There was no other sign of what had apparently happened here.  The ashes of the fire were undisturbed.  Vale’s sleeping bag looked as if it had not been slept in, as if it had only been spread out for the night before.  Lockley went over the rock shelf inch by inch.  No red stains which might be blood.  Nothing....

No.  In a patch of soft earth between two stones there was a hoofprint.  It was not a footprint.  A hoof had made it, but not a horse’s hoof, nor a burro’s.  It wasn’t a mountain sheep track.  It was not the track of any animal known on earth.  But it was here.  Lockley found himself wondering absurdly if the creature that had made it would squeak, or if it would roar.  They seemed equally unlikely.

He looked cautiously down at the lake which was almost half a mile below him.  The water was utterly blue.  It reflected only the crater wall and the landscape beyond the area where the volcanic cliffs had fallen.  Nothing moved.  There was no visible apparatus set up on the shore, as Vale had said.  But something had happened down in the lake.  Trees by the water’s edge were bent and broken.  Masses of brushwood had been crushed and torn away.  Limbs were broken down tens of yards from the water, and there were gullies to be seen wherever there was soft earth.  An enormous wave had flung itself against the nearly circular boundary of the lake.  It had struck like a tidal wave dozens of feet high in an inland body of water.  It was extremely convincing evidence that something huge and heavy had hurtled down from the sky.

But Lockley saw no movement nor any other novelty in this wilderness.  He heard nothing that was not an entirely normal sound.

But then he smelled something.

It was a horrible, somehow reptilian odor.  It was the stench of jungle, dead and rotting.  It was much, much worse than the smell of a skunk.

He moved to fling himself into flight.  Then light blinded him.  Closing his eyelids did not shut it out.  There were all colors, intolerably vivid, and they flashed in revolving combinations and forms which succeeded each other in fractions of seconds.  He could see nothing but this light.  Then there came sound.  It was raucous.  It was cacophonic.  It was an utterly unorganized tumult in which musical notes and discords and bellowings and shriekings were combined so as to be unbearable.  And then came pure horror as he found that he could not move.  Every inch of his body had turned rigid as it became filled with anguish.  He felt, all over, as if he were holding a charged wire.

He knew that he fell stiffly where he stood.  He was blinded by light and deafened by sound and his nostrils were filled with the nauseating fetor of jungle and decay.  These sensations lasted for what seemed years.

Then all the sensations ended abruptly.  But he still could not see; his eyes were still dazzled by the lights that closing his eyelids had not changed.  He still could not hear.  He’d been deafened by the sounds that had dazed and numbed him.  He moved, and he knew it, but he could not feel anything.  His hands and body felt numb.