Nevertheless they marched bravely into the hole in the moon.
Onward, climbing steadily upward, hour after hour, moving like silent shadows in order that their presence might not be betrayed, the Selinites marched with Epworth, Joan, Billy, and Queen Moawha at their head. They traveled with their chloroform guns in their hands, and their eyes straining ahead, the way being given additional light by strong electric flash lights. The danger Epworth was aware would not have been as great if he had had room to spread out his army but the corridor was so narrow in places that he could march his men only a hundred abreast.
They had been climbing upward fifteen hours, pushing earnestly ahead, when they were warned that they were approaching something by a noisome smell that came to their nostrils. Joan was the first to get the scent, and she stopped with a shudder.
“I know now what that smell means,” she whispered in a frightened voice, “and I can also feel the invisible movement of the Things ahead. They are preparing for us.”
The idea that innumerable great and mysterious monsters were preparing to do battle against them caused Epworth and Billy to pause also and shoot their flash lights far ahead.
“There is something uncanny, terrifying, unnatural, inhuman about the Things,” Epworth answered. “I feel as if I were going forth to battle with gigantic spiritual monsters of evil. They move so swiftly, so silently. They are on you before you know it.”
Billy’s teeth chattered, and Joan trembled violently. The horrors of that dark underground world were upon them notwithstanding the fact that they were backed by a splendid army.
Epworth waited until several hundred soldiers were around them, and then gave orders to march forward with all their flash lights hurling flames ahead.
The cavern heretofore had been a long, narrow corridor. Now it suddenly flared out into an immense underground chamber, and at the entrance of this chamber, lying flat and the color of their bodies changing like variegated lizards to fit into their surroundings, were twelve round-bodied, scaly backed animals with polygonal plates covering their heads. They had their tongues sticking out, and their three red eyes glared savagely.