tenfingersofdoom wrote:...and they excrete superheated oxygen out of their tail end(there is a quote somewhere).
The storm arrived just after daybreak. First there was the beady stretchedout
immobility of the desert dawn pressing dunes one into another. Next, the
advancing dust caused him to seal his face flaps. In the thickening dust the
desert became a dun picture without lines. Then sand needles began cutting his
cheeks, stinging his lids. He felt the coarse grit on his tongue and knew the
moment of decision had come. Should he risk the old stories by immobilizing the
almost exhausted worm? He took only a heartbeat to discard this choice, worked
his way back to the worm's tail, slacked off his hooks. Barely moving now, the
worm began to burrow. But the excesses of the creature's heat-transfer system
still churned up a cyclone oven behind him in the quickening storm. Fremen
children learned the dangers of this position near the worm's tail with their
earliest stories. Worms were oxygen factories; fire burned wildly in their
passage, fed by the lavish exhalations from the chemical adaptations to friction
within them.
~Children of Dune