She dreamed that she slept
beneath a great tree in the bottom of the Kor-ul-gryf and that one
of the fearsome beasts was creeping upon her but she could not open
her eyes nor move. She tried to scream but no sound issued from
her lips. She felt the thing touch her throat, her breast, her arm,
and there it closed and seemed to be dragging her toward it. With
a super-human effort of will she opened her eyes. In the instant
she knew that she was dreaming and that quickly the hallucination
of the dream would fade--it had happened to her many times before.
But it persisted. In the dim light that filtered into the dark
chamber she saw a form beside her, she felt hairy fingers upon her
and a hairy breast against which she was being drawn. Jad-ben-Otho!
this was no dream. And then she screamed and tried to fight the
thing from her; but her scream was answered by a low growl and
another hairy hand seized her by the hair of the head. The beast
rose now upon its hind legs and dragged her from the cave to the
moonlit recess without and at the same instant she saw the figure
of what she took to be a Ho-don rise above the outer edge of the
niche.
The beast that held her saw it too and growled ominously but it
did not relinquish its hold upon her hair. It crouched as though
waiting an attack, and it increased the volume and frequency of
its growls until the horrid sounds reverberated through the gorge,
drowning even the deep bellowings of the beasts below, whose mighty
thunderings had broken out anew with the sudden commotion from the
high-flung cave.
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