half-way through it. The worrying of the dog ceased with eloquent
suddenness. A curse died, unfinished.

And silence, as perfect as the silence of the unseen watchers strung
all about the periphery of the stockade, once more dominated the
night.

For precisely ten minutes, nothing broke that silence--minutes
during all of which the Master remained calmly waiting, with grave
confidence. Bohannan shuddered a little. His Celtic imagination was at
work, again. Uncanny the attack seemed to him, unreal and ghostlike.
So, perhaps, might strange, unbelievable creatures from some other
planet attack and conquer the world, noiselessly, gently, irrevocably.

This assault was different from any other ever made since man and man
first began battling together in the dim twilights of the primeval.
Not with shout and cheer did it rush forward, nor yet with venomous
gases that gave the alarm, that choked, that strangled, that tortured.

Silence and concealment, and the invisible blight of sleep, like the
greater numbing that once fell on the hosts of Sennacherib, enfolded
all opposition. All who would have stood against the Legion, simply
sighed once, perhaps spoke a few disjointed words, then sank into
oblivion.

So far as anyone could see, save for the bursting of twenty-nine
insignificant little light-bubbles, in mid-air, nothing at all had
happened. And yet tremendously much had happened, inside the huge
stockade.