Slowly they dragged her throat toward a
hideous mouth and in a little moment she was dead.
Ghek might have remained in the nest for a long time, since there
was ample food for many days; but he did not do so. Instead he
explored the burrows. He followed them into many subterranean
chambers of the city of Manator, and upward through walls to
rooms above the ground. He found many ingeniously devised traps,
and he found poisoned food and other signs of the constant battle
that the inhabitants of Manator waged against these repulsive
creatures that dwelt beneath their homes and public buildings.
His exploration revealed not only the vast proportions of the
network of runways that apparently traversed every portion of
the city, but the great antiquity of the majority of them. Tons
upon tons of dirt must have been removed, and for a long time he
wondered where it had been deposited, until in following downward
a tunnel of great size and length he sensed before him the
thunderous rush of subterranean waters, and presently came to the
bank of a great, underground river, tumbling onward, no doubt,
the length of a world to the buried sea of Omean.
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