one of them, and where they were cut through, a wine-red semi-liquid jelly slowly welled from the gap.