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existence and disappeared at the moment they died.
    I would have been able to row for weeks around the giant dome without being further along. I was making up my mind to cast the ingot of metal which served me for an anchor, when I noticed, approximately in the center of the base of the mountain, a dark blotch which gave me the impression of a door or something similar. It must have permitted entrance into the interior of the dome, into the very flanks of the monstrous block of quartz.
    I rowed hard in this direction and finally reached a large shadowy bay that opened up awash with waves.
    I didn’t even dream of venturing into this den, especially when I observed that the debris of the Vampires was more plentiful there than everywhere else, and formed in the proximity a sort of fetid swamp, full of the creeping of animals and the noise of jaws.
    I thus moved away from it, but not far enough to lose this frightening entrance from sight. I took position on a small rocky island situated to the left and I tried to eat, in spite of the anguish which clenched my throat and the nausea which turned my stomach. I had not yet eaten anything that day; but in spite of my efforts, it was hardly as if I succeeded in drinking a sip of the fortifying liquor and a pinch of those starchy grains that I had found in the subterranean galleries.
    With an inexpressible emotion, I watched the night arrive. The sun had still not disappeared when already the thunder started to rumble, and the daily gale burst out.
    It was then that I observed a strange phenomenon. As the lightning redoubled in quantity and intensity, the forest with metallic trees was surrounded by a bluish atmosphere of electricity; the treetops were crowned with fire similar to that which sailors observe sometimes at the tip of the masts. The forest seemed literally to drink the storm and be saturated with fluid.
    I understood nothing; neither on earth nor on Mars had I seen wood behave in a manner so contrary to the laws of conductivity.
    I was soon torn from this mute contemplation; night had come completely, and furious wind had arisen; but, dominating its howling, a heart-rending roar arose from the end of the horizon to the north and increased from moment to moment.
    I felt the marrow of my bones freeze and my hair stand on end with horror in recognizing the high-pitched cry of the Vampires that this time was their cry of agony.
    They had left the towers, like those that I had seen the preceding month, and here hideous and pitiful they arrived, carried on the wings of the gale.
    Already they stained the sky striated with lightning bolts with their livid mass; I heard the rushing noise of their wings, and those bitter cries which tore my heart.
    It seemed to me that they came toward me, that they begged for my help! It was dreadful . . . I had fallen, gasping for breath, on the sand; I would have wanted to close my eyes so as not to see and yet, I looked, drawn by the vertigo of the horror.
    The flock of the miserable monsters passed only several meters above me and I saw the first rush, with a speed of which only a waterspout or a whirlwind can give the image, under the dark porch of which I spoke and which now was illuminated by a vague phosphorescence.
    Their swarm rushed in, dragged by an invincible force, they fell over each other like sheep at the too-narrow door of an abattoir. The screeching and imploring horde was slowly absorbed by the mountain.
    The high-pitched cries faded into soft noise of a ground up thing, in a burp of deglutition which could be heard as far away as me. From time to time, the porch, which I didn’t dare call a mouth, discharged in a flood of bloody foam the wings and the palps which went to pile up in a semi-circular shoal, like filth forms at the entrance of sewers . . .
    And above this hideous drama, the large black sky slashed with bolts of lightning, which showed the nightmare landscape and the angry waves. . .
    It was more than my