CHAPTER 22 

For seventeen days they followed the road, while Dennis learned to live from the jungle—if not precisely in it. 

Each midday they rested. Dennis trained himself to lie so still that the lizards skittered past and across him as if he were a fallen log. Once he amused himself by flicking lumps of nutmeat from the tip of his thumb toward the lizard that lay like a purple-black shadow on the underside of a branch ten feet above him. At last he got a bead into the proper position—a hand's breadth from the lizard's blunt nose—and the lizard's pink tongue snatched in the nutmeat. 

"It is not nuts but insects that the lizard eats, Dennis," said Chester. 

"The nuts do not harm me, Chester," the youth replied. "Will the nuts harm the lizard?" 

"The nuts will not harm the lizard, that is so." 

"Then no harm has been done," Dennis said, smiling up at the little creature. "For which I am glad." 

The lizard's throat worked as it swallowed down the pellet instead of spitting it out again as expected. 

"Perhaps that's my mission, hey?" Dennis chuckled to his companion. "To convert first myself, then the lizards of the jungle, to a diet of nutmeats?" 

"Lowly work and lowly food are better than luxury far from home," the robot grumbled. 

But when Dennis thought of Emath, he wasn't sure that a palace or village in the power of the sea hag made a proper home for anything human.