feeling unpleasant," Sam suggested. "It might be a good thing to fix 'em a hot welcome." That had already occurred to me. I let Sam have the controls, and ran out and loaded the little cannon. Through the thick windows of the little conning-tower I watched the monsters flying above us. They followed as we kept up our deliberate advance toward the jungle-covered shore. Suddenly one of them dived down upon us. The impact of its heavy, shark-like body shook the machine, and its great claws grated over the metal plates with an unpleasantly suggestive sound, as it strove vainly to rip them open. I felt some alarm. For sheer fighting power I would match one of those flying plants against any animal that ever walked on earth. In wing-spread it was fully as long as the Omnimobile, though the machine was, of course, many times heavier. I slipped into gear the machinery that revolved the turret, and as soon as a portion of that rough, armored brown body was fairly before the gun, I let fire with an explosive shell. The whole machine rocked with the force of the explosion, and the side of that vast scaly brown body was torn off. A viscid green fluid gushed out, dyeing the deck and tinting the water alongside. The terrible grasp of the thing relaxed, and it slipped off into the sea. The others were hovering low, but in a moment Sam had submerged the machine, and we made for the shore under water. In five minutes we struck a soft, muddy bank. He shifted the caterpillar tread into gear. The machine waddled up the muddy slope through the fringe of strange plants, and broke into the weird jungle. The unearthly radiance of the sky filtered through the jungle roof in a dull crimson light. In the vague, ominous twilight, huge and monstrous tree-trunks rose all about us, as much like great fungoid growths as like normal trees. We pushed through thickets of weird purples and strange metallic hues, under vast masses of hanging green vines, all hung with gigantic incredible blooms that were so bright they seemed to light the dusky forest with their vivid flames of crimson and yellow and blue! For perhaps three miles the Omnimobile smashed her deliberate way like a gigantic reptilian monster through that strip of weird rotting jungle. Then we emerged on higher ground of a different vegetation.

CHAPTER XIV
The Prey of the Plant
We stopped the machine on the first little eminence of the open space, to survey the vastly different and unfamiliar region that lay before us. It was an open, park-like country. There were broad meadows and low hills covered with a fine turf of luxuriant green grass. There were scattering small groves and great solitary trees so profusely laden with vast purple blossoms that they seemed afire with purple 

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