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That they had food sufficient to last them for several days was quite certain, while the question of drink was cleared up already for they had discovered a trap-door in the girdered ceiling above them and an iron ladder outside the door of the room, which, when put in position, gave access to it.

From them extended scores of girdered arms. These were thickly studded with the flaming cruciform shapes, the opened cubes gleaming with their angry flares of reds and smoky yellows. From the tentacles of many swung immense shields like those which ringed the hall of the great cones. And as the sledges beat, ever over their bent heads poured from the crosses a flood of crimson lightnings.

Still there was no movement among all the arrased, girdered, pillared hosts. There came a little wailing; far away it was and far. Nearer it drew. Was that a tremor that passed through the crowded crater? A quick pulse of eagerness? "Hungry!" whispered Drake. "They're HUNGRY!" Closer was the wailing; again that faint tremor quivered over the place. And now I caught it a quick and avid pulsing.

They now formed a thoroughly dismayed, disheartened group of three there under the high, girdered roof of Uncle Sam's reception chamber for prospective children by adoption.

The murky, girdered ceiling still three hundred feet above him. The swelling, curving, glittering surface of steel underneath. Then he struck. He landed beside the lean man, with his left arm outstretched to share his impetus with him. Alone, he would have had momentum enough to carry himself up the slope down which the man had begun to descend. But now he shared it.