The World Below · Chapter
XIII: The Killers explained
The narrator awakens in a golden forest and meets a female amphibian companion with a childlike curiosity.
What happens
The narrator awakens in a golden forest and meets a female amphibian companion with a childlike curiosity. She shares stories of her underwater world and a past injury from a shark. The expedition halts, and the narrator is summoned to meet the five Leaders. They ask for his unconditional aid and inquire about his axe. He receives a vision of the Killers—small, worm-pink, tube-mouthed creatures with a giant archer—and witnesses their brutal hunting method. The chapter explores the contrast between the amphibians' peaceful nature and the Killers' violence.
Themes in this chapter
Violence and Ethics
The narrator's offer to fell a tree for demonstration is met with contempt, and the vision of the Killers' brutal hunting method highlights differing moral views on violence.
Knowledge and Curiosity
The female amphibian's lively curiosity and the narrator's learning about her world and the Killers drive the chapter.
Alienation and Otherness
The narrator is seen as morally unfit by the amphibians, and the Killers are depicted as utterly alien and repulsive.
Characters to notice
- Unknown
Awakens in the golden forest, converses with a female amphibian, and agrees to aid the expedition unconditionally.
- The Amphibians
The female companion shares stories of her marine world and her past injury; the five Leaders interrogate the narrator and seek his help.
- The Killers
Described in a vision as worm-pink, tube-mouthed creatures with a giant archer; they brutally hunt and capture a frog-mouthed ape.
Key passages
“The fact was that my hatred of the creature as an octopus was blended with the contempt which I felt for it as a cabbage—the first idea persisting—and that this attitude toward something which they regarded as formidable, both in itself and in its anger, impressed them inevitably.”
My mixed feelings of hatred and contempt for the creature, which the amphibians saw as dangerous, gave me some unintended prestige.
The narrator's unique perspective on the vegetable octopus earns him respect from the amphibians.
“I met here with a mind of a ready friendliness, and a very lively curiosity. I suppose, by our reckoning, she had lived for an enormous period, but the mind that met me gave an impression of an invincibly childlike quality—but it had other characteristics which I was to learn more slowly.”
The female amphibian was friendly and curious, seeming childlike despite her great age, with deeper traits I would discover later.
Describes the narrator's first impression of his amphibian companion.
“It drove through its victim’s neck, and deep into the trunk behind it. Before the shaft had ceased to quiver, the three that bore the ropes leapt forward and were twining them round the now struggling victim, binding it first to the trunk, and then, heedless of the gnashing teeth above the fastened neck, till every limb was useless.”
The arrow pinned the creature to a tree, and the Killers quickly bound it completely, ignoring its snapping teeth.
Vivid depiction of the Killers' efficient and brutal hunting technique.