He crouched beneath a squat toadstool and waited for the dawn. The slow-dripping rain kept on, falling with irregular, drum-like beats upon the tough top of the toadstool.
He did not sleep. He was not properly hidden, and there was always danger in the dark. But this was not the darkness Burl was used to. The great fires grew and spread in the masses of ready-carbonized mushroom. The glare on the horizon grew brighter through the hours. It also came nearer.
Burl shivered a little, as he watched. He had never even dreamed of fire before, and even the overhanging clouds were lighted by these flames. Over a stretch at least a dozen miles in length and from half a mile to three miles across, the seething furnaces and columns of flame-lit smoke sent illumination over the world. It was like the glow the lights of a city can throw upon the sky. And like the flitting of aircraft above a city was the assembly of fascinated creatures of the night.
Great moths and flying beetles, gigantic gnats and midges grown huge upon this planet, fluttered and danced above the flames. As the fire came nearer, Burl could see them: colossal, delicately-formed creatures sweeping above the white-hot expanse. There were moths with riotously-colored wings of thirty-foot spread, beating the air with mighty strokes, their huge eyes glowing like garnets as they stared intoxicatedly at the incandescence below them.
Burl saw a great peacock-moth soaring above the hills with wings all of forty feet across. They fluttered like sails of unbelievable magnificence. And this was when all the separate flames had united to form a single sheet of white-hot burning stuff spread across the land for miles.
Feathery antennae of the finest lace spread out before the head of the peacock-moth; its body was of softest velvet. A ring of snow-white fur marked where its head began. The glare from below smote the maroon of its body with a strange effect. For one instant it was outlined clearly. Its eyes shone more redly than any ruby's fire. The great, delicate wings were poised in flight. Burl caught the flash of flame upon the two great irridescent spots on the wings. Shining purple and bright red, all the glory of chalcedony and of chrysoprase was reflected in the glare of burning fungi.