He did not say much. His feelings were at strife. He had come to condemn, and he found himself forced to admit and admire. The plantations had by degrees crept a considerable way up the valley. The party came back along the shoulder of Ra'a's hill, and as they came towards the open a furious gust of wind carried them almost off their feet. And then they saw the most appalling sight of their lives, and one they never forgot. Out of the dim grey curtain of the west there appeared a monstrous sinuous shape that reached from sky to sea, and came swirling towards the island with an easy voluptuous grace that was full at once of haphazard fortuity and most malign intention. They stood frozen. Blair suddenly gripped Pym by the arm. He could not speak. Behind the first monster came another, and another, and another, all reeling hither and thither like drunken demons, but all making straight for the island. "Good God!" cried Pym, and instinctively put his hands to his mouth to shout a warning to his ship, a shout that could not have carried five inches. Then he commenced to run down the hill as he had never run in his life before. His whole thought was for his ship and his men, Blair's and Cathie's for the people below. Captain Pym reached the beach through a crowd of fugitives making for the hillside. The monsters had been sighted, and panic was afoot. Blair and Cathie rushed down through the village, shouting-- "To the hills!" and sped on. Jean and Aunt Jannet Harvey, busy in the house, had seen nothing. The two men dashed up the steps. Blair seized his boy under one arm, and dragged his wife by the other. Cathie laid hold of Aunt Jannet, and with a gasping word of explanation which only filled the women with fear, and explained nothing, they ran for the southern hill, whose arm ran out into the sea. Only when they had got half-way up it did they dare to turn and look. They saw Pym ramping alone on the beach like a madman. They saw the first of the hideous whirling monsters hop lightly over the swollen reef without a pause and pirouette in the lagoon. Then a blast of smoke whirled from the deck of the _Torch_, and the dull sound of the gun went quickly past them. The monster writhed and broke, and the pendulous head of it swept inland. The ships pitched at their moorings till the kedge cables snapped and they seemed standing on their sterns. The waves of the lagoon churned up to the platforms of the mission-houses. "Good lad! Good lad!" shouted Cathie. Then the other three monsters, as though in answer to the challenge, as though endued with malignant understanding and most devilish determination, bent and swung and reeled over the reef and flung themselves towards the ships. They saw Captain Pym suddenly throw up his hands above his head in a gesture of utter impotence and despair, and then turn and make for the hill.