least of which very many men would die.'"

"That MUST be new game. And yet the Poison People do not tell us
when game is afoot. They are an unfriendly folk."

"It is NOT game. It is--it is--I cannot say what it is."

"We will go there. I have never seen a White Hood, and I wish to
see the other things. Did he kill them?"

"They are all dead things. He says he is the keeper of
them all."

"Ah! As a wolf stands above meat he has taken to his own lair.
Let us go."

Mowgli swam to bank, rolled on the grass to dry himself, and the
two set off for Cold Lairs, the deserted city of which you may
have heard. Mowgli was not the least afraid of the Monkey People
in those days, but the Monkey People had the liveliest horror of
Mowgli. Their tribes, however, were raiding in the Jungle, and
so Cold Lairs stood empty and silent in the moonlight. Kaa led
up to the ruins of the queens' pavilion that stood on the
terrace, slipped over the rubbish, and dived down the half-
choked staircase that went underground from the centre of the
pavilion. Mowgli gave the snake-call,--"We be of one blood,
ye and I,"--and followed on his hands and knees. They crawled
a long distance down a sloping passage that turned and twisted
several times, and at last came to where the root of some great
tree, growing thirty feet overhead, had forced out a solid stone