Instead of obeying the command, I made a bound, and was about to take fairly to my heels, when Taee touched me slightly on the shoulder, and, fixing his eyes steadily on mine, I was rooted to the spot.  All power of volition left me.  Submissive to the infant’s gesture, I followed him to the crag he had indicated, and seated myself there in silence.  Most readers have seen something of the effects of electro-biology, whether genuine or spurious.  No professor of that doubtful craft had ever been able to influence a thought or a movement of mine, but I was a mere machine at the will of this terrible child.  Meanwhile he expanded his wings, soared aloft, and alighted amidst a copse at the brow of a hill at some distance.

I was alone; and turning my eyes with an indescribable sensation of horror towards the lake, I kept them fixed on its water, spell-bound.  It might be ten or fifteen minutes, to me it seemed ages, before the still surface, gleaming under the lamplight, began to be agitated towards the centre.  At the same time the shoals of fish near the margin evinced their sense of the enemy’s approach by splash and leap and bubbling circle.  I could detect their hurried flight hither and thither, some even casting themselves ashore.  A long, dark, undulous furrow came moving along the waters, nearer and nearer, till the vast head of the reptile emerged—­its jaws bristling with fangs, and its dull eyes fixing themselves hungrily on the spot where I sat motionless.  And now its fore feet were on the strand—­now its enormous breast, scaled on either side as in armour, in the centre showing its corrugated skin of a dull venomous yellow; and now its whole length was on the land, a hundred feet or more from the jaw to the tail.  Another stride of those ghastly feet would have brought it to the spot where I sat.  There was but a moment between me and this grim form of death, when what seemed a flash of lightning shot through the air, smote, and, for a space of time briefer than that in which a man can draw his breath, enveloped the monster; and then, as the flash vanished, there lay before me a blackened, charred, smouldering mass, a something gigantic, but of which even the outlines of form were burned away, and rapidly crumbling into dust and ashes.  I remained still seated, still speechless, ice-cold with a new sensation of dread; what had been horror was now awe.

I felt the child’s hand on my head—­fear left me—­the spell was broken—­I rose up.  “You see with what ease the Vril-ya destroy their enemies,” said Taee; and then, moving towards the bank, he contemplated the smouldering relics of the monster, and said quietly, “I have destroyed larger creatures, but none with so much pleasure.  Yes, it is a Krek; what suffering it must have inflicted while it lived!” Then he took up the poor fishes that had flung themselves ashore, and restored them mercifully to their native element.

Chapter XIX.