Carving down two yards into the cool sand that was ever eclipsed from the whirligig sun, the sappers uncovered a layer of hard white limestone. Upon that layer, Time impressed a bone claw.

It was brown with age, and three fingered. Astonished, the sappers kneeled and brushed away the sand that hid the petrified carcass of a giant creature. It was winged and terrible.

Hither and thither we wandered over, and ran over, and crowded round the rim, and made a mob, a silence-stricken mob. Silent, we stared down into the lantern-lit pit. The lantern flickered, shaking the shadows. It made an ancient monster seem to move again.

It was dry. Its wings had many folds. Its thick talons curled and creased its segmented joints in petrifaction of agony. Its slender ribbage was sundered and shattered. Its long and sinuous neck strung out in ragged chain of jagged bone, curving to a long-beaked skull. Too many teeth filled the dilated jaws. The empty skull sockets jumped back and forth with shadows that were oily, like black bubbles, like the eyes of a salty nightmare hauled up in half-torn nets from the black, blind, and timeless fathoms.

Something terrible lay here entombed. What caused this ugly dragon to die in such evident pain? Why did its brethren skulk the clouds no more? - Or did it yet fly, but only at night? - and only on the savage dark side jungles of the Moon... - Did a shadow pass over us just now? No, it was just a cloud, a misshapen cloud - was it not? What did it hunt? What killed it? What could kill it?

Looking down at it, flickery horrific, we recognized something ancient within us, instinctive and unpleasant, lizardly slithering still, solitary and sluggish and suddenly violent. (Did this Horror still circle about, boldly, on the dark side of our heart?)

Did its brood sink, consumed in God-hating crime? Some said so. What are we doing so far from home? Are not these barren cacti- encumbered craters a fit Paradise of Horror? Maybe they're some kind of savage god. I bet the hideous flock lived here in the time before Columbus. Did Captain Cortes, burning his wingXd-galleys, find this Horror's last eggs, and crush them under his studded cannon wheels? Was this flying thing, then, the source of those solemn, forgotten burial mounds? Those burial mounds - some small, some enormous - sculpted in symbolic bird-shapes by the lost races of the New Worlds? Hush, for it is idle to speculate, and war is coming to us quickly.

But these glimmering gloomings, flickering forebodings drew a dark wing over us all. A specter took his bony bodkin and stitched us all in his shivering tapestry. Our little huddle of men looked so small and helpless against the hidden horrors of this foreign Moon. So far from home!

A collective chill ran through us.

- Such a hideous grave! In the heart of the fort!

(O Diggers, what have you done? Impudent hands! Diggers of taboo! Shovel down them bad bones!)

- And will our riddled bodies, with limbs torn by shell, and bellies spilt by bayonet...will we be buried here - here?

- In this pit? In this dead snatcher's bony grip, would we rise, and find salvation? It doesn't seem likely...

(I shuddered, seeing in this twisted trench a desiccant revelation of all annihilation. O this flying horror, this war-bat, its hooting grin! O it will tear its scissor-teeth on poor privates!)

- Pickmen, hey! You dug it up. Bury it again.

- What did we dig up? What if it won't be buried again?

( - Is there mercy in the Moon?)

( - Indeed not! Is hate and horror in the hallow. What secret have you unscraped?)

( - Is not the fort just another crater?)

( - Is dust and naught on top.)

- Wait! Are we warriors or milksops? Come now... Bones are bones! Stick `em in the wheelbarrow, and dig on!

- I'm afraid. I don't want to touch them.

- I won't either.

( - How humble are bones, our bones, when so far from home.)

And so, a moonish wind did blow, to and fro, with a hiss, and a scratch, hacksawing side to side through the hollow marrow of our stick-figured fright. Hissing "Quetzl!" Scratching, "Coatl!"

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