Our teacher read us “A Wrinkle In Time” when I was in the seventh grade, about 1980. At the end of this book, there was one chapter from another book, sort of a promotional sample. It featured a fantasy warrior of some kind looking at a giant blob that contained the half-digested remains of many other warriors, their armor and their weapons, spears and such. I always wanted to read that story, never found out the name. Since it was at the end of the L’Engle book, I thought it might be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but I don’t know how to research it. Ring any bells?
Message from the original poster:
Someone else figured it out for me.
The book is Beyond the Burning Lands, the second book in the Sword of the Spirits trilogy by John Christopher.
“I looked over the ruins to the next rise of ground, and saw the Bayemot.
Except in size it was something like the bubbles of jelly that make up frog spawn. But it was almost as high as three other men, one above the other, and being flattened from a true sphere by the earth’s pull was even greater in breadth. It was motionless but quivered, although the wind had dropped, and though it was nearly transparent there were darker shapes within.
[…] I saw, or thought I saw, an arm feebly press against the jellied horror which bore it down.”
Once I realized this was the book, I also realized my teacher actually read this excerpt when she read “The White Mountains” by John Christopher to us, Not “A Wrinkle In Time,” as I had originally (mis)remembered.