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Pellucidar

by Edgar Rice Burroughs · English · Gutenberg #605 · 330,506 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Pellucidar

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs


        
Release date: July 1, 1996 [eBook #605]
                Most recently updated: July 16, 2023

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/605

Credits: Judith Boss


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PELLUCIDAR ***




[Illustration]




PELLUCIDAR

By Edgar Rice Burroughs




Contents

 PROLOGUE
 CHAPTER I. LOST ON PELLUCIDAR
 CHAPTER II. TRAVELING WITH TERROR
 CHAPTER III. SHOOTING THE CHUTES—AND AFTER
 CHAPTER IV. FRIENDSHIP AND TREACHERY
 CHAPTER V. SURPRISES
 CHAPTER VI. A PENDENT WORLD
 CHAPTER VII. FROM PLIGHT TO PLIGHT
 CHAPTER VIII. CAPTIVE
 CHAPTER IX. HOOJA’S CUTTHROATS APPEAR
 CHAPTER X. THE RAID ON THE CAVE-PRISON
 CHAPTER XI. ESCAPE
 CHAPTER XII. KIDNAPED!
 CHAPTER XIII. RACING FOR LIFE
 CHAPTER XIV. GORE AND DREAMS
 CHAPTER XV. CONQUEST AND PEACE




PROLOGUE


Several years had elapsed since I had found the opportunity to do any
big-game hunting; for at last I had my plans almost perfected for a
return to my old stamping-grounds in northern Africa, where in other
days I had had excellent sport in pursuit of the king of beasts.

The date of my departure had been set; I was to leave in two weeks. No
schoolboy counting the lagging hours that must pass before the
beginning of “long vacation” released him to the delirious joys of the
summer camp could have been filled with greater impatience or keener
anticipation.

And then came a letter that started me for Africa twelve days ahead of
my schedule.

Often am I in receipt of letters from strangers who have found
something in a story of mine to commend or to condemn. My interest in
this department of my correspondence is ever fresh. I opened this
particular letter with all the zest of pleasurable anticipation with
which I had opened so many others. The post-mark (Algiers) had aroused
my interest and curiosity, especially at this time, since it was
Algiers that was presently to witness the termination of my coming sea
voyage in search of sport and adventure.

Before the reading of that letter was completed lions and lion-hunting
had fled my thoughts, and I was in a state of excitement bordering upon
frenzy.

It—well, read it yourself, and see if you, too, do not find food for
frantic conjecture, for tantalizing doubts, and for a great hope.

Here it is:

DEAR SIR: I think that I have run across one of the most remarkable
coincidences in modern literature. But let me start at the beginning:

I am, by profession, a wanderer upon the face of the earth. I have no
trade—nor any other occupation.

My father bequeathed me a competency; some remoter ancestors lust to
roam. I have combined the two and invested them carefully and without
extravagance.

I became interested in your story, At the Earth’s Core, not so much
because of the probability of the tale as of a great and abiding wonder
that people should be paid real money for writing such impossible
trash. You will pardon my candor, but it is necessary that you
understand my mental attitude toward this particular story—that you may
credit that which follows.

Shortly thereafter I started for the Sahara in search of a rather rare
species of antelope that is to be found only occasionally within a
limited area at a certain season of the year. My chase led me far from
the haunts of man.

It was a fruitless search, however, in so far as antelope is concerned;
but one night as I lay courting sleep at the edge of a little cluster
of date-palms that surround an ancient well in the midst of the arid,
shifting sands, I suddenly became conscious of a strange sound coming
apparently from the earth beneath my head.

It was an intermittent ticking!

No reptile or insect with which I am familiar reproduces any such
notes. I lay for an hour—listening intently.

At last my curiosity got the better of me. I arose, lighted my lamp and
commenced to investigate.

My bedding lay upon a rug stretched directly upon the warm sand. The
noise appeared to be coming from beneath the rug. I raised it, but
found nothing—yet, at intervals, the sound continued.

I dug into the sand with the point of my hunting-knife. A few inches
below the surface of the sand I encountered a solid substance that had
the feel of wood beneath the sharp steel.

Excavating about it, I unearthed a small wooden box. From this
receptacle issued the strange sound that I had heard.

How had it come here?

What did it contain?

In attempting to lift it from its burying place I discovered that it
seemed to be held fast by means of a very small insulated cable running
farther into the sand beneath it.

My first impulse was to drag the thing loose by main strength; but
fortunately I thought better of this and fell to examining the box. I
soon saw that it was covered by a hinged lid, which was held closed by
a simple screwhook and eye.

It took but a moment to loosen this and raise the cover, when, to my
utter astonishment, I discovered an ordinary telegraph instrument
clicking away within.

“What in the world,” thought I, “is this thing doing here?”

That it was a French military instrument was my first guess; but really
there didn’t seem much likelihood that this was the correct
explanation, when one took into account the loneliness and remoteness
of the spot.

As I sat gazing at my remarkable find, which was ticking and clicking
away there in the silence of the desert night, trying to convey some
message which I was unable to interpret, my eyes fell upon a bit of
paper lying in the bottom of the box beside the instrument. I picked it
up and examined it. Upon it were written but two letters:

D. I.


They meant nothing to me then. I was baffled.

Once, in an interval of silence upon the part of the receiving
instrument, I moved the sending-key up and down a few times. Instantly
the receiving mechanism commenced to work frantically.

I tried to recall something of the Morse Code, with which I had played
as a little boy—but time had obliterated it from my memory. I became
almost frantic as I let my imagination run riot among the possibilities
for which this clicking instrument might stand.

Some poor devil at the unknown other end might be in dire need of
succor. The very franticness of the instrument’s wild clashing
betokened something of the kind.

And there sat I, powerless to interpret, and so powerless to help!

It was then that the inspiration came to me. In a flash there leaped to
my mind the closing paragraphs of the story I had read in the club at
Algiers:

Does the answer lie somewhere upon the bosom of the broad Sahara, at
the ends of two tiny wires, hidden beneath a lost cairn?

The idea seemed preposterous. Experience and intelligence combined to
assure me that there could be no slightest grain of truth or
possibility in your wild tale—it was fiction pure and simple.

And yet where WERE the other ends of those wires?

What was this instrument—ticking away here in the great Sahara—but a
travesty upon the possible!

Would I have believed in it had I not seen it with my own eyes?

And the initials—D. I.—upon the slip of paper!

David’s initials were these—David Innes.

I smiled at my imaginings. I ridiculed the assumption that there was an
inner world and that these wires led downward through the earth’s crust
to the surface of Pellucidar. And yet—

Well, I sat there all night, listening to that tantalizing clicking,
now and then moving the sending-key just to let the other end know that
the instrument had been discovered. In the morning, after carefully
returning the box to its hole and covering it over with sand, I called
my servants about me, snatched a hurried breakfast, mounted my horse,
and started upon a forced march for Algiers.

I arrived here today. In writing you this letter I feel that I am
making a fool of myself.

There is no David Innes.

There is no Dian the Beautiful.

There is no world within a world.

Pellucidar is but a realm of your imagination—nothing more.

BUT—

The incident of the finding of that buried telegraph instrument upon
the lonely Sahara is little short of uncanny, in view of your story of
the adventures of David Innes.

I have called it one of the most remarkable coincidences in modern
fiction. I called it literature before, but—again pardon my candor—your
story is not.

And now—why am I writing you?

Heaven knows, unless it is that the persistent clicking of that
unfathomable enigma out there in the vast silences of the Sahara has so
wrought upon my nerves that reason refuses longer to function sanely.

I cannot hear it now, yet I know that far away to the south, all alone
beneath the sands, it is still pounding out its vain, frantic appeal.

It is maddening.

It is your fault—I want you to release me from it.

Cable me at once, at my expense, that there was no basis of fact for
your story, At the Earth’s Core.

Very respectfully yours,


COGDON NESTOR,
    —— and —— Club,
        Algiers.
            June 1st, —.


Ten minutes after reading this letter I had cabled Mr. Nestor as
follows:

Story true. Await me Algiers.


As fast as train and boat would carry me, I sped toward my destination.
For all those dragging days my mind was a whirl of mad conjecture, of
frantic hope, of numbing fear.

The finding of the telegraph-instrument practically assured me that
David Innes had driven Perry’s iron mole back through the earth’s crust
to the buried world of Pellucidar; but what adventures had befallen him
since his return?

Had he found Dian the Beautiful, his half-savage mate, safe among his
friends, or had Hooja the Sly One succeeded in his nefarious schemes to
abduct her?

Did Abner Perry, the lovable old inventor and paleontologist, still
live?

Had the federated tribes of Pellucidar succeeded in overthrowing the
mighty Mahars, the dominant race of reptilian monsters, and their
fierce, gorilla-like soldiery, the savage Sagoths?

I must admit that I was in a state bordering upon nervous prostration
when I entered the —— and —— Club, in Algiers, and inquired for Mr.
Nestor. A moment later I was ushered into his presence, to find myself
clasping hands with the sort of chap that the world holds only too few
of.

He was a tall, smooth-faced man of about thirty, clean-cut, straight,
and strong, and weather-tanned to the hue of a desert Arab. I liked him
immensely from the first, and I hope that after our three months
together in the desert country—three months not entirely lacking in
adventure—he found that a man may be a writer of “impossible trash” and
yet have some redeeming qualities.

The day following my arrival at Algiers we left for the south, Nestor
having made all arrangements in advance, guessing, as he naturally did,
that I could be coming to Africa for but a single purpose—to hasten at
once to the buried telegraph-instrument and wrest its secret from it.

In addition to our native servants, we took along an English
telegraph-operator named Frank Downes. Nothing of interest enlivened
our journey by rail and caravan till we came to the cluster of
date-palms about the ancient well upon the rim of the Sahara.

It was the very spot at which I first had seen David Innes. If he had
ever raised a cairn above the telegraph instrument no sign of it
remained now. Had it not been for the chance that caused Cogdon Nestor
to throw down his sleeping rug directly over the hidden instrument, it
might still be clicking there unheard—and this story still unwritten.

When we reached the spot and unearthed the little box the instrument
was quiet, nor did repeated attempts upon the part of our telegrapher
succeed in winning a response from the other end of the line. After
several days of futile endeavor to raise Pellucidar, we had begun to
despair. I was as positive that the other end of that little cable
protruded through the surface of the inner world as I am that I sit
here today in my study—when about midnight of the fourth day I was
awakened by the sound of the instrument.

Leaping to my feet I grasped Downes roughly by the neck and dragged him
out of his blankets. He didn’t need to be told what caused my
excitement, for the instant he was awake he, too, heard the long-hoped
for click, and with a whoop of delight pounced upon the instrument.

Nestor was on his feet almost as soon as I. The three of us huddled
about that little box as if our lives depended upon the message it had
for us.

Downes interrupted the clicking with his sending-key. The noise of the
receiver stopped instantly.

“Ask who it is, Downes,” I directed.

He did so, and while we awaited the Englishman’s translation of the
reply, I doubt if either Nestor or I breathed.

“He says he’s David Innes,” said Downes. “He wants to know who we are.”

“Tell him,” said I; “and that we want to know how he is—and all that
has befallen him since I last saw him.”

For two months I talked with David Innes almost every day, and as
Downes translated, either Nestor or I took notes. From these, arranged
in chronological order, I have set down the following account of the
further adventures of David Innes at the earth’s core, practically in
his own words.




CHAPTER I
LOST ON PELLUCIDAR


The Arabs, of whom I wrote you at the end of my last letter (Innes
began), and whom I thought to be enemies intent only upon murdering me,
proved to be exceedingly friendly—they were searching for the very band
of marauders that had threatened my existence. The huge
rhamphorhynchus-like reptile that I had brought back with me from the
inner world—the ugly Mahar that Hooja the Sly One had substituted for
my dear Dian at the moment of my departure—filled them with wonder and
with awe.

Nor less so did the mighty subterranean prospector which had carried me
to Pellucidar and back again, and which lay out in the desert about two
miles from my camp.

With their help I managed to get the unwieldy tons of its great bulk
into a vertical position—the nose deep in a hole we had dug in the sand
and the rest of it supported by the trunks of date-palms cut for the
purpose.

It was a mighty engineering job with only wild Arabs and their wilder
mounts to do the work of an electric crane—but finally it was
completed, and I was ready for departure.

For some time I hesitated to take the Mahar back with me. She had been
docile and quiet ever since she had discovered herself virtually a
prisoner aboard the “iron mole.” It had been, of course, impossible for
me to communicate with her since she had no auditory organs and I no
knowledge of her fourth-dimension, sixth-sense method of communication.

Naturally I am kind-hearted, and so I found it beyond me to leave even
this hateful and repulsive thing alone in a strange and hostile world.
The result was that when I entered the iron mole I took her with me.

That she knew that we were about to return to Pellucidar was evident,
for immediately her manner changed from that of habitual gloom that had
pervaded her, to an almost human expression of contentment and delight.

Our trip through the earth’s crust was but a repetition of my two
former journeys between the inner and the outer worlds. This time,
however, I imagine that we must have maintained a more nearly
perpendicular course, for we accomplished the journey in a few minutes’
less time than upon the occasion of my first journey through the
five-hundred-mile crust. Just a trifle less than seventy-two hours
after our departure into the sands of the Sahara, we broke through the
surface of Pellucidar.

Fortune once again favored me by the slightest of margins, for when I
opened the door in the prospector’s outer jacket I saw that we had
missed coming up through the bottom of an ocean by but a few hundred
yards.

The aspect of the surrounding country was entirely unfamiliar to me—I
had no conception of precisely where I was upon the one hundred and
twenty-four million square miles of Pellucidar’s vast land surface.

The perpetual midday sun poured down its torrid rays from zenith, as it
had done since the beginning of Pellucidarian time—as it would continue
to do to the end of it. Before me, across the wide sea, the weird,
horizonless seascape folded gently upward to meet the sky until it lost
itself to view in the azure depths of distance far above the level of
my eyes.

How strange it looked! How vastly different from the flat and puny area
of the circumscribed vision of the dweller upon the outer crust!

I was lost. Though I wandered ceaselessly throughout a lifetime, I
might never discover the whereabouts of my former friends of this
strange and savage world. Never again might I see dear old Perry, nor
Ghak the Hairy One, nor Dacor the Strong One, nor that other infinitely
precious one—my sweet and noble mate, Dian the Beautiful!

But even so I was glad to tread once more the surface of Pellucidar.
Mysterious and terrible, grotesque and savage though she is in many of
her aspects, I can not but love her. Her very savagery appealed to me,
for it is the savagery of unspoiled Nature.

The magnificence of her tropic beauties enthralled me. Her mighty land
areas breathed unfettered freedom.

Her untracked oceans, whispering of virgin wonders unsullied by the eye
of man, beckoned me out upon their restless bosoms.

Not for an instant did I regret the world of my nativity. I was in
Pellucidar. I was home. And I was content.

As I stood dreaming beside the giant thing that had brought me safely
through the earth’s crust, my traveling companion, the hideous Mahar,
emerged from the interior of the prospector and stood beside me. For a
long time she remained motionless.

What thoughts were passing through the convolutions of her reptilian
brain?

I do not know.

She was a member of the dominant race of Pellucidar. By a strange freak
of evolution her kind had first developed the power of reason in that
world of anomalies.

To her, creatures such as I were of a lower order. As Perry had
discovered among the writings of her kind in the buried city of Phutra,
it was still an open question among the Mahars as to whether man
possessed means of intelligent communication or the power of reason.

Her kind believed that in the center of all-pervading solidity there
was a single, vast, spherical cavity, which was Pellucidar. This cavity
had been left there for the sole purpose of providing a place for the
creation and propagation of the Mahar race. Everything within it had
been put there for the uses of the Mahar.

I wondered what this particular Mahar might think now. I found pleasure
in speculating upon just what the effect had been upon her of passing
through the earth’s crust, and coming out into a world that one of even
less intelligence than the great Mahars could easily see was a
different world from her own Pellucidar.

What had she thought of the outer world’s tiny sun?

What had been the effect upon her of the moon and myriad stars of the
clear African nights?

How had she explained them?

With what sensations of awe must she first have watched the sun moving
slowly across the heavens to disappear at last beneath the western
horizon, leaving in his wake that which the Mahar had never before
witnessed—the darkness of night? For upon Pellucidar there is no night.
The stationary sun hangs forever in the center of the Pellucidarian
sky—directly overhead.

Then, too, she must have been impressed by the wondrous mechanism of
the prospector which had bored its way from world to world and back
again. And that it had been driven by a rational being must also have
occurred to her.

Too, she had seen me conversing with other men upon the earth’s
surface. She had seen the arrival of the caravan of books and arms, and
ammunition, and the balance of the heterogeneous collection which I had
crammed into the cabin of the iron mole for transportation to
Pellucidar.

She had seen all these evidences of a civilization and brain-power
transcending in scientific achievement anything that her race had
produced; nor once had she seen a creature of her own kind.

There could have been but a single deduction in the mind of the
Mahar—there were other worlds than Pellucidar, and the gilak was a
rational being.

Now the creature at my side was creeping slowly toward the near-by sea.
At my hip hung a long-barreled six-shooter—somehow I had been unable to
find the same sensation of security in the newfangled automatics that
had been perfected since my first departure from the outer world—and in
my hand was a heavy express rifle.

I could have shot the Mahar with ease, for I knew intuitively that she
was escaping—but I did not.

I felt that if she could return to her own kind with the story of her
adventures, the position of the human race within Pellucidar would be
advanced immensely at a single stride, for at once man would take his
proper place in the considerations of the reptilia.

At the edge of the sea the creature paused and looked back at me. Then
she slid sinuously into the surf.

For several minutes I saw no more of her as she luxuriated in the cool
depths.

Then a hundred yards from shore she rose and there for another short
while she floated upon the surface.

Finally she spread her giant wings, flapped them vigorously a score of
times and rose above the blue sea. A single time she circled far
aloft—and then straight as an arrow she sped away.

I watched her until the distant haze enveloped her and she had
disappeared. I was alone.

My first concern was to discover where within Pellucidar I might be—and
in what direction lay the land of the Sarians where Ghak the Hairy One
ruled.

But how was I to guess in which direction lay Sari?

And if I set out to search—what then?

Could I find my way back to the prospector with its priceless freight
of books, firearms, ammunition, scientific instruments, and still more
books—its great library of reference works upon every conceivable
branch of applied sciences?

And if I could not, of what value was all this vast storehouse of
potential civilization and progress to be to the world of my adoption?

Upon the other hand, if I remained here alone with it, what could I
accomplish single-handed?

Nothing.

But where there was no east, no west, no north, no south, no stars, no
moon, and only a stationary midday sun, how was I to find my way back
to this spot should ever I get out of sight of it?

I didn’t know.

For a long time I stood buried in deep thought, when it occurred to me
to try out one of the compasses I had brought and ascertain if it
remained steadily fixed upon an unvarying pole. I reentered the
prospector and fetched a compass without.

Moving a considerable distance from the prospector that the needle
might not be influenced by its great bulk of iron and steel I turned
the delicate instrument about in every direction.

Always and steadily the needle remained rigidly fixed upon a point
straight out to sea, apparently pointing toward a large island some ten
or twenty miles distant. This then should be north.

I drew my note-book from my pocket and made a careful topographical
sketch of the locality within the range of my vision. Due north lay the
island, far out upon the shimmering sea.

The spot I had chosen for my observations was the top of a large, flat
boulder which rose six or eight feet above the turf. This spot I called
Greenwich. The boulder was the “Royal Observatory.”

I had made a start! I cannot tell you what a sense of relief was
imparted to me by the simple fact that there was at least one spot
within Pellucidar with a familiar name and a place upon a map.

It was with almost childish joy that I made a little circle in my
note-book and traced the word Greenwich beside it.

Now I felt I might start out upon my search with some assurance of
finding my way back again to the prospector.

I decided that at first I would travel directly south in the hope that
I might in that direction find some familiar landmark. It was as good a
direction as any. This much at least might be said of it.

Among the many other things I had brought from the outer world were a
number of pedometers. I slipped three of these into my pockets with the
idea that I might arrive at a more or less accurate mean from the
registrations of them all.

On my map I would register so many paces south, so many east, so many
west, and so on. When I was ready to return I would then do so by any
route that I might choose.

I also strapped a considerable quantity of ammunition across my
shoulders, pocketed some matches, and hooked an aluminum fry-pan and a
small stew-kettle of the same metal to my belt.

I was ready—ready to go forth and explore a world!

Ready to search a land area of 124,110,000 square miles for my friends,
my incomparable mate, and good old Perry!

And so, after locking the door in the outer shell of the prospector, I
set out upon my quest. Due south I traveled, across lovely valleys
thick-dotted with grazing herds.

Through dense primeval forests I forced my way and up the slopes of
mighty mountains searching for a pass to their farther sides.

Ibex and musk-sheep fell before my good old revolver, so that I lacked
not for food in the higher altitudes. The forests and the plains gave
plentifully of fruits and wild birds, antelope, aurochsen, and elk.

Occasionally, for the larger game animals and the gigantic beasts of
prey, I used my express rifle, but for the most part the revolver
filled all my needs.

There were times, too, when faced by a mighty cave bear, a
saber-toothed tiger, or huge felis spelaea, black-maned and terrible,
even my powerful rifle seemed pitifully inadequate—but fortune favored
me so that I passed unscathed through adventures that even the
recollection of causes the short hairs to bristle at the nape of my
neck.

How long I wandered toward the south I do not know, for shortly after I
left the prospector something went wrong with my watch, and I was again
at the mercy of the baffling timelessness of Pellucidar, forging
steadily ahead beneath the great, motionless sun which hangs eternally
at noon.

I ate many times, however, so that days must have elapsed, possibly
months with no familiar landscape rewarding my eager eyes.

I saw no men nor signs of men. Nor is this strange, for Pellucidar, in
its land area, is immense, while the human race there is very young and
consequently far from numerous.

Doubtless upon that long search mine was the first human foot to touch
the soil in many places—mine the first human eye to rest upon the
gorgeous wonders of the landscape.

It was a staggering thought. I could not but dwell upon it often as I
made my lonely way through this virgin world. Then, quite suddenly, one
day I stepped out of the peace of manless primality into the presence
of man—and peace was gone.

It happened thus:

I had been following a ravine downward out of a chain of lofty hills
and had paused at its mouth to view the lovely little valley that lay
before me. At one side was tangled wood, while straight ahead a river
wound peacefully along parallel to the cliffs in which the hills
terminated at the valley’s edge.

Presently, as I stood enjoying the lovely scene, as insatiate for
Nature’s wonders as if I had not looked upon similar landscapes
countless times, a sound of shouting broke from the direction of the
woods. That the harsh, discordant notes rose from the throats of men I
could not doubt.

I slipped behind a large boulder near the mouth of the ravine and
waited. I could hear the crashing of underbrush in the forest, and I
guessed that whoever came came quickly—pursued and pursuers, doubtless.

In a short time some hunted animal would break into view, and a moment
later a score of half-naked savages would come leaping after with
spears or club or great stone-knives.

I had seen the thing so many times during my life within Pellucidar
that I felt that I could anticipate to a nicety precisely what I was
about to witness. I hoped that the hunters would prove friendly and be
able to direct me toward Sari.

Even as I was thinking these thoughts the quarry emerged from the
forest. But it was no terrified four-footed beast. Instead, what I saw
was an old man—a terrified old man!

Staggering feebly and hopelessly from what must have been some very
terrible fate, if one could judge from the horrified expressions he
continually cast behind him toward the wood, he came stumbling on in my
direction.

He had covered but a short distance from the forest when I beheld the
first of his pursuers—a Sagoth, one of those grim and terrible
gorilla-men who guard the mighty Mahars in their buried cities, faring
forth from time to time upon slave-raiding or punitive expeditions
against the human race of Pellucidar, of whom the dominant race of the
inner world think as we think of the bison or the wild sheep of our own
world.

Close behind the foremost Sagoth came others until a full dozen raced,
shouting after the terror-stricken old man. They would be upon him
shortly, that was plain.

One of them was rapidly overhauling him, his back-thrown spear-arm
testifying to his purpose.

And then, quite with the suddenness of an unexpected blow, I realized a
past familiarity with the gait and carriage of the fugitive.

Simultaneously there swept over me the staggering fact that the old man
was—PERRY! That he was about to die before my very eyes with no hope
that I could reach him in time to avert the awful catastrophe—for to me
it meant a real catastrophe!

Perry was my best friend.

Dian, of course, I looked upon as more than friend. She was my mate—a
part of me.

I had entirely forgotten the rifle in my hand and the revolvers at my
belt; one does not readily synchronize his thoughts with the stone age
and the twentieth century simultaneously.

Now from past habit I still thought in the stone age, and in my
thoughts of the stone age there were no thoughts of firearms.

The fellow was almost upon Perry when the feel of the gun in my hand
awoke me from the lethargy of terror that had gripped me. From behind
my boulder I threw up the heavy express rifle—a mighty engine of
destruction that might bring down a cave bear or a mammoth at a single
shot—and let drive at the Sagoth’s broad, hairy breast.

At the sound of the shot he stopped stock-still. His spear dropped from
his hand.

Then he lunged forward upon his face.

The effect upon the others was little less remarkable. Perry alone
could have possibly guessed the meaning of the loud report or explained
its connection with the sudden collapse of the Sagoth. The other
gorilla-men halted for but an instant. Then with renewed shrieks of
rage they sprang forward to finish Perry.

At the same time I stepped from behind my boulder, drawing one of my
revolvers that I might conserve the more precious ammunition of the
express rifle. Quickly I fired again with the lesser weapon.

Then it was that all eyes were directed toward me. Another Sagoth fell
to the bullet from the revolver; but it did not stop his companions.
They were out for revenge as well as blood now, and they meant to have
both.

As I ran forward toward Perry I fired four more shots, dropping three
of our antagonists. Then at last the remaining seven wavered. It was
too much for them, this roaring death that leaped, invisible, upon them
from a great distance.

As they hesitated I reached Perry’s side. I have never seen such an
expression upon any man’s face as that upon Perry’s when he recognized
me. I have no words wherewith to describe it. There was not time to
talk then—scarce for a greeting. I thrust the full, loaded revolver
into his hand, fired the last shot in my own, and reloaded. There were
but six Sagoths left then.

They started toward us once more, though I could see that they were
terrified probably as much by the noise of the guns as by their
effects. They never reached us. Half-way the three that remained turned
and fled, and we let them go.

The last we saw of them they were disappearing into the tangled
undergrowth of the forest. And then Perry turned and threw his arms
about my neck and, burying his old face upon my shoulder, wept like a
child.




CHAPTER II
TRAVELING WITH TERROR


We made camp there beside the peaceful river. There Perry told me all
that had befallen him since I had departed for the outer crust.

It seemed that Hooja had made it appear that I had intentionally left
Dian behind, and that I did not purpose ever returning to Pellucidar.
He told them that I was of another world and that I had tired of this
and of its inhabitants.

To Dian he had explained that I had a mate in the world to which I was
returning; that I had never intended taking Dian the Beautiful back
with me; and that she had seen the last of me.

Shortly afterward Dian had disappeared from the camp, nor had Perry
seen or heard aught of her since.

He had no conception of the time that had elapsed since I had departed,
but guessed that many years had dragged their slow way into the past.

Hooja, too, had disappeared very soon after Dian had left. The Sarians,
under Ghak the Hairy One, and the Amozites under Dacor the Strong One,
Dian’s brother, had fallen out over my supposed defection, for Ghak
would not believe that I had thus treacherously deceived and deserted
them.

The result had been that these two powerful tribes had fallen upon one
another with the new weapons that Perry and I had taught them to make
and to use. Other tribes of the new federation took sides with the
original disputants or set up petty revolutions of their own.

The result was the total demolition of the work we had so well started.

Taking advantage of the tribal war, the Mahars had gathered their
Sagoths in force and fallen upon one tribe after another in rapid
succession, wreaking awful havoc among them and reducing them for the
most part to as pitiable a state of terror as that from which we had
raised them.

Alone of all the once-mighty federation the Sarians and the Amozites
with a few other tribes continued to maintain their defiance of the
Mahars; but these tribes were still divided among themselves, nor had
it seemed at all probable to Perry when he had last been among them
that any attempt at re-amalgamation would be made.

“And thus, your majesty,” he concluded, “has faded back into the
oblivion of the Stone Age our wondrous dream and with it has gone the
First Empire of Pellucidar.”

We both had to smile at the use of my royal title, yet I was indeed
still “Emperor of Pellucidar,” and some day I meant to rebuild what the
vile act of the treacherous Hooja had torn down.

But first I would find my empress. To me she was worth forty empires.

“Have you no clue as to the whereabouts of Dian?” I asked.

“None whatever,” replied Perry. “It was in search of her that I came to
the pretty pass in which you discovered me, and from which, David, you
saved me.

“I knew perfectly well that you had not intentionally deserted either
Dian or Pellucidar. I guessed that in some way Hooja the Sly One was at
the bottom of the matter, and I determined to go to Amoz, where I
guessed that Dian might come to the protection of her brother, and do
my utmost to convince her, and through her Dacor the Strong One, that
we had all been victims of a treacherous plot to which you were no
party.

“I came to Amoz after a most trying and terrible journey, only to find
that Dian was not among her brother’s people and that they knew naught
of her whereabouts.

“Dacor, I am sure, wanted to be fair and just, but so great were his
grief and anger over the disappearance of his sister that he could not
listen to reason, but kept repeating time and again that only your
return to Pellucidar could prove the honesty of your intentions.

“Then came a stranger from another tribe, sent I am sure at the
instigation of Hooja. He so turned the Amozites against me that I was
forced to flee their country to escape assassination.

“In attempting to return to Sari I became lost, and then the Sagoths
discovered me. For a long time I eluded them, hiding in caves and
wading in rivers to throw them off my trail.

“I lived on nuts and fruits and the edible roots that chance threw in
my way.

“I traveled on and on, in what directions I could not even guess; and
at last I could elude them no longer and the end came as I had long
foreseen that it would come, except that I had not foreseen that you
would be there to save me.”

We rested in our camp until Perry had regained sufficient strength to
travel again. We planned much, rebuilding all our shattered
air-castles; but above all we planned most to find Dian.

I could not believe that she was dead, yet where she might be in this
savage world, and under what frightful conditions she might be living,
I could not guess.

When Perry was rested we returned to the prospector, where he fitted
himself out fully like a civilized human being—under-clothing, socks,
shoes, khaki jacket and breeches and good, substantial puttees.

When I had come upon him he was clothed in rough sadak sandals, a
gee-string and a tunic fashioned from the shaggy hide of a thag. Now he
wore real clothing again for the first time since the ape-folk had
stripped us of our apparel that long-gone day that had witnessed our
advent within Pellucidar.

With a bandoleer of cartridges across his shoulder, two six-shooters at
his hips, and a rifle in his hand he was a much rejuvenated Perry.

Indeed he was quite a different person altogether from the rather shaky
old man who had entered the prospector with me ten or eleven years
before, for the trial trip that had plunged us into such wondrous
adventures and into such a strange and hitherto undreamed-of-world.

Now he was straight and active. His muscles, almost atrophied from
disuse in his former life, had filled out.

He was still an old man of course, but instead of appearing ten years
older than he really was, as he had when we left the outer world, he
now appeared about ten years younger. The wild, free life of Pellucidar
had worked wonders for him.

Well, it must need have done so or killed him, for a man of Perry’s
former physical condition could not long have survived the dangers and
rigors of the primitive life of the inner world.

Perry had been greatly interested in my map and in the “royal
observatory” at Greenwich. By use of the pedometers we had retraced our
way to the prospector with ease and accuracy.

Now that we were ready to set out again we decided to follow a
different route on the chance that it might lead us into more familiar
territory.

I shall not weary you with a repetition of the countless adventures of
our long search. Encounters with wild beasts of gigantic size were of
almost daily occurrence; but with our deadly express rifles we ran
comparatively little risk when one recalls that previously we had both
traversed this world of frightful dangers inadequately armed with
crude, primitive weapons and all but naked.

We ate and slept many times—so many that we lost count—and so I do not
know how long we roamed, though our map shows the distances and
directions quite accurately. We must have covered a great many thousand
square miles of territory, and yet we had seen nothing in the way of a
familiar landmark, when from the heights of a mountain-range we were
crossing I descried far in the distance great masses of billowing
clouds.

Now clouds are practically unknown in the skies of Pellucidar. The
moment that my eyes rested upon them my heart leaped. I seized Perry’s
arm and, pointing toward the horizonless distance, shouted:

“The Mountains of the Clouds!”

“They lie close to Phutra, and the country of our worst enemies, the
Mahars,” Perry remonstrated.

“I know it,” I replied, “but they give us a starting-point from which
to prosecute our search intelligently. They are at least a familiar
landmark.

“They tell us that we are upon the right trail and not wandering far in
the wrong direction.

“Furthermore, close to the Mountains of the Clouds dwells a good
friend, Ja the Mezop. You did not know him, but you know all that he
did for me and all that he will gladly do to aid me.

“At least he can direct us upon the right direction toward Sari.”

“The Mountains of the Clouds constitute a mighty range,” replied Perry.
“They must cover an enormous territory. How are you to find your friend
in all the great country that is visible from their rugged flanks?”

“Easily,” I answered him, “for Ja gave me minute directions. I recall
almost his exact words:

“‘You need merely come to the foot of the highest peak of the Mountains
of the Clouds. There you will find a river that flows into the Lural
Az.

“‘Directly opposite the mouth of the river you will see three large
islands far out—so far that they are barely discernible. The one to the
extreme left as you face them from the mouth of the river is Anoroc,
where I rule the tribe of Anoroc.’”

And so we hastened onward toward the great cloud-mass that was to be
our guide for several weary marches. At last we came close to the
towering crags, Alp-like in their grandeur.

Rising nobly among its noble fellows, one stupendous peak reared its
giant head thousands of feet above the others. It was he whom we
sought; but at its foot no river wound down toward any sea.

“It must rise from the opposite side,” suggested Perry, casting a
rueful glance at the forbidding heights that barred our further
progress. “We cannot endure the arctic cold of those high flung passes,
and to traverse the endless miles about this interminable range might
require a year or more. The land we seek must lie upon the opposite
side of the mountains.”

“Then we must cross them,” I insisted.

Perry shrugged.

“We can’t do it, David,” he repeated. “We are dressed for the tropics.
We should freeze to death among the snows and glaciers long before we
had discovered a pass to the opposite side.”

“We must cross them,” I reiterated. “We will cross them.”

I had a plan, and that plan we carried out. It took some time.

First we made a permanent camp part way up the slopes where there was
good water. Then we set out in search of the great, shaggy cave bear of
the higher altitudes.

He is a mighty animal—a terrible animal. He is but little larger than
his cousin of the lesser, lower hills; but he makes up for it in the
awfulness of his ferocity and in the length and thickness of his shaggy
coat. It was his coat that we were after.

We came upon him quite unexpectedly. I was trudging in advance along a
rocky trail worn smooth by the padded feet of countless ages of wild
beasts. At a shoulder of the mountain around which the path ran I came
face to face with the Titan.

I was going up for a fur coat. He was coming down for breakfast. Each
realized that here was the very thing he sought.

With a horrid roar the beast charged me.

At my right the cliff rose straight upward for thousands of feet.

At my left it dropped into a dim, abysmal cañon.

In front of me was the bear.

Behind me was Perry.

I shouted to him in warning, and then I raised my rifle and fired into
the broad breast of the creature. There was no time to take aim; the
thing was too close upon me.

But that my bullet took effect was evident from the howl of rage and
pain that broke from the frothing jowls. It didn’t stop him, though.

I fired again, and then he was upon me. Down I went beneath his ton of
maddened, clawing flesh and bone and sinew.

I thought my time had come. I remember feeling sorry for poor old
Perry, left all alone in this inhospitable, savage world.

And then of a sudden I realized that the bear was gone and that I was
quite unharmed. I leaped to my feet, my rifle still clutched in my
hand, and looked about for my antagonist.

I thought that I should find him farther down the trail, probably
finishing Perry, and so I leaped in the direction I supposed him to be,
to find Perry perched upon a projecting rock several feet above the
trail. My cry of warning had given him time to reach this point of
safety.

There he squatted, his eyes wide and his mouth ajar, the picture of
abject terror and consternation.

“Where is he?” he cried when he saw me. “Where is he?”

“Didn’t he come this way?” I asked.

“Nothing came this way,” replied the old man. “But I heard his roars—he
must have been as large as an elephant.”

“He was,” I admitted; “but where in the world do you suppose he
disappeared to?”

Then came a possible explanation to my mind. I returned to the point at
which the bear had hurled me down and peered over the edge of the cliff
into the abyss below.

Far, far down I saw a small brown blotch near the bottom of the canon.
It was the bear.

My second shot must have killed him, and so his dead body, after
hurling me to the path, had toppled over into the abyss. I shivered at
the thought of how close I, too, must have been to going over with him.

It took us a long time to reach the carcass, and arduous labor to
remove the great pelt. But at last the thing was accomplished, and we
returned to camp dragging the heavy trophy behind us.

Here we devoted another considerable period to scraping and curing it.
When this was done to our satisfaction we made heavy boots, trousers,
and coats of the shaggy skin, turning the fur in.

From the scraps we fashioned caps that came down around our ears, with
flaps that fell about our shoulders and breasts. We were now fairly
well equipped for our search for a pass to the opposite side of the
Mountains of the Clouds.

Our first step now was to move our camp upward to the very edge of the
perpetual snows which cap this lofty range. Here we built a snug,
secure little hut, which we provisioned and stored with fuel for its
diminutive fireplace.

With our hut as a base we sallied forth in search of a pass across the
range.

Our every move was carefully noted upon our maps which we now kept in
duplicate. By this means we were saved tedious and unnecessary
retracing of ways already explored.

Systematically we worked upward in both directions from our base, and
when we had at last discovered what seemed might prove a feasible pass
we moved our belongings to a new hut farther up.

It was hard work—cold, bitter, cruel work. Not a step did we take in
advance but the grim reaper strode silently in our tracks.

There were the great cave bears in the timber, and gaunt, lean
wolves—huge creatures twice the size of our Canadian timber-wolves.
Farther up we were assailed by enormous white bears—hungry, devilish
fellows, who came roaring across the rough glacier tops at the first
glimpse of us, or stalked us stealthily by scent when they had not yet
seen us.

It is one of the peculiarities of life within Pellucidar that man is
more often the hunted than the hunter. Myriad are the huge-bellied
carnivora of this primitive world. Never, from birth to death, are
those great bellies sufficiently filled, so always are their mighty
owners prowling about in search of meat.

Terribly armed for battle as they are, man presents to them in his
primal state an easy prey, slow of foot, puny of strength, ill-equipped
by nature with natural weapons of defense.

The bears looked upon us as easy meat. Only our heavy rifles saved us
from prompt extinction. Poor Perry never was a raging lion at heart,
and I am convinced that the terrors of that awful period must have
caused him poignant mental anguish.

When we were abroad pushing our trail farther and farther toward the
distant break which, we assumed, marked a feasible way across the
range, we never knew at what second some great engine of clawed and
fanged destruction might rush upon us from behind, or lie in wait for
us beyond an ice-hummock or a jutting shoulder of the craggy steeps.

The roar of our rifles was constantly shattering the world-old silence
of stupendous canons upon which the eye of man had never before gazed.
And when in the comparative safety of our hut we lay down to sleep the
great beasts roared and fought without the walls, clawed and battered
at the door, or rushed their colossal frames headlong against the hut’s
sides until it rocked and trembled to the impact.

Yes, it was a gay life.

Perry had got to taking stock of our ammunition each time we returned
to the hut. It became something of an obsession with him.

He’d count our cartridges one by one and then try to figure how long it
would be before the last was expended and we must either remain in the
hut until we starved to death or venture forth, empty, to fill the
belly of some hungry bear.

I must admit that I, too, felt worried, for our progress was indeed
snail-like, and our ammunition could not last forever. In discussing
the problem, finally we came to the decision to burn our bridges behind
us and make one last supreme effort to cross the divide.

It would mean that we must go without sleep for a long period, and with
the further chance that when the time came that sleep could no longer
be denied we might still be high in the frozen regions of perpetual
snow and ice, where sleep would mean certain death, exposed as we would
be to the attacks of wild beasts and without shelter from the hideous
cold.

But we decided that we must take these chances and so at last we set
forth from our hut for the last time, carrying such necessities as we
felt we could least afford to do without. The bears seemed unusually
troublesome and determined that time, and as we clambered slowly upward
beyond the highest point to which we had previously attained, the cold
became infinitely more intense.

Presently, with two great bears dogging our footsteps we entered a
dense fog.

We had reached the heights that are so often cloud-wrapped for long
periods. We could see nothing a few paces beyond our noses.

We dared not turn back into the teeth of the bears which we could hear
grunting behind us. To meet them in this bewildering fog would have
been to court instant death.

Perry was almost overcome by the hopelessness of our situation. He
flopped down on his knees and began to pray.

It was the first time I had heard him at his old habit since my return
to Pellucidar, and I had thought that he had given up his little
idiosyncrasy; but he hadn’t. Far from it.

I let him pray for a short time undisturbed, and then as I was about to
suggest that we had better be pushing along one of the bears in our
rear let out a roar that made the earth fairly tremble beneath our
feet.

It brought Perry to his feet as if he had been stung by a wasp, and
sent him racing ahead through the blinding fog at a gait that I knew
must soon end in disaster were it not checked.

Crevasses in the glacier-ice were far too frequent to permit of
reckless speed even in a clear atmosphere, and then there were hideous
precipices along the edges of which our way often led us. I shivered as
I thought of the poor old fellow’s peril.

At the top of my lungs I called to him to stop, but he did not answer
me. And then I hurried on in the direction he had gone, faster by far
than safety dictated.

For a while I thought I heard him ahead of me, but at last, though I
paused often to listen and to call to him, I heard nothing more, not
even the grunting of the bears that had been behind us. All was deathly
silence—the silence of the tomb. About me lay the thick, impenetrable
fog.

I was alone. Perry was gone—gone forever, I had not the slightest
doubt.

Somewhere near by lay the mouth of a treacherous fissure, and far down
at its icy bottom lay all that was mortal of my old friend, Abner
Perry. There would his body be preserved in its icy sepulcher for
countless ages, until on some far distant day the slow-moving river of
ice had wound its snail-like way down to the warmer level, there to
disgorge its grisly evidence of grim tragedy, and what in that far
future age, might mean baffling mystery.




CHAPTER III
SHOOTING THE CHUTES—AND AFTER


Through the fog I felt my way along by means of my compass. I no longer
heard the bears, nor did I encounter one within the fog.

Experience has since taught me that these great beasts are as
terror-stricken by this phenomenon as a landsman by a fog at sea, and
that no sooner does a fog envelop them than they make the best of their
way to lower levels and a clear atmosphere. It was well for me that
this was true.

I felt very sad and lonely as I crawled along the difficult footing. My
own predicament weighed less heavily upon me than the loss of Perry,
for I loved the old fellow.

That I should ever win the opposite slopes of the range I began to
doubt, for though I am naturally sanguine, I imagine that the
bereavement which had befallen me had cast such a gloom over my spirits
that I could see no slightest ray of hope for the future.

Then, too, the blighting, gray oblivion of the cold, damp clouds
through which I wandered was distressing. Hope thrives best in
sunlight, and I am sure that it does not thrive at all in a fog.

But the instinct of self-preservation is stronger than hope. It
thrives, fortunately, upon nothing. It takes root upon the brink of the
grave, and blossoms in the jaws of death. Now it flourished bravely
upon the breast of dead hope, and urged me onward and upward in a stern
endeavor to justify its existence.

As I advanced the fog became denser. I could see nothing beyond my
nose. Even the snow and ice I trod were invisible.

I could not see below the breast of my bearskin coat. I seemed to be
floating in a sea of vapor.

To go forward over a dangerous glacier under such conditions was little
short of madness; but I could not have stopped going had I known
positively that death lay two paces before my nose. In the first place,
it was too cold to stop, and in the second, I should have gone mad but
for the excitement of the perils that beset each forward step.

For some time the ground had been rougher and steeper, until I had been
forced to scale a considerable height that had carried me from the
glacier entirely. I was sure from my compass that I was following the
right general direction, and so I kept on.

Once more the ground was level. From the wind that blew about me I
guessed that I must be upon some exposed peak of ridge.

And then quite suddenly I stepped out into space. Wildly I turned and
clutched at the ground that had slipped from beneath my feet.

Only a smooth, icy surface was there. I found nothing to clutch or stay
my fall, and a moment later so great was my speed that nothing could
have stayed me.

As suddenly as I had pitched into space, with equal suddenness did I
emerge from the fog, out of which I shot like a projectile from a
cannon into clear daylight. My speed was so great that I could see
nothing about me but a blurred and indistinct sheet of smooth and
frozen snow, that rushed past me with express-train velocity.

I must have slid downward thousands of feet before the steep incline
curved gently on to a broad, smooth, snow-covered plateau. Across this
I hurtled with slowly diminishing velocity, until at last objects about
me began to take definite shape.

Far ahead, miles and miles away, I saw a great valley and mighty woods,
and beyond these a broad expanse of water. In the nearer foreground I
discerned a small, dark blob of color upon the shimmering whiteness of
the snow.

“A bear,” thought I, and thanked the instinct that had impelled me to
cling tenaciously to my rifle during the moments of my awful tumble.

At the rate I was going it would be but a moment before I should be
quite abreast the thing; nor was it long before I came to a sudden stop
in soft snow, upon which the sun was shining, not twenty paces from the
object of my most immediate apprehension.

It was standing upon its hind legs waiting for me. As I scrambled to my
feet to meet it, I dropped my gun in the snow and doubled up with
laughter.

It was Perry.

The expression upon his face, combined with the relief I felt at seeing
him again safe and sound, was too much for my overwrought nerves.

“David!” he cried. “David, my boy! God has been good to an old man. He
has answered my prayer.”

It seems that Perry in his mad flight had plunged over the brink at
about the same point as that at which I had stepped over it a short
time later. Chance had done for us what long periods of rational labor
had failed to accomplish.

We had crossed the divide. We were upon the side of the Mountains of
the Clouds that we had for so long been attempting to reach.

We looked about. Below us were green trees and warm jungles. In the
distance was a great sea.

“The Lural Az,” I said, pointing toward its blue-green surface.

Somehow—the gods alone can explain it—Perry, too, had clung to his
rifle during his mad descent of the icy slope. For that there was cause
for great rejoicing.

Neither of us was worse for his experience, so after shaking the snow
from our clothing, we set off at a great rate down toward the warmth
and comfort of the forest and the jungle.

The going was easy by comparison with the awful obstacles we had had to
encounter upon the opposite side of the divide. There were beasts, of
course, but we came through safely.

Before we halted to eat or rest, we stood beside a little mountain
brook beneath the wondrous trees of the primeval forest in an
atmosphere of warmth and comfort. It reminded me of an early June day
in the Maine woods.

We fell to work with our short axes and cut enough small trees to build
a rude protection from the fiercer beasts. Then we lay down to sleep.

How long we slept I do not know. Perry says that inasmuch as there is
no means of measuring time within Pellucidar, there can be no such
thing as time here, and that we may have slept an outer earthly year,
or we may have slept but a second.

But this I know. We had stuck the ends of some of the saplings into the
ground in the building of our shelter, first stripping the leaves and
branches from them, and when we awoke we found that many of them had
thrust forth sprouts.

Personally, I think that we slept at least a month; but who may say?
The sun marked midday when we closed our eyes; it was still in the same
position when we opened them; nor had it varied a hair’s breadth in the
interim.

It is most baffling, this question of elapsed time within Pellucidar.

Anyhow, I was famished when we awoke. I think that it was the pangs of
hunger that awoke me. Ptarmigan and wild boar fell before my revolver
within a dozen moments of my awakening. Perry soon had a roaring fire
blazing by the brink of the little stream.

It was a good and delicious meal we made. Though we did not eat the
entire boar, we made a very large hole in him, while the ptarmigan was
but a mouthful.

Having satisfied our hunger, we determined to set forth at once in
search of Anoroc and my old friend, Ja the Mezop. We each thought that
by following the little stream downward, we should come upon the large
river which Ja had told me emptied into the Lural Az op-posite his
island.

We did so; nor were we disappointed, for at last after a pleasant
journey—and what journey would not be pleasant after the hardships we
had endured among the peaks of the Mountains of the Clouds—we came upon
a broad flood that rushed majestically onward in the direction of the
great sea we had seen from the snowy slopes of the mountains.

For three long marches we followed the left bank of the growing river,
until at last we saw it roll its mighty volume into the vast waters of
the sea. Far out across the rippling ocean we descried three islands.
The one to the left must be Anoroc.

At last we had come close to a solution of our problem—the road to
Sari.

But how to reach the islands was now the foremost question in our
minds. We must build a canoe.

Perry is a most resourceful man. He has an axiom which carries the
thought-kernel that what man has done, man can do, and it doesn’t cut
any figure with Perry whether a fellow knows how to do it or not.

He set out to make gunpowder once, shortly after our escape from Phutra
and at the beginning of the confederation of the wild tribes of
Pellucidar. He said that some one, without any knowledge of the fact
that such a thing might be concocted, had once stumbled upon it by
accident, and so he couldn’t see why a fellow who knew all about powder
except how to make it couldn’t do as well.

He worked mighty hard mixing all sorts of things together, until
finally he evolved a substance that looked like powder. He had been
very proud of the stuff, and had gone about the village of the Sarians
exhibiting it to every one who would listen to him, and explaining what
its purpose was and what terrific havoc it would work, until finally
the natives became so terrified at the stuff that they wouldn’t come
within a rod of Perry and his invention.

Finally, I suggested that we experiment with it and see what it would
do, so Perry built a fire, after placing the powder at a safe distance,
and then touched a glowing ember to a minute particle of the deadly
explosive. It extinguished the ember.

Repeated experiments with it determined me that in searching for a high
explosive, Perry had stumbled upon a fire-extinguisher that would have
made his fortune for him back in our own world.

So now he set himself to work to build a scientific canoe. I had
suggested that we construct a dugout, but Perry convinced me that we
must build something more in keeping with our positions of supermen in
this world of the Stone Age.

“We must impress these natives with our superiority,” he explained.
“You must not forget, David, that you are emperor of Pellucidar. As
such you may not with dignity approach the shores of a foreign power in
so crude a vessel as a dugout.”

I pointed out to Perry that it wasn’t much more incongruous for the
emperor to cruise in a canoe, than it was for the prime minister to
attempt to build one with his own hands.

He had to smile at that; but in extenuation of his act he assured me
that it was quite customary for prime ministers to give their personal
attention to the building of imperial navies; “and this,” he said, “is
the imperial navy of his Serene Highness, David I, Emperor of the
Federated Kingdoms of Pellucidar.”

I grinned; but Perry was quite serious about it. It had always seemed
rather more or less of a joke to me that I should be addressed as
majesty and all the rest of it. Yet my imperial power and dignity had
been a very real thing during my brief reign.

Twenty tribes had joined the federation, and their chiefs had sworn
eternal fealty to one another and to me. Among them were many powerful
though savage nations. Their chiefs we had made kings; their tribal
lands kingdoms.

We had armed them with bows and arrows and swords, in addition to their
own more primitive weapons. I had trained them in military discipline
and in so much of the art of war as I had gleaned from extensive
reading of the campaigns of Napoleon, Von Moltke, Grant, and the
ancients.

We had marked out as best we could natural boundaries dividing the
various kingdoms. We had warned tribes beyond these boundaries that
they must not trespass, and we had marched against and severely
punished those who had.

We had met and defeated the Mahars and the Sagoths. In short, we had
demonstrated our rights to empire, and very rapidly were we being
recognized and heralded abroad when my departure for the outer world
and Hooja’s treachery had set us back.

But now I had returned. The work that fate had undone must be done
again, and though I must need smile at my imperial honors, I none the
less felt the weight of duty and obligation that rested upon my
shoulders.

Slowly the imperial navy progressed toward completion. She was a
wondrous craft, but I had my doubts about her. When I voiced them to
Perry, he reminded me gently that my people for many generations had
been mine-owners, not ship-builders, and consequently I couldn’t be
expected to know much about the matter.

I was minded to inquire into his hereditary fitness to design
battleships; but inasmuch as I already knew that his father had been a
minister in a back-woods village far from the coast, I hesitated lest I
offend the dear old fellow.

He was immensely serious about his work, and I must admit that in so
far as appearances went he did extremely well with the meager tools and
assistance at his command. We had only two short axes and our
hunting-knives; yet with these we hewed trees, split them into planks,
surfaced and fitted them.

The “navy” was some forty feet in length by ten feet beam. Her sides
were quite straight and fully ten feet high—“for the purpose,”
explained Perry, “of adding dignity to her appearance and rendering it
less easy for an enemy to board her.”

As a matter of fact, I knew that he had had in mind the safety of her
crew under javelin-fire—the lofty sides made an admirable shelter.
Inside she reminded me of nothing so much as a floating trench. There
was also some slight analogy to a huge coffin.

Her prow sloped sharply backward from the water-line—quite like a line
of battleship. Perry had designed her more for moral effect upon an
enemy, I think, than for any real harm she might inflict, and so those
parts which were to show were the most imposing.

Below the water-line she was practically non-existent. She should have
had considerable draft; but, as the enemy couldn’t have seen it, Perry
decided to do away with it, and so made her flat-bottomed. It was this
that caused my doubts about her.

There was another little idiosyncrasy of design that escaped us both
until she was about ready to launch—there was no method of propulsion.
Her sides were far too high to permit the use of sweeps, and when Perry
suggested that we pole her, I remonstrated on the grounds that it would
be a most undignified and awkward manner of sweeping down upon the foe,
even if we could find or wield poles that would reach to the bottom of
the ocean.

Finally I suggested that we convert her into a sailing vessel. When
once the idea took hold Perry was most enthusiastic about it, and
nothing would do but a four-masted, full-rigged ship.

Again I tried to dissuade him, but he was simply crazy over the
psychological effect which the appearance of this strange and mighty
craft would have upon the natives of Pellucidar. So we rigged her with
thin hides for sails and dried gut for rope.

Neither of us knew much about sailing a full-rigged ship; but that
didn’t worry me a great deal, for I was confident that we should never
be called upon to do so, and as the day of launching approached I was
positive of it.

We had built her upon a low bank of the river close to where it emptied
into the sea, and just above high tide. Her keel we had laid upon
several rollers cut from small trees, the ends of the rollers in turn
resting upon parallel tracks of long saplings. Her stern was toward the
water.

A few hours before we were ready to launch her she made quite an
imposing picture, for Perry had insisted upon setting every shred of
“canvas.” I told him that I didn’t know much about it, but I was sure
that at launching the hull only should have been completed, everything
else being completed after she had floated safely.

At the last minute there was some delay while we sought a name for her.
I wanted her christened the Perry in honor both of her designer and
that other great naval genius of another world, Captain Oliver Hazard
Perry, of the United States Navy. But Perry was too modest; he wouldn’t
hear of it.

We finally decided to establish a system in the naming of the fleet.
Battle-ships of the first-class should bear the names of kingdoms of
the federation; armored cruisers the names of kings; cruisers the names
of cities, and so on down the line. Therefore, we decided to name the
first battle-ship Sari, after the first of the federated kingdoms.

The launching of the Sari proved easier than I contemplated. Perry
wanted me to get in and break something over the bow as she floated out
upon the bosom of the river, but I told him that I should feel safer on
dry land until I saw which side up the Sari would float.

I could see by the expression of the old man’s face that my words had
hurt him; but I noticed that he didn’t offer to get in himself, and so
I felt less contrition than I might otherwise.

When we cut the ropes and removed the blocks that held the Sari in
place she started for the water with a lunge. Before she hit it she was
going at a reckless speed, for we had laid our tracks quite down to the
water, greased them, and at intervals placed rollers all ready to
receive the ship as she moved forward with stately dignity. But there
was no dignity in the Sari.

When she touched the surface of the river she must have been going
twenty or thirty miles an hour. Her momentum carried her well out into
the stream, until she came to a sudden halt at the end of the long line
which we had had the foresight to attach to her bow and fasten to a
large tree upon the bank.

The moment her progress was checked she promptly capsized. Perry was
overwhelmed. I didn’t upbraid him, nor remind him that I had “told him
so.”

His grief was so genuine and so apparent that I didn’t have the heart
to reproach him, even were I inclined to that particular sort of
meanness.

“Come, come, old man!” I cried. “It’s not as bad as it looks. Give me a
hand with this rope, and we’ll drag her up as far as we can; and then
when the tide goes out we’ll try another scheme. I think we can make a
go of her yet.”

Well, we managed to get her up into shallow water. When the tide
receded she lay there on her side in the mud, quite a pitiable object
for the premier battle-ship of a world—“the terror of the seas” was the
way Perry had occasionally described her.

We had to work fast; but before the tide came in again we had stripped
her of her sails and masts, righted her, and filled her about a quarter
full of rock ballast. If she didn’t stick too fast in the mud I was
sure that she would float this time right side up.

I can tell you that it was with palpitating hearts that we sat upon the
river-bank and watched that tide come slowly in. The tides of
Pellucidar don’t amount to much by comparison with our higher tides of
the outer world, but I knew that it ought to prove ample to float the
Sari.

Nor was I mistaken. Finally we had the satisfaction of seeing the
vessel rise out of the mud and float slowly upstream with the tide. As
the water rose we pulled her in quite close to the bank and clambered
aboard.

She rested safely now upon an even keel; nor did she leak, for she was
well calked with fiber and tarry pitch. We rigged up a single short
mast and light sail, fastened planking down over the ballast to form a
deck, worked her out into midstream with a couple of sweeps, and
dropped our primitive stone anchor to await the turn of the tide that
would bear us out to sea.

While we waited we devoted the time to the construction of an upper
deck, since the one immediately above the ballast was some seven feet
from the gunwale. The second deck was four feet above this. In it was a
large, commodious hatch, leading to the lower deck. The sides of the
ship rose three feet above the upper deck, forming an excellent
breastwork, which we loopholed at intervals that we might lie prone and
fire upon an enemy.

Though we were sailing out upon a peaceful mission in search of my
friend Ja, we knew that we might meet with people of some other island
who would prove unfriendly.

At last the tide turned. We weighed anchor. Slowly we drifted down the
great river toward the sea.

About us swarmed the mighty denizens of the primeval deep—plesiosauri
and ichthyosauria with all their horrid, slimy cousins whose names were
as the names of aunts and uncles to Perry, but which I have never been
able to recall an hour after having heard them.

At last we were safely launched upon the journey to which we had looked
forward for so long, and the results of which meant so much to me.




CHAPTER IV
FRIENDSHIP AND TREACHERY


The Sari proved a most erratic craft. She might have done well enough
upon a park lagoon if safely anchored, but upon the bosom of a mighty
ocean she left much to be desired.

Sailing with the wind she did her best; but in quartering or when
close-hauled she drifted terribly, as a nautical man might have guessed
she would. We couldn’t keep within miles of our course, and our
progress was pitifully slow.

Instead of making for the island of Anoroc, we bore far to the right,
until it became evident that we should have to pass between the two
right-hand islands and attempt to return toward Anoroc from the
opposite side.

As we neared the islands Perry was quite overcome by their beauty. When
we were directly between two of them he fairly went into raptures; nor
could I blame him.

The tropical luxuriance of the foliage that dripped almost to the
water’s edge and the vivid colors of the blooms that shot the green
made a most gorgeous spectacle.

Perry was right in the midst of a flowery panegyric on the wonders of
the peaceful beauty of the scene when a canoe shot out from the nearest
island. There were a dozen warriors in it; it was quickly followed by a
second and third.

Of course we couldn’t know the intentions of the strangers, but we
could pretty well guess them.

Perry wanted to man the sweeps and try to get away from them, but I
soon convinced him that any speed of which the Sari was capable would
be far too slow to outdistance the swift, though awkward, dugouts of
the Mezops.

I waited until they were quite close enough to hear me, and then I
hailed them. I told them that we were friends of the Mezops, and that
we were upon a visit to Ja of Anoroc, to which they replied that they
were at war with Ja, and that if we would wait a minute they’d board us
and throw our corpses to the azdyryths.

I warned them that they would get the worst of it if they didn’t leave
us alone, but they only shouted in derision and paddled swiftly toward
us. It was evident that they were considerably impressed by the
appearance and dimensions of our craft, but as these fellows know no
fear they were not at all awed.

Seeing that they were determined to give battle, I leaned over the rail
of the Sari and brought the imperial battle-squadron of the Emperor of
Pellucidar into action for the first time in the history of a world. In
other and simpler words, I fired my revolver at the nearest canoe.

The effect was magical. A warrior rose from his knees, threw his paddle
aloft, stiffened into rigidity for an instant, and then toppled
overboard.

The others ceased paddling, and, with wide eyes, looked first at me and
then at the battling sea-things which fought for the corpse of their
comrade. To them it must have seemed a miracle that I should be able to
stand at thrice the range of the most powerful javelin-thrower and with
a loud noise and a smudge of smoke slay one of their number with an
invisible missile.

But only for an instant were they paralyzed with wonder. Then, with
savage shouts, they fell once more to their paddles and forged rapidly
toward us.

Again and again I fired. At each shot a warrior sank to the bottom of
the canoe or tumbled overboard.

When the prow of the first craft touched the side of the Sari it
contained only dead and dying men. The other two dugouts were
approaching rapidly, so I turned my attention toward them.

I think that they must have been commencing to have some doubts—those
wild, naked, red warriors—for when the first man fell in the second
boat, the others stopped paddling and commenced to jabber among
themselves.

The third boat pulled up alongside the second and its crews joined in
the conference. Taking advantage of the lull in the battle, I called
out to the survivors to return to their shore.

“I have no fight with you,” I cried, and then I told them who I was and
added that if they would live in peace they must sooner or later join
forces with me.

“Go back now to your people,” I counseled them, “and tell them that you
have seen David I, Emperor of the Federated Kingdoms of Pellucidar, and
that single-handed he has overcome you, just as he intends overcoming
the Mahars and the Sagoths and any other peoples of Pellucidar who
threaten the peace and welfare of his empire.”

Slowly they turned the noses of their canoes toward land. It was
evident that they were impressed; yet that they were loath to give up
without further contesting my claim to naval supremacy was also
apparent, for some of their number seemed to be exhorting the others to
a renewal of the conflict.

However, at last they drew slowly away, and the Sari, which had not
decreased her snail-like speed during this, her first engagement,
continued upon her slow, uneven way.

Presently Perry stuck his head up through the hatch and hailed me.

“Have the scoundrels departed?” he asked. “Have you killed them all?”

“Those whom I failed to kill have departed, Perry,” I replied.

He came out on deck and, peering over the side, descried the lone canoe
floating a short distance astern with its grim and grisly freight.
Farther his eyes wandered to the retreating boats.

“David,” said he at last, “this is a notable occasion. It is a great
day in the annals of Pellucidar. We have won a glorious victory.

“Your majesty’s navy has routed a fleet of the enemy thrice its own
size, manned by ten times as many men. Let us give thanks.”

I could scarce restrain a smile at Perry’s use of the pronoun “we,” yet
I was glad to share the rejoicing with him as I shall always be glad to
share everything with the dear old fellow.

Perry is the only male coward I have ever known whom I could respect
and love. He was not created for fighting; but I think that if the
occasion should ever arise where it became necessary he would give his
life cheerfully for me—yes, I KNOW it.

It took us a long time to work around the islands and draw in close to
Anoroc. In the leisure afforded we took turns working on our map, and
by means of the compass and a little guesswork we set down the
shoreline we had left and the three islands with fair accuracy.

Crossed sabers marked the spot where the first great naval engagement
of a world had taken place. In a note-book we jotted down, as had been
our custom, details that would be of historical value later.

Opposite Anoroc we came to anchor quite close to shore. I knew from my
previous experience with the tortuous trails of the island that I could
never find my way inland to the hidden tree-village of the Mezop
chieftain, Ja; so we remained aboard the Sari, firing our express
rifles at intervals to attract the attention of the natives.

After some ten shots had been fired at considerable intervals a body of
copper-colored warriors appeared upon the shore. They watched us for a
moment and then I hailed them, asking the whereabouts of my old friend
Ja.

They did not reply at once, but stood with their heads together in
serious and animated discussion. Continually they turned their eyes
toward our strange craft. It was evident that they were greatly puzzled
by our appearance as well as unable to explain the source of the loud
noises that had attracted their attention to us. At last one of the
warriors addressed us.

“Who are you who seek Ja?” he asked. “What would you of our chief?”

“We are friends,” I replied. “I am David. Tell Ja that David, whose
life he once saved from a sithic, has come again to visit him.

“If you will send out a canoe we will come ashore. We cannot bring our
great warship closer in.”

Again they talked for a considerable time. Then two of them entered a
canoe that several dragged from its hiding-place in the jungle and
paddled swiftly toward us.

They were magnificent specimens of manhood. Perry had never seen a
member of this red race close to before. In fact, the dead men in the
canoe we had left astern after the battle and the survivors who were
paddling rapidly toward their shore were the first he ever had seen. He
had been greatly impressed by their physical beauty and the promise of
superior intelligence which their well-shaped skulls gave.

The two who now paddled out received us into their canoe with dignified
courtesy. To my inquiries relative to Ja they explained that he had not
been in the village when our signals were heard, but that runners had
been sent out after him and that doubtless he was already upon his way
to the coast.

One of the men remembered me from the occasion of my former visit to
the island; he was extremely agree-able the moment that he came close
enough to recognize me. He said that Ja would be delighted to welcome
me, and that all the tribe of Anoroc knew of me by repute, and had
received explicit instructions from their chieftain that if any of them
should ever come upon me to show me every kindness and attention.

Upon shore we were received with equal honor. While we stood conversing
with our bronze friends a tall warrior leaped suddenly from the jungle.

It was Ja. As his eyes fell upon me his face lighted with pleasure. He
came quickly forward to greet me after the manner of his tribe.

Toward Perry he was equally hospitable. The old man fell in love with
the savage giant as completely as had I. Ja conducted us along the
maze-like trail to his strange village, where he gave over one of the
tree-houses for our exclusive use.

Perry was much interested in the unique habitation, which resembled
nothing so much as a huge wasp’s nest built around the bole of a tree
well above the ground.

After we had eaten and rested Ja came to see us with a number of his
head men. They listened attentively to my story, which included a
narrative of the events leading to the formation of the federated
kingdoms, the battle with the Mahars, my journey to the outer world,
and my return to Pellucidar and search for Sari and my mate.

Ja told me that the Mezops had heard something of the federation and
had been much interested in it. He had even gone so far as to send a
party of warriors toward Sari to investigate the reports, and to
arrange for the entrance of Anoroc into the empire in case it appeared
that there was any truth in the rumors that one of the aims of the
federation was the overthrow of the Mahars.

The delegation had met with a party of Sagoths. As there had been a
truce between the Mahars and the Mezops for many generations, they
camped with these warriors of the reptiles, from whom they learned that
the federation had gone to pieces. So the party returned to Anoroc.

When I showed Ja our map and explained its purpose to him, he was much
interested. The location of Anoroc, the Mountains of the Clouds, the
river, and the strip of seacoast were all familiar to him.

He quickly indicated the position of the inland sea and close beside
it, the city of Phutra, where one of the powerful Mahar nations had its
seat. He likewise showed us where Sari should be and carried his own
coast-line as far north and south as it was known to him.

His additions to the map convinced us that Greenwich lay upon the verge
of this same sea, and that it might be reached by water more easily
than by the arduous crossing of the mountains or the dangerous approach
through Phutra, which lay almost directly in line between Anoroc and
Greenwich to the northwest.

If Sari lay upon the same water then the shore-line must bend far back
toward the southwest of Greenwich—an assumption which, by the way, we
found later to be true. Also, Sari was upon a lofty plateau at the
southern end of a mighty gulf of the Great Ocean.

The location which Ja gave to distant Amoz puzzled us, for it placed it
due north of Greenwich, apparently in mid-ocean. As Ja had never been
so far and knew only of Amoz through hearsay, we thought that he must
be mistaken; but he was not. Amoz lies directly north of Greenwich
across the mouth of the same gulf as that upon which Sari is.

The sense of direction and location of these primitive Pellucidarians
is little short of uncanny, as I have had occasion to remark in the
past. You may take one of them to the uttermost ends of his world, to
places of which he has never even heard, yet without sun or moon or
stars to guide him, without map or compass, he will travel straight for
home in the shortest direction.

Mountains, rivers, and seas may have to be gone around, but never once
does his sense of direction fail him—the homing instinct is supreme.

In the same remarkable way they never forget the location of any place
to which they have ever been, and know that of many of which they have
only heard from others who have visited them.

In short, each Pellucidarian is a walking geography of his own district
and of much of the country contiguous thereto. It always proved of the
greatest aid to Perry and me; nevertheless we were anxious to enlarge
our map, for we at least were not endowed with the homing instinct.

After several long councils it was decided that, in order to expedite
matters, Perry should return to the prospector with a strong party of
Mezops and fetch the freight I had brought from the outer world. Ja and
his warriors were much impressed by our firearms, and were also anxious
to build boats with sails.

As we had arms at the prospector and also books on boat-building we
thought that it might prove an excellent idea to start these naturally
maritime people upon the construction of a well built navy of staunch
sailing-vessels. I was sure that with definite plans to go by Perry
could oversee the construction of an adequate flotilla.

I warned him, however, not to be too ambitious, and to forget about
dreadnoughts and armored cruisers for a while and build instead a few
small sailing-boats that could be manned by four or five men.

I was to proceed to Sari, and while prosecuting my search for Dian
attempt at the same time the rehabilitation of the federation. Perry
was going as far as possible by water, with the chances that the entire
trip might be made in that manner, which proved to be the fact.

With a couple of Mezops as companions I started for Sari. In order to
avoid crossing the principal range of the Mountains of the Clouds we
took a route that passed a little way south of Phutra. We had eaten
four times and slept once, and were, as my companions told me, not far
from the great Mahar city, when we were suddenly confronted by a
considerable band of Sagoths.

They did not attack us, owing to the peace which exists between the
Mahars and the Mezops, but I could see that they looked upon me with
considerable suspicion. My friends told them that I was a stranger from
a remote country, and as we had previously planned against such a
contingency I pretended ignorance of the language which the human
beings of Pellucidar employ in conversing with the gorilla-like
soldiery of the Mahars.

I noticed, and not without misgivings, that the leader of the Sagoths
eyed me with an expression that betokened partial recognition. I was
sure that he had seen me before during the period of my incarceration
in Phutra and that he was trying to recall my identity.

It worried me not a little. I was extremely thankful when we bade them
adieu and continued upon our journey.

Several times during the next few marches I became acutely conscious of
the sensation of being watched by unseen eyes, but I did not speak of
my suspicions to my companions. Later I had reason to regret my
reticence, for—

Well, this is how it happened:

We had killed an antelope and after eating our fill I had lain down to
sleep. The Pellucidarians, who seem seldom if ever to require sleep,
joined me in this instance, for we had had a very trying march along
the northern foothills of the Mountains of the Clouds, and now with
their bellies filled with meat they seemed ready for slumber.

When I awoke it was with a start to find a couple of huge Sagoths
astride me. They pinioned my arms and legs, and later chained my wrists
behind my back. Then they let me up.

I saw my companions; the brave fellows lay dead where they had slept,
javelined to death without a chance at self-defense.

I was furious. I threatened the Sagoth leader with all sorts of dire
reprisals; but when he heard me speak the hybrid language that is the
medium of communication between his kind and the human race of the
inner world he only grinned, as much as to say, “I thought so!”

They had not taken my revolvers or ammunition away from me because they
did not know what they were; but my heavy rifle I had lost. They simply
left it where it had lain beside me.

So low in the scale of intelligence are they, that they had not
sufficient interest in this strange object even to fetch it along with
them.

I knew from the direction of our march that they were taking me to
Phutra. Once there I did not need much of an imagination to picture
what my fate would be. It was the arena and a wild thag or fierce tarag
for me—unless the Mahars elected to take me to the pits.

In that case my end would be no more certain, though infinitely more
horrible and painful, for in the pits I should be subjected to cruel
vivisection. From what I had once seen of their methods in the pits of
Phutra I knew them to be the opposite of merciful, whereas in the arena
I should be quickly despatched by some savage beast.

Arrived at the underground city, I was taken immediately before a slimy
Mahar. When the creature had received the report of the Sagoth its cold
eyes glistened with malice and hatred as they were turned balefully
upon me.

I knew then that my identity had been guessed. With a show of
excitement that I had never before seen evinced by a member of the
dominant race of Pellucidar, the Mahar hustled me away, heavily
guarded, through the main avenue of the city to one of the principal
buildings.

Here we were ushered into a great hall where presently many Mahars
gathered.

In utter silence they conversed, for they have no oral speech since
they are without auditory nerves. Their method of communication Perry
has likened to the projection of a sixth sense into a fourth dimension,
where it becomes cognizable to the sixth sense of their audience.

Be that as it may, however, it was evident that I was the subject of
discussion, and from the hateful looks bestowed upon me not a
particularly pleasant subject.

How long I waited for their decision I do not know, but it must have
been a very long time. Finally one of the Sagoths addressed me. He was
acting as interpreter for his masters.

“The Mahars will spare your life,” he said, “and release you on one
condition.”

“And what is that condition?” I asked, though I could guess its terms.

“That you return to them that which you stole from the pits of Phutra
when you killed the four Mahars and escaped,” he replied.

I had thought that that would be it. The great secret upon which
depended the continuance of the Mahar race was safely hid where only
Dian and I knew.

I ventured to imagine that they would have given me much more than my
liberty to have it safely in their keeping again; but after that—what?

Would they keep their promises?

I doubted it. With the secret of artificial propagation once more in
their hands their numbers would soon be made so to overrun the world of
Pellucidar that there could be no hope for the eventual supremacy of
the human race, the cause for which I so devoutly hoped, for which I
had consecrated my life, and for which I was not willing to give my
life.

Yes! In that moment as I stood before the heartless tribunal I felt
that my life would be a very little thing to give could it save to the
human race of Pellucidar the chance to come into its own by insuring
the eventual extinction of the hated, powerful Mahars.

“Come!” exclaimed the Sagoths. “The mighty Mahars await your reply.”

“You may say to them,” I answered, “that I shall not tell them where
the great secret is hid.”

When this had been translated to them there was a great beating of
reptilian wings, gaping of sharp-fanged jaws, and hideous hissing. I
thought that they were about to fall upon me on the spot, and so I laid
my hands upon my revolvers; but at length they became more quiet and
presently transmitted some command to my Sagoth guard, the chief of
which laid a heavy hand upon my arm and pushed me roughly before him
from the audience-chamber.

They took me to the pits, where I lay carefully guarded. I was sure
that I was to be taken to the vivisection laboratory, and it required
all my courage to fortify myself against the terrors of so fearful a
death. In Pellucidar, where there is no time, death-agonies may endure
for eternities.

Accordingly, I had to steel myself against an endless doom, which now
stared me in the face!




CHAPTER V
SURPRISES


But at last the allotted moment arrived—the moment for which I had been
trying to prepare myself, for how long I could not even guess. A great
Sagoth came and spoke some words of command to those who watched over
me. I was jerked roughly to my feet and with little consideration
hustled upward toward the higher levels.

Out into the broad avenue they conducted me, where, amid huge throngs
of Mahars, Sagoths, and heavily guarded slaves, I was led, or, rather,
pushed and shoved roughly, along in the same direction that the mob
moved. I had seen such a concourse of people once before in the buried
city of Phutra; I guessed, and rightly, that we were bound for the
great arena where slaves who are condemned to death meet their end.

Into the vast amphitheater they took me, stationing me at the extreme
end of the arena. The queen came, with her slimy, sickening retinue.
The seats were filled. The show was about to commence.

Then, from a little doorway in the opposite end of the structure, a
girl was led into the arena. She was at a considerable distance from
me. I could not see her features.

I wondered what fate awaited this other poor victim and myself, and why
they had chosen to have us die together. My own fate, or rather, my
thought of it, was submerged in the natural pity I felt for this lone
girl, doomed to die horribly beneath the cold, cruel eyes of her awful
captors. Of what crime could she be guilty that she must expiate it in
the dreaded arena?

As I stood thus thinking, another door, this time at one of the long
sides of the arena, was thrown open, and into the theater of death
slunk a mighty tarag, the huge cave tiger of the Stone Age. At my sides
were my revolvers. My captors had not taken them from me, because they
did not yet realize their nature. Doubtless they thought them some
strange manner of war-club, and as those who are condemned to the arena
are permitted weapons of defense, they let me keep them.

The girl they had armed with a javelin. A brass pin would have been
almost as effective against the ferocious monster they had loosed upon
her.

The tarag stood for a moment looking about him—first up at the vast
audience and then about the arena. He did not seem to see me at all,
but his eyes fell presently upon the girl. A hideous roar broke from
his titanic lungs—a roar which ended in a long-drawn scream that is
more human than the death-cry of a tortured woman—more human but more
awesome. I could scarce restrain a shudder.

Slowly the beast turned and moved toward the girl. Then it was that I
came to myself and to a realization of my duty. Quickly and as
noiselessly as possible I ran down the arena in pursuit of the grim
creature. As I ran I drew one of my pitifully futile weapons. Ah! Could
I but have had my lost express-gun in my hands at that moment! A single
well-placed shot would have crumbled even this great monster. The best
I could hope to accomplish was to divert the thing from the girl to
myself and then to place as many bullets as possible in it before it
reached and mauled me into insensibility and death.

There is a certain unwritten law of the arena that vouchsafes freedom
and immunity to the victor, be he beast or human being—both of whom, by
the way, are all the same to the Mahar. That is, they were accustomed
to look upon man as a lower animal before Perry and I broke through the
Pellucidarian crust, but I imagine that they were beginning to alter
their views a trifle and to realize that in the gilak—their word for
human being—they had a highly organized, reasoning being to contend
with.

Be that as it may, the chances were that the tarag alone would profit
by the law of the arena. A few more of his long strides, a prodigious
leap, and he would be upon the girl. I raised a revolver and fired. The
bullet struck him in the left hind leg. It couldn’t have damaged him
much; but the report of the shot brought him around, facing me.

I think the snarling visage of a huge, enraged, saber-toothed tiger is
one of the most terrible sights in the world. Especially if he be
snarling at you and there be nothing between the two of you but bare
sand.

Even as he faced me a little cry from the girl carried my eyes beyond
the brute to her face. Hers was fastened upon me with an expression of
incredulity that baffles description. There was both hope and horror in
them, too.

“Dian!” I cried. “My Heavens, Dian!”

I saw her lips form the name David, as with raised javelin she rushed
forward upon the tarag. She was a tigress then—a primitive savage
female defending her loved one. Before she could reach the beast with
her puny weapon, I fired again at the point where the tarag’s neck met
his left shoulder. If I could get a bullet through there it might reach
his heart. The bullet didn’t reach his heart, but it stopped him for an
instant.

It was then that a strange thing happened. I heard a great hissing from
the stands occupied by the Mahars, and as I glanced toward them I saw
three mighty thipdars—the winged dragons that guard the queen, or, as
Perry calls them, pterodactyls—rise swiftly from their rocks and dart
lightning-like, toward the center of the arena. They are huge, powerful
reptiles. One of them, with the advantage which his wings might give
him, would easily be a match for a cave bear or a tarag.

These three, to my consternation, swooped down upon the tarag as he was
gathering himself for a final charge upon me. They buried their talons
in his back and lifted him bodily from the arena as if he had been a
chicken in the clutches of a hawk.

What could it mean?

I was baffled for an explanation; but with the tarag gone I lost no
time in hastening to Dian’s side. With a little cry of delight she
threw herself into my arms. So lost were we in the ecstasy of reunion
that neither of us—to this day—can tell what became of the tarag.

The first thing we were aware of was the presence of a body of Sagoths
about us. Gruffly they commanded us to follow them. They led us from
the arena and back through the streets of Phutra to the audience
chamber in which I had been tried and sentenced. Here we found
ourselves facing the same cold, cruel tribunal.

Again a Sagoth acted as interpreter. He explained that our lives had
been spared because at the last moment Tu-al-sa had returned to Phutra,
and seeing me in the arena had prevailed upon the queen to spare my
life.

“Who is Tu-al-sa?” I asked.

“A Mahar whose last male ancestor was—ages ago—the last of the male
rulers among the Mahars,” he replied.

“Why should she wish to have my life spared?”

He shrugged his shoulders and then repeated my question to the Mahar
spokesman. When the latter had explained in the strange sign-language
that passes for speech between the Mahars and their fighting men the
Sagoth turned again to me:

“For a long time you had Tu-al-sa in your power,” he explained. “You
might easily have killed her or abandoned her in a strange world—but
you did neither. You did not harm her, and you brought her back with
you to Pellucidar and set her free to return to Phutra. This is your
reward.”

Now I understood. The Mahar who had been my involuntary companion upon
my return to the outer world was Tu-al-sa. This was the first time that
I had learned the lady’s name. I thanked fate that I had not left her
upon the sands of the Sahara—or put a bullet in her, as I had been
tempted to do. I was surprised to discover that gratitude was a
characteristic of the dominant race of Pellucidar. I could never think
of them as aught but cold-blooded, brainless reptiles, though Perry had
devoted much time in explaining to me that owing to a strange freak of
evolution among all the genera of the inner world, this species of the
reptilia had advanced to a position quite analogous to that which man
holds upon the outer crust.

He had often told me that there was every reason to believe from their
writings, which he had learned to read while we were incarcerated in
Phutra, that they were a just race, and that in certain branches of
science and arts they were quite well advanced, especially in genetics
and metaphysics, engineering and architecture.

While it had always been difficult for me to look upon these things as
other than slimy, winged crocodiles—which, by the way, they do not at
all resemble—I was now forced to a realization of the fact that I was
in the hands of enlightened creatures—for justice and gratitude are
certain hallmarks of rationality and culture.

But what they purposed for us further was of most imminent interest to
me. They might save us from the tarag and yet not free us. They looked
upon us yet, to some extent, I knew, as creatures of a lower order, and
so as we are unable to place ourselves in the position of the brutes we
enslave—thinking that they are happier in bondage than in the free
fulfilment of the purposes for which nature intended them—the Mahars,
too, might consider our welfare better conserved in captivity than
among the dangers of the savage freedom we craved. Naturally, I was
next impelled to inquire their further intent.

To my question, put through the Sagoth interpreter, I received the
reply that having spared my life they considered that Tu-al-sa’s debt
of gratitude was canceled. They still had against me, however, the
crime of which I had been guilty—the unforgivable crime of stealing the
great secret. They, therefore, intended holding Dian and me prisoners
until the manuscript was returned to them.

They would, they said, send an escort of Sagoths with me to fetch the
precious document from its hiding-place, keeping Dian at Phutra as a
hostage and releasing us both the moment that the document was safely
restored to their queen.

There was no doubt but that they had the upper hand. However, there was
so much more at stake than the liberty or even the lives of Dian and
myself, that I did not deem it expedient to accept their offer without
giving the matter careful thought.

Without the great secret this maleless race must eventually become
extinct. For ages they had fertilized their eggs by an artificial
process, the secret of which lay hidden in the little cave of a far-off
valley where Dian and I had spent our honeymoon. I was none too sure
that I could find the valley again, nor that I cared to. So long as the
powerful reptilian race of Pellucidar continued to propagate, just so
long would the position of man within the inner world be jeopardized.
There could not be two dominant races.

I said as much to Dian.

“You used to tell me,” she replied, “of the wonderful things you could
accomplish with the inventions of your own world. Now you have returned
with all that is necessary to place this great power in the hands of
the men of Pellucidar.

“You told me of great engines of destruction which would cast a
bursting ball of metal among our enemies, killing hundreds of them at
one time.

“You told me of mighty fortresses of stone which a thousand men armed
with big and little engines such as these could hold forever against a
million Sagoths.

“You told me of great canoes which moved across the water without
paddles, and which spat death from holes in their sides.

“All these may now belong to the men of Pellucidar. Why should we fear
the Mahars?

“Let them breed! Let their numbers increase by thousands. They will be
helpless before the power of the Emperor of Pellucidar.

“But if you remain a prisoner in Phutra, what may we accomplish?

“What could the men of Pellucidar do without you to lead them?

“They would fight among themselves, and while they fought the Mahars
would fall upon them, and even though the Mahar race should die out, of
what value would the emancipation of the human race be to them without
the knowledge, which you alone may wield, to guide them toward the
wonderful civilization of which you have told me so much that I long
for its comforts and luxuries as I never before longed for anything.

“No, David; the Mahars cannot harm us if you are at liberty. Let them
have their secret that you and I may return to our people, and lead
them to the conquest of all Pellucidar.”

It was plain that Dian was ambitious, and that her ambition had not
dulled her reasoning faculties. She was right. Nothing could be gained
by remaining bottled up in Phutra for the rest of our lives.

It was true that Perry might do much with the contents of the
prospector, or iron mole, in which I had brought down the implements of
outer-world civilization; but Perry was a man of peace. He could never
weld the warring factions of the disrupted federation. He could never
win new tribes to the empire. He would fiddle around manufacturing
gun-powder and trying to improve upon it until some one blew him up
with his own invention. He wasn’t practical. He never would get
anywhere without a balance-wheel—without some one to direct his
energies.

Perry needed me and I needed him. If we were going to do anything for
Pellucidar we must be free to do it together.

The outcome of it all was that I agreed to the Mahars’ proposition.
They promised that Dian would be well treated and protected from every
indignity during my absence. So I set out with a hundred Sagoths in
search of the little valley which I had stumbled upon by accident, and
which I might and might not find again.

We traveled directly toward Sari. Stopping at the camp where I had been
captured I recovered my express rifle, for which I was very thankful. I
found it lying where I had left it when I had been overpowered in my
sleep by the Sagoths who had captured me and slain my Mezop companions.

On the way I added materially to my map, an occupation which did not
elicit from the Sagoths even a shadow of interest. I felt that the
human race of Pellucidar had little to fear from these gorilla-men.
They were fighters—that was all. We might even use them later ourselves
in this same capacity. They had not sufficient brain power to
constitute a menace to the advancement of the human race.

As we neared the spot where I hoped to find the little valley I became
more and more confident of success. Every landmark was familiar to me,
and I was sure now that I knew the exact location of the cave.

It was at about this time that I sighted a number of the half-naked
warriors of the human race of Pellucidar. They were marching across our
front. At sight of us they halted; that there would be a fight I could
not doubt. These Sagoths would never permit an opportunity for the
capture of slaves for their Mahar masters to escape them.

I saw that the men were armed with bows and arrows, long lances and
swords, so I guessed that they must have been members of the
federation, for only my people had been thus equipped. Before Perry and
I came the men of Pellucidar had only the crudest weapons wherewith to
slay one another.

The Sagoths, too, were evidently expecting battle. With savage shouts
they rushed forward toward the human warriors.

Then a strange thing happened. The leader of the human beings stepped
forward with upraised hands. The Sagoths ceased their war-cries and
advanced slowly to meet him. There was a long parley during which I
could see that I was often the subject of their discourse. The Sagoths’
leader pointed in the direction in which I had told him the valley lay.
Evidently he was explaining the nature of our expedition to the leader
of the warriors. It was all a puzzle to me.

What human being could be upon such excellent terms with the
gorilla-men?

I couldn’t imagine. I tried to get a good look at the fellow, but the
Sagoths had left me in the rear with a guard when they had advanced to
battle, and the distance was too great for me to recognize the features
of any of the human beings.

Finally the parley was concluded and the men continued on their way
while the Sagoths returned to where I stood with my guard. It was time
for eating, so we stopped where we were and made our meal. The Sagoths
didn’t tell me who it was they had met, and I did not ask, though I
must confess that I was quite curious.

They permitted me to sleep at this halt. Afterward we took up the last
leg of our journey. I found the valley without difficulty and led my
guard directly to the cave. At its mouth the Sagoths halted and I
entered alone.

I noticed as I felt about the floor in the dim light that there was a
pile of fresh-turned rubble there. Presently my hands came to the spot
where the great secret had been buried. There was a cavity where I had
carefully smoothed the earth over the hiding-place of the document—the
manuscript was gone!

Frantically I searched the whole interior of the cave several times
over, but without other result than a complete confirmation of my worst
fears. Someone had been here ahead of me and stolen the great secret.

The one thing within Pellucidar which might free Dian and me was gone,
nor was it likely that I should ever learn its whereabouts. If a Mahar
had found it, which was quite improbable, the chances were that the
dominant race would never divulge the fact that they had recovered the
precious document. If a cave man had happened upon it he would have no
conception of its meaning or value, and as a consequence it would be
lost or destroyed in short order.

With bowed head and broken hopes I came out of the cave and told the
Sagoth chieftain what I had discovered. It didn’t mean much to the
fellow, who doubt-less had but little better idea of the contents of
the document I had been sent to fetch to his masters than would the
cave man who in all probability had discovered it.

The Sagoth knew only that I had failed in my mission, so he took
advantage of the fact to make the return journey to Phutra as
disagreeable as possible. I did not rebel, though I had with me the
means to destroy them all. I did not dare rebel because of the
consequences to Dian. I intended demanding her release on the grounds
that she was in no way guilty of the theft, and that my failure to
recover the document had not lessened the value of the good faith I had
had in offering to do so. The Mahars might keep me in slavery if they
chose, but Dian should be returned safely to her people.

I was full of my scheme when we entered Phutra and I was conducted
directly to the great audience-chamber. The Mahars listened to the
report of the Sagoth chieftain, and so difficult is it to judge their
emotions from their almost expressionless countenance, that I was at a
loss to know how terrible might be their wrath as they learned that
their great secret, upon which rested the fate of their race, might now
be irretrievably lost.

Presently I could see that she who presided was communicating something
to the Sagoth interpreter—doubt-less something to be transmitted to me
which might give me a forewarning of the fate which lay in store for
me. One thing I had decided definitely: If they would not free Dian I
should turn loose upon Phutra with my little arsenal. Alone I might
even win to freedom, and if I could learn where Dian was imprisoned it
would be worth the attempt to free her. My thoughts were interrupted by
the interpreter.

“The mighty Mahars,” he said, “are unable to reconcile your statement
that the document is lost with your action in sending it to them by a
special messenger. They wish to know if you have so soon forgotten the
truth or if you are merely ignoring it.”

“I sent them no document,” I cried. “Ask them what they mean.”

“They say,” he went on after conversing with the Mahar for a moment,
“that just before your return to Phutra, Hooja the Sly One came,
bringing the great secret with him. He said that you had sent him ahead
with it, asking him to deliver it and return to Sari where you would
await him, bringing the girl with him.”

“Dian?” I gasped. “The Mahars have given over Dian into the keeping of
Hooja.”

“Surely,” he replied. “What of it? She is only a gilak,” as you or I
would say, “She is only a cow.”




CHAPTER VI
A PENDENT WORLD


The Mahars set me free as they had promised, but with strict
injunctions never to approach Phutra or any other Mahar city. They also
made it perfectly plain that they considered me a dangerous creature,
and that having wiped the slate clean in so far as they were under
obligations to me, they now considered me fair prey. Should I again
fall into their hands, they intimated it would go ill with me.

They would not tell me in which direction Hooja had set forth with
Dian, so I departed from Phutra, filled with bitterness against the
Mahars, and rage toward the Sly One who had once again robbed me of my
greatest treasure.

At first I was minded to go directly back to Anoroc; but upon second
thought turned my face toward Sari, as I felt that somewhere in that
direction Hooja would travel, his own country lying in that general
direction.

Of my journey to Sari it is only necessary to say that it was fraught
with the usual excitement and adventure, incident to all travel across
the face of savage Pellucidar. The dangers, however, were greatly
reduced through the medium of my armament. I often wondered how it had
happened that I had ever survived the first ten years of my life within
the inner world, when, naked and primitively armed, I had traversed
great areas of her beast-ridden surface.

With the aid of my map, which I had kept with great care during my
march with the Sagoths in search of the great secret, I arrived at Sari
at last. As I topped the lofty plateau in whose rocky cliffs the
principal tribe of Sarians find their cave-homes, a great hue and cry
arose from those who first discovered me.

Like wasps from their nests the hairy warriors poured from their caves.
The bows with their poison-tipped arrows, which I had taught them to
fashion and to use, were raised against me. Swords of hammered
iron—another of my innovations—menaced me, as with lusty shouts the
horde charged down.

It was a critical moment. Before I should be recognized I might be
dead. It was evident that all semblance of intertribal relationship had
ceased with my going, and that my people had reverted to their former
savage, suspicious hatred of all strangers. My garb must have puzzled
them, too, for never before of course had they seen a man clothed in
khaki and puttees.

Leaning my express rifle against my body I raised both hands aloft. It
was the peace-sign that is recognized everywhere upon the surface of
Pellucidar. The charging warriors paused and surveyed me. I looked for
my friend Ghak, the Hairy One, king of Sari, and presently I saw him
coming from a distance. Ah, but it was good to see his mighty, hairy
form once more! A friend was Ghak—a friend well worth the having; and
it had been some time since I had seen a friend.

Shouldering his way through the throng of warriors, the mighty
chieftain advanced toward me. There was an expression of puzzlement
upon his fine features. He crossed the space between the warriors and
myself, halting before me.

I did not speak. I did not even smile. I wanted to see if Ghak, my
principal lieutenant, would recognize me. For some time he stood there
looking me over carefully. His eyes took in my large pith helmet, my
khaki jacket, and bandoleers of cartridges, the two revolvers swinging
at my hips, the large rifle resting against my body. Still I stood with
my hands above my head. He examined my puttees and my strong tan
shoes—a little the worse for wear now. Then he glanced up once more to
my face. As his gaze rested there quite steadily for some moments I saw
recognition tinged with awe creep across his countenance.

Presently without a word he took one of my hands in his and dropping to
one knee raised my fingers to his lips. Perry had taught them this
trick, nor ever did the most polished courtier of all the grand courts
of Europe perform the little act of homage with greater grace and
dignity.

Quickly I raised Ghak to his feet, clasping both his hands in mine. I
think there must have been tears in my eyes then—I know I felt too full
for words. The king of Sari turned toward his warriors.

“Our emperor has come back,” he announced. “Come hither and—”

But he got no further, for the shouts that broke from those savage
throats would have drowned the voice of heaven itself. I had never
guessed how much they thought of me. As they clustered around, almost
fighting for the chance to kiss my hand, I saw again the vision of
empire which I had thought faded forever.

With such as these I could conquer a world. With such as these I
_would_ conquer one! If the Sarians had remained loyal, so too would
the Amozites be loyal still, and the Kalians, and the Suvians, and all
the great tribes who had formed the federation that was to emancipate
the human race of Pellucidar.

Perry was safe with the Mezops; I was safe with the Sarians; now if
Dian were but safe with me the future would look bright indeed.

It did not take long to outline to Ghak all that had befallen me since
I had departed from Pellucidar, and to get down to the business of
finding Dian, which to me at that moment was of even greater importance
than the very empire itself.

When I told him that Hooja had stolen her, he stamped his foot in rage.

“It is always the Sly One!” he cried. “It was Hooja who caused the
first trouble between you and the Beautiful One.

“It was Hooja who betrayed our trust, and all but caused our recapture
by the Sagoths that time we escaped from Phutra.

“It was Hooja who tricked you and substituted a Mahar for Dian when you
started upon your return journey to your own world.

“It was Hooja who schemed and lied until he had turned the kingdoms one
against another and destroyed the federation.

“When we had him in our power we were foolish to let him live. Next
time—”

Ghak did not need to finish his sentence.

“He has become a very powerful enemy now,” I replied. “That he is
allied in some way with the Mahars is evidenced by the familiarity of
his relations with the Sagoths who were accompanying me in search of
the great secret, for it must have been Hooja whom I saw conversing
with them just before we reached the valley. Doubtless they told him of
our quest and he hastened on ahead of us, discovered the cave and stole
the document. Well does he deserve his appellation of the Sly One.”

With Ghak and his head men I held a number of consultations. The upshot
of them was a decision to combine our search for Dian with an attempt
to rebuild the crumbled federation. To this end twenty warriors were
despatched in pairs to ten of the leading kingdoms, with instructions
to make every effort to discover the whereabouts of Hooja and Dian,
while prosecuting their missions to the chieftains to whom they were
sent.

Ghak was to remain at home to receive the various delegations which we
invited to come to Sari on the business of the federation. Four hundred
warriors were started for Anoroc to fetch Perry and the contents of the
prospector, to the capitol of the empire, which was also the principal
settlements of the Sarians.

At first it was intended that I remain at Sari, that I might be in
readiness to hasten forth at the first report of the discovery of Dian;
but I found the inaction in the face of my deep solicitude for the
welfare of my mate so galling that scarce had the several units
departed upon their missions before I, too, chafed to be actively
engaged upon the search.

It was after my second sleep, subsequent to the departure of the
warriors, as I recall, that I at last went to Ghak with the admission
that I could no longer support the intolerable longing to be personally
upon the trail of my lost love.

Ghak tried to dissuade me, though I could tell that his heart was with
me in my wish to be away and really doing something. It was while we
were arguing upon the subject that a stranger, with hands above his
head, entered the village. He was immediately surrounded by warriors
and conducted to Ghak’s presence.

The fellow was a typical cave man-squat muscular, and hairy, and of a
type I had not seen before. His features, like those of all the
primeval men of Pellucidar, were regular and fine. His weapons
consisted of a stone ax and knife and a heavy knobbed bludgeon of wood.
His skin was very white.

“Who are you?” asked Ghak. “And whence come you?”

“I am Kolk, son of Goork, who is chief of the Thurians,” replied the
stranger. “From Thuria I have come in search of the land of Amoz, where
dwells Dacor, the Strong One, who stole my sister, Canda, the Grace-ful
One, to be his mate.

“We of Thuria had heard of a great chieftain who has bound together
many tribes, and my father has sent me to Dacor to learn if there be
truth in these stories, and if so to offer the services of Thuria to
him whom we have heard called emperor.”

“The stories are true,” replied Ghak, “and here is the emperor of whom
you have heard. You need travel no farther.”

Kolk was delighted. He told us much of the wonderful resources of
Thuria, the Land of Awful Shadow, and of his long journey in search of
Amoz.

“And why,” I asked, “does Goork, your father, desire to join his
kingdom to the empire?”

“There are two reasons,” replied the young man. “Forever have the
Mahars, who dwell beyond the Lidi Plains which lie at the farther rim
of the Land of Awful Shadow, taken heavy toll of our people, whom they
either force into lifelong slavery or fatten for their feasts. We have
heard that the great emperor makes successful war upon the Mahars,
against whom we should be glad to fight.

“Recently has another reason come. Upon a great island which lies in
the Sojar Az, but a short distance from our shores, a wicked man has
collected a great band of outcast warriors of all tribes. Even are
there many Sagoths among them, sent by the Mahars to aid the Wicked
One.

“This band makes raids upon our villages, and it is constantly growing
in size and strength, for the Mahars give liberty to any of their male
prisoners who will promise to fight with this band against the enemies
of the Mahars. It is the purpose of the Mahars thus to raise a force of
our own kind to combat the growth and menace of the new empire of which
I have come to seek information. All this we learned from one of our
own warriors who had pretended to sympathize with this band and had
then escaped at the first opportunity.”

“Who could this man be,” I asked Ghak, “who leads so vile a movement
against his own kind?”

“His name is Hooja,” spoke up Kolk, answering my question.

Ghak and I looked at each other. Relief was written upon his
countenance and I know that it was beating strongly in my heart. At
last we had discovered a tangible clue to the whereabouts of Hooja—and
with the clue a guide!

But when I broached the subject to Kolk he demurred. He had come a long
way, he explained, to see his sister and to confer with Dacor.
Moreover, he had instructions from his father which he could not ignore
lightly. But even so he would return with me and show me the way to the
island of the Thurian shore if by doing so we might accomplish
anything.

“But we cannot,” he urged. “Hooja is powerful. He has thousands of
warriors. He has only to call upon his Mahar allies to receive a
countless horde of Sagoths to do his bidding against his human enemies.

“Let us wait until you may gather an equal horde from the kingdoms of
your empire. Then we may march against Hooja with some show of success.

“But first must you lure him to the mainland, for who among you knows
how to construct the strange things that carry Hooja and his band back
and forth across the water?

“We are not island people. We do not go upon the water. We know nothing
of such things.”

I couldn’t persuade him to do more than direct me upon the way. I
showed him my map, which now included a great area of country extending
from Anoroc upon the east to Sari upon the west, and from the river
south of the Mountains of the Clouds north to Amoz. As soon as I had
explained it to him he drew a line with his finger, showing a sea-coast
far to the west and south of Sari, and a great circle which he said
marked the extent of the Land of Awful Shadow in which lay Thuria.

The shadow extended southeast of the coast out into the sea half-way to
a large island, which he said was the seat of Hooja’s traitorous
government. The island itself lay in the light of the noonday sun.
Northwest of the coast and embracing a part of Thuria lay the Lidi
Plains, upon the northwestern verge of which was situated the Mahar
city which took such heavy toll of the Thurians.

Thus were the unhappy people now between two fires, with Hooja upon one
side and the Mahars upon the other. I did not wonder that they sent out
an appeal for succor.

Though Ghak and Kolk both attempted to dissuade me, I was determined to
set out at once, nor did I delay longer than to make a copy of my map
to be given to Perry that he might add to his that which I had set down
since we parted. I left a letter for him as well, in which among other
things I advanced the theory that the Sojar Az, or Great Sea, which
Kolk mentioned as stretching eastward from Thuria, might indeed be the
same mighty ocean as that which, swinging around the southern end of a
continent ran northward along the shore opposite Phutra, mingling its
waters with the huge gulf upon which lay Sari, Amoz, and Greenwich.

Against this possibility I urged him to hasten the building of a fleet
of small sailing-vessels, which we might utilize should I find it
impossible to entice Hooja’s horde to the mainland.

I told Ghak what I had written, and suggested that as soon as he could
he should make new treaties with the various kingdoms of the empire,
collect an army and march toward Thuria—this of course against the
possibility of my detention through some cause or other.

Kolk gave me a sign to his father—a lidi, or beast of burden, crudely
scratched upon a bit of bone, and beneath the lidi a man and a flower;
all very rudely done perhaps, but none the less effective as I well
knew from my long years among the primitive men of Pellucidar.

The lidi is the tribal beast of the Thurians; the man and the flower in
the combination in which they appeared bore a double significance, as
they constituted not only a message to the effect that the bearer came
in peace, but were also Kolk’s signature.

And so, armed with my credentials and my small arsenal, I set out alone
upon my quest for the dearest girl in this world or yours.

Kolk gave me explicit directions, though with my map I do not believe
that I could have gone wrong. As a matter of fact I did not need the
map at all, since the principal landmark of the first half of my
journey, a gigantic mountain-peak, was plainly visible from Sari,
though a good hundred miles away.

At the southern base of this mountain a river rose and ran in a
westerly direction, finally turning south and emptying into the Sojar
Az some forty miles northeast of Thuria. All that I had to do was
follow this river to the sea and then follow the coast to Thuria.

Two hundred and forty miles of wild mountain and primeval jungle, of
untracked plain, of nameless rivers, of deadly swamps and savage
forests lay ahead of me, yet never had I been more eager for an
adventure than now, for never had more depended upon haste and success.

I do not know how long a time that journey required, and only half did
I appreciate the varied wonders that each new march unfolded before me,
for my mind and heart were filled with but a single image—that of a
perfect girl whose great, dark eyes looked bravely forth from a frame
of raven hair.

It was not until I had passed the high peak and found the river that my
eyes first discovered the pendent world, the tiny satellite which hangs
low over the surface of Pellucidar casting its perpetual shadow always
upon the same spot—the area that is known here as the Land of Awful
Shadow, in which dwells the tribe of Thuria.

From the distance and the elevation of the highlands where I stood the
Pellucidarian noonday moon showed half in sunshine and half in shadow,
while directly beneath it was plainly visible the round dark spot upon
the surface of Pellucidar where the sun has never shone. From where I
stood the moon appeared to hang so low above the ground as almost to
touch it; but later I was to learn that it floats a mile above the
surface—which seems indeed quite close for a moon.

Following the river downward I soon lost sight of the tiny planet as I
entered the mazes of a lofty forest. Nor did I catch another glimpse of
it for some time—several marches at least. However, when the river led
me to the sea, or rather just before it reached the sea, of a sudden
the sky became overcast and the size and luxuriance of the vegetation
diminished as by magic—as if an omni-potent hand had drawn a line upon
the earth, and said:

“Upon this side shall the trees and the shrubs, the grasses and the
flowers, riot in profusion of rich colors, gigantic size and
bewildering abundance; and upon that side shall they be dwarfed and
pale and scant.”

Instantly I looked above, for clouds are so uncommon in the skies of
Pellucidar—they are practically unknown except above the mightiest
mountain ranges—that it had given me something of a start to discover
the sun obliterated. But I was not long in coming to a realization of
the cause of the shadow.

Above me hung another world. I could see its mountains and valleys,
oceans, lakes, and rivers, its broad, grassy plains and dense forests.
But too great was the distance and too deep the shadow of its under
side for me to distinguish any movement as of animal life.

Instantly a great curiosity was awakened within me. The questions which
the sight of this planet, so tantalizingly close, raised in my mind
were numerous and unanswerable.

Was it inhabited?

If so, by what manner and form of creature?

Were its people as relatively diminutive as their little world, or were
they as disproportionately huge as the lesser attraction of gravity
upon the surface of their globe would permit of their being?

As I watched it, I saw that it was revolving upon an axis that lay
parallel to the surface of Pellucidar, so that during each revolution
its entire surface was once exposed to the world below and once bathed
in the heat of the great sun above. The little world had that which
Pellucidar could not have—a day and night, and—greatest of boons to one
outer-earthly born—time.

Here I saw a chance to give time to Pellucidar, using this mighty
clock, revolving perpetually in the heavens, to record the passage of
the hours for the earth below. Here should be located an observatory,
from which might be flashed by wireless to every corner of the empire
the correct time once each day. That this time would be easily measured
I had no doubt, since so plain were the landmarks upon the under
surface of the satellite that it would be but necessary to erect a
simple instrument and mark the instant of passage of a given landmark
across the instrument.

But then was not the time for dreaming; I must devote my mind to the
purpose of my journey. So I hastened onward beneath the great shadow.
As I advanced I could not but note the changing nature of the
vegetation and the paling of its hues.

The river led me a short distance within the shadow before it emptied
into the Sojar Az. Then I continued in a southerly direction along the
coast toward the village of Thuria, where I hoped to find Goork and
deliver to him my credentials.

I had progressed no great distance from the mouth of the river when I
discerned, lying some distance at sea, a great island. This I assumed
to be the stronghold of Hooja, nor did I doubt that upon it even now
was Dian.

The way was most difficult, since shortly after leaving the river I
encountered lofty cliffs split by numerous long, narrow fiords, each of
which necessitated a considerable detour. As the crow flies it is about
twenty miles from the mouth of the river to Thuria, but before I had
covered half of it I was fagged. There was no familiar fruit or
vegetable growing upon the rocky soil of the cliff-tops, and I would
have fared ill for food had not a hare broken cover almost beneath my
nose.

I carried bow and arrows to conserve my ammunition-supply, but so quick
was the little animal that I had no time to draw and fit a shaft. In
fact my dinner was a hundred yards away and going like the proverbial
bat when I dropped my six-shooter on it. It was a pretty shot and when
coupled with a good dinner made me quite contented with myself.

After eating I lay down and slept. When I awoke I was scarcely so
self-satisfied, for I had not more than opened my eyes before I became
aware of the presence, barely a hundred yards from me, of a pack of
some twenty huge wolf-dogs—the things which Perry insisted upon calling
hyaenodons—and almost simultaneously I discovered that while I slept my
revolvers, rifle, bow, arrows, and knife had been stolen from me.

And the wolf-dog pack was preparing to rush me.




CHAPTER VII
FROM PLIGHT TO PLIGHT


I have never been much of a runner; I hate running. But if ever a
sprinter broke into smithereens all world’s records it was I that day
when I fled before those hideous beasts along the narrow spit of rocky
cliff between two narrow fiords toward the Sojar Az. Just as I reached
the verge of the cliff the foremost of the brutes was upon me. He
leaped and closed his massive jaws upon my shoulder.

The momentum of his flying body, added to that of my own, carried the
two of us over the cliff. It was a hideous fall. The cliff was almost
perpendicular. At its foot broke the sea against a solid wall of rock.

We struck the cliff-face once in our descent and then plunged into the
salt sea. With the impact with the water the hyaenodon released his
hold upon my shoulder.

As I came sputtering to the surface I looked about for some tiny foot-
or hand-hold where I might cling for a moment of rest and recuperation.
The cliff itself offered me nothing, so I swam toward the mouth of the
fiord.

At the far end I could see that erosion from above had washed down
sufficient rubble to form a narrow ribbon of beach. Toward this I swam
with all my strength. Not once did I look behind me, since every
unnecessary movement in swimming detracts so much from one’s endurance
and speed. Not until I had drawn myself safely out upon the beach did I
turn my eyes back toward the sea for the hyaenodon. He was swimming
slowly and apparently painfully toward the beach upon which I stood.

I watched him for a long time, wondering why it was that such a doglike
animal was not a better swimmer. As he neared me I realized that he was
weakening rapidly. I had gathered a handful of stones to be ready for
his assault when he landed, but in a moment I let them fall from my
hands. It was evident that the brute either was no swimmer or else was
severely injured, for by now he was making practically no headway.
Indeed, it was with quite apparent difficulty that he kept his nose
above the surface of the sea.

He was not more than fifty yards from shore when he went under. I
watched the spot where he had disappeared, and in a moment I saw his
head reappear. The look of dumb misery in his eyes struck a chord in my
breast, for I love dogs. I forgot that he was a vicious, primordial
wolf-thing—a man-eater, a scourge, and a terror. I saw only the sad
eyes that looked like the eyes of Raja, my dead collie of the outer
world.

I did not stop to weigh and consider. In other words, I did not stop to
think, which I believe must be the way of men who do things—in
contradistinction to those who think much and do nothing. Instead, I
leaped back into the water and swam out toward the drowning beast. At
first he showed his teeth at my approach, but just before I reached him
he went under for the second time, so that I had to dive to get him.

I grabbed him by the scruff of the neck, and though he weighed as much
as a Shetland pony, I managed to drag him to shore and well up upon the
beach. Here I found that one of his forelegs was broken—the crash
against the cliff-face must have done it.

By this time all the fight was out of him, so that when I had gathered
a few tiny branches from some of the stunted trees that grew in the
crevices of the cliff, and returned to him he permitted me to set his
broken leg and bind it in splints. I had to tear part of my shirt into
bits to obtain a bandage, but at last the job was done. Then I sat
stroking the savage head and talking to the beast in the man-dog talk
with which you are familiar, if you ever owned and loved a dog.

When he is well, I thought, he probably will turn upon me and attempt
to devour me, and against that eventuality I gathered together a pile
of rocks and set to work to fashion a stone-knife. We were bottled up
at the head of the fiord as completely as if we had been behind prison
bars. Before us spread the Sojar Az, and elsewhere about us rose
unscalable cliffs.

Fortunately a little rivulet trickled down the side of the rocky wall,
giving us ample supply of fresh water—some of which I kept constantly
beside the hyaenodon in a huge, bowl-shaped shell, of which there were
countless numbers among the rubble of the beach.

For food we subsisted upon shellfish and an occasional bird that I
succeeded in knocking over with a rock, for long practice as a pitcher
on prep-school and varsity nines had made me an excellent shot with a
hand-thrown missile.

It was not long before the hyaenodon’s leg was sufficiently mended to
permit him to rise and hobble about on three legs. I shall never forget
with what intent interest I watched his first attempt. Close at my hand
lay my pile of rocks. Slowly the beast came to his three good feet. He
stretched himself, lowered his head, and lapped water from the
drinking-shell at his side, turned and looked at me, and then hobbled
off toward the cliffs.

Thrice he traversed the entire extent of our prison, seeking, I
imagine, a loop-hole for escape, but finding none he returned in my
direction. Slowly he came quite close to me, sniffed at my shoes, my
puttees, my hands, and then limped off a few feet and lay down again.

Now that he was able to get around, I was a little uncertain as to the
wisdom of my impulsive mercy.

How could I sleep with that ferocious thing prowling about the narrow
confines of our prison?

Should I close my eyes it might be to open them again to the feel of
those mighty jaws at my throat. To say the least, I was uncomfortable.

I have had too much experience with dumb animals to bank very strongly
on any sense of gratitude which may be attributed to them by
inexperienced sentimentalists. I believe that some animals love their
masters, but I doubt very much if their affection is the outcome of
gratitude—a characteristic that is so rare as to be only occasionally
traceable in the seemingly unselfish acts of man himself.

But finally I was forced to sleep. Tired nature would be put off no
longer. I simply fell asleep, willy nilly, as I sat looking out to sea.
I had been very uncomfortable since my ducking in the ocean, for though
I could see the sunlight on the water half-way toward the island and
upon the island itself, no ray of it fell upon us. We were well within
the Land of Awful Shadow. A perpetual half-warmth pervaded the
atmosphere, but clothing was slow in drying, and so from loss of sleep
and great physical discomfort, I at last gave way to nature’s demands
and sank into profound slumber.

When I awoke it was with a start, for a heavy body was upon me. My
first thought was that the hyaenodon had at last attacked me, but as my
eyes opened and I struggled to rise, I saw that a man was astride me
and three others bending close above him.

I am no weakling—and never have been. My experience in the hard life of
the inner world has turned my thews to steel. Even such giants as Ghak
the Hairy One have praised my strength; but to it is added another
quality which they lack—science.

The man upon me held me down awkwardly, leaving me many openings—one of
which I was not slow in taking advantage of, so that almost before the
fellow knew that I was awake I was upon my feet with my arms over his
shoulders and about his waist and had hurled him heavily over my head
to the hard rubble of the beach, where he lay quite still.

In the instant that I arose I had seen the hyaenodon lying asleep
beside a boulder a few yards away. So nearly was he the color of the
rock that he was scarcely discernible. Evidently the newcomers had not
seen him.

I had not more than freed myself from one of my antagonists before the
other three were upon me. They did not work silently now, but charged
me with savage cries—a mistake upon their part. The fact that they did
not draw their weapons against me convinced me that they desired to
take me alive; but I fought as desperately as if death loomed immediate
and sure.

The battle was short, for scarce had their first wild whoop
reverberated through the rocky fiord, and they had closed upon me, than
a hairy mass of demoniacal rage hurtled among us.

It was the hyaenodon!

In an instant he had pulled down one of the men, and with a single
shake, terrier-like, had broken his neck. Then he was upon another. In
their efforts to vanquish the wolf-dog the savages forgot all about me,
thus giving me an instant in which to snatch a knife from the
loin-string of him who had first fallen and account for another of
them. Almost simultaneously the hyaenodon pulled down the remaining
enemy, crushing his skull with a single bite of those fearsome jaws.

The battle was over—unless the beast considered me fair prey, too. I
waited, ready for him with knife and bludgeon—also filched from a dead
foeman; but he paid no attention to me, falling to work instead to
devour one of the corpses.

The beast bad been handicapped but little by his splinted leg; but
having eaten he lay down and commenced to gnaw at the bandage. I was
sitting some little distance away devouring shellfish, of which, by the
way, I was becoming exceedingly tired.

Presently, the hyaenodon arose and came toward me. I did not move. He
stopped in front of me and deliberately raised his bandaged leg and
pawed my knee. His act was as intelligible as words—he wished the
bandage removed.

I took the great paw in one hand and with the other hand untied and
unwound the bandage, removed the splints and felt of the injured
member. As far as I could judge the bone was completely knit. The joint
was stiff; when I bent it a little the brute winced—but he neither
growled nor tried to pull away. Very slowly and gently I rubbed the
joint and applied pressure to it for a few moments.

Then I set it down upon the ground. The hyaenodon walked around me a
few times, and then lay down at my side, his body touching mine. I laid
my hand upon his head. He did not move. Slowly, I scratched about his
ears and neck and down beneath the fierce jaws. The only sign he gave
was to raise his chin a trifle that I might better caress him.

That was enough! From that moment I have never again felt suspicion of
Raja, as I immediately named him. Somehow all sense of loneliness
vanished, too—I had a dog! I had never guessed precisely what it was
that was lacking to life in Pellucidar, but now I knew it was the total
absence of domestic animals.

Man here had not yet reached the point where he might take the time
from slaughter and escaping slaughter to make friends with any of the
brute creation. I must qualify this statement a trifle and say that
this was true of those tribes with which I was most familiar. The
Thurians do domesticate the colossal lidi, traversing the great Lidi
Plains upon the backs of these grotesque and stupendous monsters, and
possibly there may also be other, far-distant peoples within the great
world, who have tamed others of the wild things of jungle, plain or
mountain.

The Thurians practice agriculture in a crude sort of way. It is my
opinion that this is one of the earliest steps from savagery to
civilization. The taming of wild beasts and their domestication
follows.

Perry argues that wild dogs were first domesticated for hunting
purposes; but I do not agree with him. I believe that if their
domestication were not purely the result of an accident, as, for
example, my taming of the hyaenodon, it came about through the desire
of tribes who had previously domesticated flocks and herds to have some
strong, ferocious beast to guard their roaming property. However, I
lean rather more strongly to the theory of accident.

As I sat there upon the beach of the little fiord eating my unpalatable
shell-fish, I commenced to wonder how it had been that the four savages
had been able to reach me, though I had been unable to escape from my
natural prison. I glanced about in all directions, searching for an
explanation. At last my eyes fell upon the bow of a small dugout
protruding scarce a foot from behind a large boulder lying half in the
water at the edge of the beach.

At my discovery I leaped to my feet so suddenly that it brought Raja,
growling and bristling, upon all fours in an instant. For the moment I
had forgotten him. But his savage rumbling did not cause me any
uneasiness. He glanced quickly about in all directions as if searching
for the cause of my excitement. Then, as I walked rapidly down toward
the dugout, he slunk silently after me.

The dugout was similar in many respects to those which I had seen in
use by the Mezops. In it were four paddles. I was much delighted, as it
promptly offered me the escape I had been craving.

I pushed it out into water that would float it, stepped in and called
to Raja to enter. At first he did not seem to understand what I wished
of him, but after I had paddled out a few yards he plunged through the
surf and swam after me. When he had come alongside I grasped the scruff
of his neck, and after a considerable struggle, in which I several
times came near to overturning the canoe, I managed to drag him aboard,
where he shook himself vigorously and squatted down before me.

After emerging from the fiord, I paddled southward along the coast,
where presently the lofty cliffs gave way to lower and more level
country. It was here somewhere that I should come upon the principal
village of the Thurians. When, after a time, I saw in the distance what
I took to be huts in a clearing near the shore, I drew quickly into
land, for though I had been furnished credentials by Kolk, I was not
sufficiently familiar with the tribal characteristics of these people
to know whether I should receive a friendly welcome or not; and in case
I should not, I wanted to be sure of having a canoe hidden safely away
so that I might undertake the trip to the island, in any
event—provided, of course, that I escaped the Thurians should they
prove belligerent.

At the point where I landed the shore was quite low. A forest of pale,
scrubby ferns ran down almost to the beach. Here I dragged up the
dugout, hiding it well within the vegetation, and with some loose rocks
built a cairn upon the beach to mark my cache. Then I turned my steps
toward the Thurian village.

As I proceeded I began to speculate upon the possible actions of Raja
when we should enter the presence of other men than myself. The brute
was padding softly at my side, his sensitive nose constantly atwitch
and his fierce eyes moving restlessly from side to side—nothing would
ever take Raja unawares!

The more I thought upon the matter the greater became my perturbation.
I did not want Raja to attack any of the people upon whose friendship I
so greatly depended, nor did I want him injured or slain by them.

I wondered if Raja would stand for a leash. His head as he paced beside
me was level with my hip. I laid my hand upon it caressingly. As I did
so he turned and looked up into my face, his jaws parting and his red
tongue lolling as you have seen your own dog’s beneath a love pat.

“Just been waiting all your life to be tamed and loved, haven’t you,
old man?” I asked. “You’re nothing but a good pup, and the man who put
the hyaeno in your name ought to be sued for libel.”

Raja bared his mighty fangs with upcurled, snarling lips and licked my
hand.

“You’re grinning, you old fraud, you!” I cried. “If you’re not, I’ll
eat you. I’ll bet a doughnut you’re nothing but some kid’s poor old
Fido, masquerading around as a real, live man-eater.”

Raja whined. And so we walked on together toward Thuria—I talking to
the beast at my side, and he seeming to enjoy my company no less than I
enjoyed his. If you don’t think it’s lonesome wandering all by yourself
through savage, unknown Pellucidar, why, just try it, and you will not
wonder that I was glad of the company of this first dog—this living
replica of the fierce and now extinct hyaenodon of the outer crust that
hunted in savage packs the great elk across the snows of southern
France, in the days when the mastodon roamed at will over the broad
continent of which the British Isles were then a part, and perchance
left his footprints and his bones in the sands of Atlantis as well.

Thus I dreamed as we moved on toward Thuria. My dreaming was rudely
shattered by a savage growl from Raja. I looked down at him. He had
stopped in his tracks as one turned to stone. A thin ridge of stiff
hair bristled along the entire length of his spine. His yellow green
eyes were fastened upon the scrubby jungle at our right.

I fastened my fingers in the bristles at his neck and turned my eyes in
the direction that his pointed. At first I saw nothing. Then a slight
movement of the bushes riveted my attention. I thought it must be some
wild beast, and was glad of the primitive weapons I had taken from the
bodies of the warriors who had attacked me.

Presently I distinguished two eyes peering at us from the vegetation. I
took a step in their direction, and as I did so a youth arose and fled
precipitately in the direction we had been going. Raja struggled to be
after him, but I held tightly to his neck, an act which he did not seem
to relish, for he turned on me with bared fangs.

I determined that now was as good a time as any to discover just how
deep was Raja’s affection for me. One of us could be master, and
logically I was the one. He growled at me. I cuffed him sharply across
the nose. He looked it me for a moment in surprised bewilderment, and
then he growled again. I made another feint at him, expecting that it
would bring him at my throat; but instead he winced and crouched down.

Raja was subdued!

I stooped and patted him. Then I took a piece of the rope that
constituted a part of my equipment and made a leash for him.

Thus we resumed our journey toward Thuria. The youth who had seen us
was evidently of the Thurians. That he had lost no time in racing
homeward and spreading the word of my coming was evidenced when we had
come within sight of the clearing, and the village—the first real
village, by the way, that I had ever seen constructed by human
Pellucidarians. There was a rude rectangle walled with logs and
boulders, in which were a hundred or more thatched huts of similar
construction. There was no gate. Ladders that could be removed by night
led over the palisade.

Before the village were assembled a great concourse of warriors. Inside
I could see the heads of women and children peering over the top of the
wall; and also, farther back, the long necks of lidi, topped by their
tiny heads. Lidi, by the way, is both the singular and plural form of
the noun that describes the huge beasts of burden of the Thurians. They
are enormous quadrupeds, eighty or a hundred feet long, with very small
heads perched at the top of very long, slender necks. Their heads are
quite forty feet from the ground. Their gait is slow and deliberate,
but so enormous are their strides that, as a matter of fact, they cover
the ground quite rapidly.

Perry has told me that they are almost identical with the fossilized
remains of the diplodocus of the outer crust’s Jurassic age. I have to
take his word for it—and I guess you will, unless you know more of such
matters than I.

As we came in sight of the warriors the men set up a great jabbering.
Their eyes were wide in astonishment—not only, I presume, because of my
strange garmenture, but as well from the fact that I came in company
with a jalok, which is the Pellucidarian name of the hyaenodon.

Raja tugged at his leash, growling and showing his long white fangs. He
would have liked nothing better than to be at the throats of the whole
aggregation; but I held him in with the leash, though it took all my
strength to do it. My free hand I held above my head, palm out, in
token of the peacefulness of my mission.

In the foreground I saw the youth who had discovered us, and I could
tell from the way he carried himself that he was quite overcome by his
own importance. The warriors about him were all fine looking fellows,
though shorter and squatter than the Sarians or the Amozites. Their
color, too, was a bit lighter, owing, no doubt, to the fact that much
of their lives is spent within the shadow of the world that hangs
forever above their country.

A little in advance of the others was a bearded fellow tricked out in
many ornaments. I didn’t need to ask to know that he was the
chieftain—doubtless Goork, father of Kolk. Now to him I addressed
myself.

“I am David,” I said, “Emperor of the Federated Kingdoms of Pellucidar.
Doubtless you have heard of me?”

He nodded his head affirmatively.

“I come from Sari,” I continued, “where I just met Kolk, the son of
Goork. I bear a token from Kolk to his father, which will prove that I
am a friend.”

Again the warrior nodded. “I am Goork,” he said. “Where is the token?”

“Here,” I replied, and fished into the game-bag where I had placed it.

Goork and his people waited in silence. My hand searched the inside of
the bag.

It was empty!

The token had been stolen with my arms!




CHAPTER VIII
CAPTIVE


When Goork and his people saw that I had no token they commenced to
taunt me.

“You do not come from Kolk, but from the Sly One!” they cried. “He has
sent you from the island to spy upon us. Go away, or we will set upon
you and kill you.”

I explained that all my belongings had been stolen from me, and that
the robber must have taken the token too; but they didn’t believe me.
As proof that I was one of Hooja’s people, they pointed to my weapons,
which they said were ornamented like those of the island clan. Further,
they said that no good man went in company with a jalok—and that by
this line of reasoning I certainly was a bad man.

I saw that they were not naturally a war-like tribe, for they preferred
that I leave in peace rather than force them to attack me, whereas the
Sarians would have killed a suspicious stranger first and inquired into
his purposes later.

I think Raja sensed their antagonism, for he kept tugging at his leash
and growling ominously. They were a bit in awe of him, and kept at a
safe distance. It was evident that they could not comprehend why it was
that this savage brute did not turn upon me and rend me.

I wasted a long time there trying to persuade Goork to accept me at my
own valuation, but he was too canny. The best he would do was to give
us food, which he did, and direct me as to the safest portion of the
island upon which to attempt a landing, though even as he told me I am
sure that he thought my request for information but a blind to deceive
him as to my true knowledge of the insular stronghold.

At last I turned away from them—rather disheartened, for I had hoped to
be able to enlist a considerable force of them in an attempt to rush
Hooja’s horde and rescue Dian. Back along the beach toward the hidden
canoe we made our way.

By the time we came to the cairn I was dog-tired. Throwing myself upon
the sand I soon slept, and with Raja stretched out beside me I felt a
far greater security than I had enjoyed for a long time.

I awoke much refreshed to find Raja’s eyes glued upon me. The moment I
opened mine he rose, stretched himself, and without a backward glance
plunged into the jungle. For several minutes I could hear him crashing
through the brush. Then all was silent.

I wondered if he had left me to return to his fierce pack. A feeling of
loneliness overwhelmed me. With a sigh I turned to the work of dragging
the canoe down to the sea. As I entered the jungle where the dugout lay
a hare darted from beneath the boat’s side, and a well-aimed cast of my
javelin brought it down. I was hungry—I had not realized it before—so I
sat upon the edge of the canoe and devoured my repast. The last
remnants gone, I again busied myself with preparations for my
expedition to the island.

I did not know for certain that Dian was there; but I surmised as much.
Nor could I guess what obstacles might confront me in an effort to
rescue her. For a time I loitered about after I had the canoe at the
water’s edge, hoping against hope that Raja would return; but he did
not, so I shoved the awkward craft through the surf and leaped into it.

I was still a little downcast by the desertion of my new-found friend,
though I tried to assure myself that it was nothing but what I might
have expected.

The savage brute had served me well in the short time that we had been
together, and had repaid his debt of gratitude to me, since he had
saved my life, or at least my liberty, no less certainly than I had
saved his life when he was injured and drowning.

The trip across the water to the island was uneventful. I was mighty
glad to be in the sunshine again when I passed out of the shadow of the
dead world about half-way between the mainland and the island. The hot
rays of the noonday sun did a great deal toward raising my spirits, and
dispelling the mental gloom in which I had been shrouded almost
continually since entering the Land of Awful Shadow. There is nothing
more dispiriting to me than absence of sunshine.

I had paddled to the southwestern point, which Goork said he believed
to be the least frequented portion of the island, as he had never seen
boats put off from there. I found a shallow reef running far out into
the sea and rather precipitous cliffs running almost to the surf. It
was a nasty place to land, and I realized now why it was not used by
the natives; but at last I managed, after a good wetting, to beach my
canoe and scale the cliffs.

The country beyond them appeared more open and park-like than I had
anticipated, since from the mainland the entire coast that is visible
seems densely clothed with tropical jungle. This jungle, as I could see
from the vantage-point of the cliff-top, formed but a relatively narrow
strip between the sea and the more open forest and meadow of the
interior. Farther back there was a range of low but apparently very
rocky hills, and here and there all about were visible flat-topped
masses of rock—small mountains, in fact—which reminded me of pictures I
had seen of landscapes in New Mexico. Altogether, the country was very
much broken and very beautiful. From where I stood I counted no less
than a dozen streams winding down from among the table-buttes and
emptying into a pretty river which flowed away in a northeasterly
direction toward the op-posite end of the island.

As I let my eyes roam over the scene I suddenly became aware of figures
moving upon the flat top of a far-distant butte. Whether they were
beast or human, though, I could not make out; but at least they were
alive, so I determined to prosecute my search for Hooja’s stronghold in
the general direction of this butte.

To descend to the valley required no great effort. As I swung along
through the lush grass and the fragrant flowers, my cudgel swinging in
my hand and my javelin looped across my shoulders with its aurochs-hide
strap, I felt equal to any emergency, ready for any danger.

I had covered quite a little distance, and I was passing through a
strip of wood which lay at the foot of one of the flat-topped hills,
when I became conscious of the sensation of being watched. My life
within Pellucidar has rather quickened my senses of sight, hearing, and
smell, and, too, certain primitive intuitive or instinctive qualities
that seem blunted in civilized man. But, though I was positive that
eyes were upon me, I could see no sign of any living thing within the
wood other than the many, gay-plumaged birds and little monkeys which
filled the trees with life, color, and action.

To you it may seem that my conviction was the result of an overwrought
imagination, or to the actual reality of the prying eyes of the little
monkeys or the curious ones of the birds; but there is a difference
which I cannot explain between the sensation of casual observation and
studied espionage. A sheep might gaze at you without transmitting a
warning through your subjective mind, because you are in no danger from
a sheep. But let a tiger gaze fixedly at you from ambush, and unless
your primitive instincts are completely calloused you will presently
commence to glance furtively about and be filled with vague,
unreasoning terror.

Thus was it with me then. I grasped my cudgel more firmly and unslung
my javelin, carrying it in my left hand. I peered to left and right,
but I saw nothing. Then, all quite suddenly, there fell about my neck
and shoulders, around my arms and body, a number of pliant fiber ropes.

In a jiffy I was trussed up as neatly as you might wish. One of the
nooses dropped to my ankles and was jerked up with a suddenness that
brought me to my face upon the ground. Then something heavy and hairy
sprang upon my back. I fought to draw my knife, but hairy hands grasped
my wrists and, dragging them behind my back, bound them securely.

Next my feet were bound. Then I was turned over upon my back to look up
into the faces of my captors.

And what faces! Imagine if you can a cross between a sheep and a
gorilla, and you will have some conception of the physiognomy of the
creature that bent close above me, and of those of the half-dozen
others that clustered about. There was the facial length and great eyes
of the sheep, and the bull-neck and hideous fangs of the gorilla. The
bodies and limbs were both man and gorilla-like.

As they bent over me they conversed in a mono-syllabic tongue that was
perfectly intelligible to me. It was something of a simplified language
that had no need for aught but nouns and verbs, but such words as it
included were the same as those of the human beings of Pellucidar. It
was amplified by many gestures which filled in the speech-gaps.

I asked them what they intended doing with me; but, like our own North
American Indians when questioned by a white man, they pretended not to
understand me. One of them swung me to his shoulder as lightly as if I
had been a shoat. He was a huge creature, as were his fellows, standing
fully seven feet upon his short legs and weighing considerably more
than a quarter of a ton.

Two went ahead of my bearer and three behind. In this order we cut to
the right through the forest to the foot of the hill where precipitous
cliffs appeared to bar our farther progress in this direction. But my
escort never paused. Like ants upon a wall, they scaled that seemingly
unscalable barrier, clinging, Heaven knows how, to its ragged
perpendicular face. During most of the short journey to the summit I
must admit that my hair stood on end. Presently, however, we topped the
thing and stood upon the level mesa which crowned it.

Immediately from all about, out of burrows and rough, rocky lairs,
poured a perfect torrent of beasts similar to my captors. They
clustered about, jabbering at my guards and attempting to get their
hands upon me, whether from curiosity or a desire to do me bodily harm
I did not know, since my escort with bared fangs and heavy blows kept
them off.

Across the mesa we went, to stop at last before a large pile of rocks
in which an opening appeared. Here my guards set me upon my feet and
called out a word which sounded like “Gr-gr-gr!” and which I later
learned was the name of their king.

Presently there emerged from the cavernous depths of the lair a
monstrous creature, scarred from a hundred battles, almost hairless and
with an empty socket where one eye had been. The other eye, sheeplike
in its mildness, gave the most startling appearance to the beast, which
but for that single timid orb was the most fearsome thing that one
could imagine.

I had encountered the black, hairless, long-tailed ape—things of the
mainland—the creatures which Perry thought might constitute the link
between the higher orders of apes and man—but these brute-men of
Gr-gr-gr seemed to set that theory back to zero, for there was less
similarity between the black ape-men and these creatures than there was
between the latter and man, while both had many human attributes, some
of which were better developed in one species and some in the other.

The black apes were hairless and built thatched huts in their arboreal
retreats; they kept domesticated dogs and ruminants, in which respect
they were farther advanced than the human beings of Pellucidar; but
they appeared to have only a meager language, and sported long, apelike
tails.

On the other hand, Gr-gr-gr’s people were, for the most part, quite
hairy, but they were tailless and had a language similar to that of the
human race of Pellucidar; nor were they arboreal. Their skins, where
skin showed, were white.

From the foregoing facts and others that I have noted during my long
life within Pellucidar, which is now passing through an age analogous
to some pre-glacial age of the outer crust, I am constrained to the
belief that evolution is not so much a gradual transition from one form
to another as it is an accident of breeding, either by crossing or the
hazards of birth. In other words, it is my belief that the first man
was a freak of nature—nor would one have to draw overstrongly upon his
credulity to be convinced that Gr-gr-gr and his tribe were also freaks.

The great man-brute seated himself upon a flat rock—his throne, I
imagine—just before the entrance to his lair. With elbows on knees and
chin in palms he regarded me intently through his lone sheep-eye while
one of my captors told of my taking.

When all had been related Gr-gr-gr questioned me. I shall not attempt
to quote these people in their own abbreviated tongue—you would have
even greater difficulty in interpreting them than did I. Instead, I
shall put the words into their mouths which will carry to you the ideas
which they intended to convey.

“You are an enemy,” was Gr-gr-gr’s initial declaration. “You belong to
the tribe of Hooja.”

Ah! So they knew Hooja and he was their enemy! Good!

“I am an enemy of Hooja,” I replied. “He has stolen my mate and I have
come here to take her away from him and punish Hooja.”

“How could you do that alone?”

“I do not know,” I answered, “but I should have tried had you not
captured me. What do you intend to do with me?”

“You shall work for us.”

“You will not kill me?” I asked.

“We do not kill except in self-defense,” he replied; “self-defense and
punishment. Those who would kill us and those who do wrong we kill. If
we knew you were one of Hooja’s people we might kill you, for all
Hooja’s people are bad people; but you say you are an enemy of Hooja.
You may not speak the truth, but until we learn that you have lied we
shall not kill you. You shall work.”

“If you hate Hooja,” I suggested, “why not let me, who hate him, too,
go and punish him?”

For some time Gr-gr-gr sat in thought. Then he raised his head and
addressed my guard.

“Take him to his work,” he ordered.

His tone was final. As if to emphasize it he turned and entered his
burrow. My guard conducted me farther into the mesa, where we came
presently to a tiny depression or valley, at one end of which gushed a
warm spring.

The view that opened before me was the most surprising that I have ever
seen. In the hollow, which must have covered several hundred acres,
were numerous fields of growing things, and working all about with
crude implements or with no implements at all other than their bare
hands were many of the brute-men engaged in the first agriculture that
I had seen within Pellucidar.

They put me to work cultivating in a patch of melons.

I never was a farmer nor particularly keen for this sort of work, and I
am free to confess that time never had dragged so heavily as it did
during the hour or the year I spent there at that work. How long it
really was I do not know, of course; but it was all too long.

The creatures that worked about me were quite simple and friendly. One
of them proved to be a son of Gr-gr-gr. He had broken some minor tribal
law, and was working out his sentence in the fields. He told me that
his tribe had lived upon this hilltop always, and that there were other
tribes like them dwelling upon other hilltops. They had no wars and had
always lived in peace and harmony, menaced only by the larger carnivora
of the island, until my kind had come under a creature called Hooja,
and attacked and killed them when they chanced to descend from their
natural fortresses to visit their fellows upon other lofty mesas.

Now they were afraid; but some day they would go in a body and fall
upon Hooja and his people and slay them all. I explained to him that I
was Hooja’s enemy, and asked, when they were ready to go, that I be
allowed to go with them, or, better still, that they let me go ahead
and learn all that I could about the village where Hooja dwelt so that
they might attack it with the best chance of success.

Gr-gr-gr’s son seemed much impressed by my suggestion. He said that
when he was through in the fields he would speak to his father about
the matter.

Some time after this Gr-gr-gr came through the fields where we were,
and his son spoke to him upon the subject, but the old gentleman was
evidently in anything but a good humor, for he cuffed the youngster
and, turning upon me, informed me that he was convinced that I had lied
to him, and that I was one of Hooja’s people.

“Wherefore,” he concluded, “we shall slay you as soon as the melons are
cultivated. Hasten, therefore.”

And hasten I did. I hastened to cultivate the weeds which grew among
the melon-vines. Where there had been one sickly weed before, I
nourished two healthy ones. When I found a particularly promising
variety of weed growing elsewhere than among my melons, I forthwith dug
it up and transplanted it among my charges.

My masters did not seem to realize my perfidy. They saw me always
laboring diligently in the melon-patch, and as time enters not into the
reckoning of Pellucidarians—even of human beings and much less of
brutes and half brutes—I might have lived on indefinitely through this
subterfuge had not that occurred which took me out of the melon-patch
for good and all.




CHAPTER IX
HOOJA’S CUTTHROATS APPEAR


I had built a little shelter of rocks and brush where I might crawl in
and sleep out of the perpetual light and heat of the noonday sun. When
I was tired or hungry I retired to my humble cot.

My masters never interposed the slightest objection. As a matter of
fact, they were very good to me, nor did I see aught while I was among
them to indicate that they are ever else than a simple, kindly folk
when left to themselves. Their awe-inspiring size, terrific strength,
mighty fighting-fangs, and hideous appearance are but the attributes
necessary to the successful waging of their constant battle for
survival, and well do they employ them when the need arises. The only
flesh they eat is that of herbivorous animals and birds. When they hunt
the mighty thag, the prehistoric bos of the outer crust, a single male,
with his fiber rope, will catch and kill the greatest of the bulls.

Well, as I was about to say, I had this little shelter at the edge of
my melon-patch. Here I was resting from my labors on a certain occasion
when I heard a great hub-bub in the village, which lay about a quarter
of a mile away.

Presently a male came racing toward the field, shouting excitedly. As
he approached I came from my shelter to learn what all the commotion
might be about, for the monotony of my existence in the melon-patch
must have fostered that trait of my curiosity from which it had always
been my secret boast I am peculiarly free.

The other workers also ran forward to meet the messenger, who quickly
unburdened himself of his information, and as quickly turned and
scampered back toward the village. When running these beast-men often
go upon all fours. Thus they leap over obstacles that would slow up a
human being, and upon the level attain a speed that would make a
thoroughbred look to his laurels. The result in this instance was that
before I had more than assimilated the gist of the word which had been
brought to the fields, I was alone, watching my co-workers speeding
villageward.

I was alone! It was the first time since my capture that no beast-man
had been within sight of me. I was alone! And all my captors were in
the village at the op-posite edge of the mesa repelling an attack of
Hooja’s horde!

It seemed from the messenger’s tale that two of Gr-gr-gr’s great males
had been set upon by a half-dozen of Hooja’s cutthroats while the
former were peaceably returning from the thag hunt. The two had
returned to the village unscratched, while but a single one of Hooja’s
half-dozen had escaped to report the outcome of the battle to their
leader. Now Hooja was coming to punish Gr-gr-gr’s people. With his
large force, armed with the bows and arrows that Hooja had learned from
me to make, with long lances and sharp knives, I feared that even the
mighty strength of the beastmen could avail them but little.

At last had come the opportunity for which I waited! I was free to make
for the far end of the mesa, find my way to the valley below, and while
the two forces were engaged in their struggle, continue my search for
Hooja’s village, which I had learned from the beast-men lay farther on
down the river that I had been following when taken prisoner.

As I turned to make for the mesa’s rim the sounds of battle came
plainly to my ears—the hoarse shouts of men mingled with the
half-beastly roars and growls of the brute-folk.

Did I take advantage of my opportunity?

I did not. Instead, lured by the din of strife and by the desire to
deliver a stroke, however feeble, against hated Hooja, I wheeled and
ran directly toward the village.

When I reached the edge of the plateau such a scene met my astonished
gaze as never before had startled it, for the unique battle-methods of
the half-brutes were rather the most remarkable I had ever witnessed.
Along the very edge of the cliff-top stood a thin line of mighty
males—the best rope-throwers of the tribe. A few feet behind these the
rest of the males, with the exception of about twenty, formed a second
line. Still farther in the rear all the women and young children were
clustered into a single group under the protection of the remaining
twenty fighting males and all the old males.

But it was the work of the first two lines that interested me. The
forces of Hooja—a great horde of savage Sagoths and primeval cave
men—were working their way up the steep cliff-face, their agility but
slightly less than that of my captors who had clambered so nimbly
aloft—even he who was burdened by my weight.

As the attackers came on they paused occasionally wherever a projection
gave them sufficient foothold and launched arrows and spears at the
defenders above them. During the entire battle both sides hurled taunts
and insults at one another—the human beings naturally excelling the
brutes in the coarseness and vileness of their vilification and
invective.

The “firing-line” of the brute-men wielded no weapon other than their
long fiber nooses. When a foeman came within range of them a noose
would settle unerringly about him and he would be dragged, fighting and
yelling, to the cliff-top, unless, as occasionally occurred, he was
quick enough to draw his knife and cut the rope above him, in which
event he usually plunged down-ward to a no less certain death than that
which awaited him above.

Those who were hauled up within reach of the powerful clutches of the
defenders had the nooses snatched from them and were catapulted back
through the first line to the second, where they were seized and killed
by the simple expedient of a single powerful closing of mighty fangs
upon the backs of their necks.

But the arrows of the invaders were taking a much heavier toll than the
nooses of the defenders and I foresaw that it was but a matter of time
before Hooja’s forces must conquer unless the brute-men changed their
tactics, or the cave men tired of the battle.

Gr-gr-gr was standing in the center of the first line. All about him
were boulders and large fragments of broken rock. I approached him and
without a word toppled a large mass of rock over the edge of the cliff.
It fell directly upon the head of an archer, crushing him to instant
death and carrying his mangled corpse with it to the bottom of the
declivity, and on its way brushing three more of the attackers into the
hereafter.

Gr-gr-gr turned toward me in surprise. For an instant he appeared to
doubt the sincerity of my motives. I felt that perhaps my time had come
when he reached for me with one of his giant paws; but I dodged him,
and running a few paces to the right hurled down another missile. It,
too, did its allotted work of destruction. Then I picked up smaller
fragments and with all the control and accuracy for which I had earned
justly deserved fame in my collegiate days I rained down a hail of
death upon those beneath me.

Gr-gr-gr was coming toward me again. I pointed to the litter of rubble
upon the cliff-top.

“Hurl these down upon the enemy!” I cried to him. “Tell your warriors
to throw rocks down upon them!”

At my words the others of the first line, who had been interested
spectators of my tactics, seized upon great boulders or bits of rock,
whichever came first to their hands, and, without waiting for a command
from Gr-gr-gr, deluged the terrified cave men with a perfect avalanche
of stone. In less than no time the cliff-face was stripped of enemies
and the village of Gr-gr-gr was saved.

Gr-gr-gr was standing beside me when the last of the cave men
disappeared in rapid flight down the valley. He was looking at me
intently.

“Those were your people,” he said. “Why did you kill them?”

“They were not my people,” I returned. “I have told you that before,
but you would not believe me. Will you believe me now when I tell you
that I hate Hooja and his tribe as much as you do? Will you believe me
when I tell you that I wish to be the friend of Gr-gr-gr?”

For some time he stood there beside me, scratching his head. Evidently
it was no less difficult for him to readjust his preconceived
conclusions than it is for most human beings; but finally the idea
percolated—which it might never have done had he been a man, or I might
qualify that statement by saying had he been some men. Finally he
spoke.

“Gilak,” he said, “you have made Gr-gr-gr ashamed. He would have killed
you. How can he reward you?”

“Set me free,” I replied quickly.

“You are free,” he said. “You may go down when you wish, or you may
stay with us. If you go you may always return. We are your friends.”

Naturally, I elected to go. I explained all over again to Gr-gr-gr the
nature of my mission. He listened attentively; after I had done he
offered to send some of his people with me to guide me to Hooja’s
village. I was not slow in accepting his offer.

First, however, we must eat. The hunters upon whom Hooja’s men had
fallen had brought back the meat of a great thag. There would be a
feast to commemorate the victory—a feast and dancing.

I had never witnessed a tribal function of the brute-folk, though I had
often heard strange sounds coming from the village, where I had not
been allowed since my capture. Now I took part in one of their orgies.

It will live forever in my memory. The combination of bestiality and
humanity was oftentimes pathetic, and again grotesque or horrible.
Beneath the glaring noonday sun, in the sweltering heat of the
mesa-top, the huge, hairy creatures leaped in a great circle. They
coiled and threw their fiber-ropes; they hurled taunts and insults at
an imaginary foe; they fell upon the carcass of the thag and literally
tore it to pieces; and they ceased only when, gorged, they could no
longer move.

I had to wait until the processes of digestion had released my escort
from its torpor. Some had eaten until their abdomens were so distended
that I thought they must burst, for beside the thag there had been
fully a hundred antelopes of various sizes and varied degrees of
decomposition, which they had unearthed from burial beneath the floors
of their lairs to grace the banquet-board.

But at last we were started—six great males and myself. Gr-gr-gr had
returned my weapons to me, and at last I was once more upon my
oft-interrupted way toward my goal. Whether I should find Dian at the
end of my journey or no I could not even surmise; but I was none the
less impatient to be off, for if only the worst lay in store for me I
wished to know even the worst at once.

I could scarce believe that my proud mate would still be alive in the
power of Hooja; but time upon Pellucidar is so strange a thing that I
realized that to her or to him only a few minutes might have elapsed
since his subtle trickery had enabled him to steal her away from
Phutra. Or she might have found the means either to repel his advances
or escape him.

As we descended the cliff we disturbed a great pack of large hyena-like
beasts—hyaena spelaeus, Perry calls them—who were busy among the
corpses of the cave men fallen in battle. The ugly creatures were far
from the cowardly things that our own hyenas are reputed to be; they
stood their ground with bared fangs as we approached them. But, as I
was later to learn, so formidable are the brute-folk that there are few
even of the larger carnivora that will not make way for them when they
go abroad. So the hyenas moved a little from our line of march, closing
in again upon their feasts when we had passed.

We made our way steadily down the rim of the beautiful river which
flows the length of the island, coming at last to a wood rather denser
than any that I had before encountered in this country. Well within
this forest my escort halted.

“There!” they said, and pointed ahead. “We are to go no farther.”

Thus having guided me to my destination they left me. Ahead of me,
through the trees, I could see what appeared to be the foot of a steep
hill. Toward this I made my way. The forest ran to the very base of a
cliff, in the face of which were the mouths of many caves. They
appeared untenanted; but I decided to watch for a while before
venturing farther. A large tree, densely foliaged, offered a splendid
vantage-point from which to spy upon the cliff, so I clambered among
its branches where, securely hidden, I could watch what transpired
about the caves.

It seemed that I had scarcely settled myself in a comfortable position
before a party of cave men emerged from one of the smaller apertures in
the cliff-face, about fifty feet from the base. They descended into the
forest and disappeared. Soon after came several others from the same
cave, and after them, at a short interval, a score of women and
children, who came into the wood to gather fruit. There were several
warriors with them—a guard, I presume.

After this came other parties, and two or three groups who passed out
of the forest and up the cliff-face to enter the same cave. I could not
understand it. All who came out had emerged from the same cave. All who
returned reentered it. No other cave gave evidence of habitation, and
no cave but one of extraordinary size could have accommodated all the
people whom I had seen pass in and out of its mouth.

For a long time I sat and watched the coming and going of great numbers
of the cave-folk. Not once did one leave the cliff by any other opening
save that from which I had seen the first party come, nor did any
reenter the cliff through another aperture.

What a cave it must be, I thought, that houses an entire tribe! But
dissatisfied of the truth of my surmise, I climbed higher among the
branches of the tree that I might get a better view of other portions
of the cliff. High above the ground I reached a point whence I could
see the summit of the hill. Evidently it was a flat-topped butte
similar to that on which dwelt the tribe of Gr-gr-gr.

As I sat gazing at it a figure appeared at the very edge. It was that
of a young girl in whose hair was a gorgeous bloom plucked from some
flowering tree of the forest. I had seen her pass beneath me but a
short while before and enter the small cave that had swallowed all of
the returning tribesmen.

The mystery was solved. The cave was but the mouth of a passage that
led upward through the cliff to the summit of the hill. It served
merely as an avenue from their lofty citadel to the valley below.

No sooner had the truth flashed upon me than the realization came that
I must seek some other means of reaching the village, for to pass
unobserved through this well-traveled thoroughfare would be impossible.
At the moment there was no one in sight below me, so I slid quickly
from my arboreal watch-tower to the ground and moved rapidly away to
the right with the intention of circling the hill if necessary until I
had found an unwatched spot where I might have some slight chance of
scaling the heights and reaching the top unseen.

I kept close to the edge of the forest, in the very midst of which the
hill seemed to rise. Though I carefully scanned the cliff as I
traversed its base, I saw no sign of any other entrance than that to
which my guides had led me.

After some little time the roar of the sea broke upon my ears. Shortly
after I came upon the broad ocean which breaks at this point at the
very foot of the great hill where Hooja had found safe refuge for
himself and his villains.

I was just about to clamber along the jagged rocks which lie at the
base of the cliff next to the sea, in search of some foothold to the
top, when I chanced to see a canoe rounding the end of the island. I
threw myself down behind a large boulder where I could watch the dugout
and its occupants without myself being seen.

They paddled toward me for a while and then, about a hundred yards from
me, they turned straight in toward the foot of the frowning cliffs.
From where I was it seemed that they were bent upon self-destruction,
since the roar of the breakers beating upon the perpendicular rock-face
appeared to offer only death to any one who might venture within their
relentless clutch.

A mass of rock would soon hide them from my view; but so keen was the
excitement of the instant that I could not refrain from crawling
forward to a point whence I could watch the dashing of the small craft
to pieces on the jagged rocks that loomed before her, although I risked
discovery from above to accomplish my design.

When I had reached a point where I could again see the dugout, I was
just in time to see it glide unharmed between two needle-pointed
sentinels of granite and float quietly upon the unruffled bosom of a
tiny cove.

Again I crouched behind a boulder to observe what would next transpire;
nor did I have long to wait. The dugout, which contained but two men,
was drawn close to the rocky wall. A fiber rope, one end of which was
tied to the boat, was made fast about a projection of the cliff face.

Then the two men commenced the ascent of the almost perpendicular wall
toward the summit several hundred feet above. I looked on in amazement,
for, splendid climbers though the cave men of Pellucidar are, I never
before had seen so remarkable a feat performed. Upwardly they moved
without a pause, to disappear at last over the summit.

When I felt reasonably sure that they had gone for a while at least I
crawled from my hiding-place and at the risk of a broken neck leaped
and scrambled to the spot where their canoe was moored.

If they had scaled that cliff I could, and if I couldn’t I should die
in the attempt.

But when I turned to the accomplishment of the task I found it easier
than I had imagined it would be, since I immediately discovered that
shallow hand and foot-holds had been scooped in the cliff’s rocky face,
forming a crude ladder from the base to the summit.

At last I reached the top, and very glad I was, too. Cautiously I
raised my head until my eyes were above the cliff-crest. Before me
spread a rough mesa, liberally sprinkled with large boulders. There was
no village in sight nor any living creature.

I drew myself to level ground and stood erect. A few trees grew among
the boulders. Very carefully I advanced from tree to tree and boulder
to boulder toward the inland end of the mesa. I stopped often to listen
and look cautiously about me in every direction.

How I wished that I had my revolvers and rifle! I would not have to
worm my way like a scared cat toward Hooja’s village, nor did I relish
doing so now; but Dian’s life might hinge upon the success of my
venture, and so I could not afford to take chances. To have met
suddenly with discovery and had a score or more of armed warriors upon
me might have been very grand and heroic; but it would have immediately
put an end to all my earthly activities, nor have accomplished aught in
the service of Dian.

Well, I must have traveled nearly a mile across that mesa without
seeing a sign of anyone, when all of a sudden, as I crept around the
edge of a boulder, I ran plump into a man, down on all fours like
myself, crawling toward me.




CHAPTER X
THE RAID ON THE CAVE-PRISON


His head was turned over his shoulder as I first saw him—he was looking
back toward the village. As I leaped for him his eyes fell upon me.
Never in my life have I seen a more surprised mortal than this poor
cave man. Before he could utter a single scream of warning or alarm I
had my fingers on his throat and had dragged him behind the boulder,
where I proceeded to sit upon him, while I figured out what I had best
do with him.

He struggled a little at first, but finally lay still, and so I
released the pressure of my fingers at his windpipe, for which I
imagine he was quite thankful—I know that I should have been.

I hated to kill him in cold blood; but what else I was to do with him I
could not see, for to turn him loose would have been merely to have the
entire village aroused and down upon me in a moment. The fellow lay
looking up at me with the surprise still deeply written on his
countenance. At last, all of a sudden, a look of recognition entered
his eyes.

“I have seen you before,” he said. “I saw you in the arena at the
Mahars’ city of Phutra when the thipdars dragged the tarag from you and
your mate. I never understood that. Afterward they put me in the arena
with two warriors from Gombul.”

He smiled in recollection.

“It would have been the same had there been ten warriors from Gombul. I
slew them, winning my freedom. Look!”

He half turned his left shoulder toward me, exhibiting the newly healed
scar of the Mahars’ branded mark.

“Then,” he continued, “as I was returning to my people I met some of
them fleeing. They told me that one called Hooja the Sly One had come
and seized our village, putting our people into slavery. So I hurried
hither to learn the truth, and, sure enough, here I found Hooja and his
wicked men living in my village, and my father’s people but slaves
among them.

“I was discovered and captured, but Hooja did not kill me. I am the
chief’s son, and through me he hoped to win my father’s warriors back
to the village to help him in a great war he says that he will soon
commence.

“Among his prisoners is Dian the Beautiful One, whose brother, Dacor
the Strong One, chief of Amoz, once saved my life when he came to
Thuria to steal a mate. I helped him capture her, and we are good
friends. So when I learned that Dian the Beautiful One was Hooja’s
prisoner, I told him that I would not aid him if he harmed her.

“Recently one of Hooja’s warriors overheard me talking with another
prisoner. We were planning to combine all the prisoners, seize weapons,
and when most of Hooja’s warriors were away, slay the rest and retake
our hilltop. Had we done so we could have held it, for there are only
two entrances—the narrow tunnel at one end and the steep path up the
cliffs at the other.

“But when Hooja heard what we had planned he was very angry, and
ordered that I die. They bound me hand and foot and placed me in a cave
until all the warriors should return to witness my death; but while
they were away I heard someone calling me in a muffled voice which
seemed to come from the wall of the cave. When I replied the voice,
which was a woman’s, told me that she had overheard all that had passed
between me and those who had brought me thither, and that she was
Dacor’s sister and would find a way to help me.

“Presently a little hole appeared in the wall at the point from which
the voice had come. After a time I saw a woman’s hand digging with a
bit of stone. Dacor’s sister made a hole in the wall between the cave
where I lay bound and that in which she had been confined, and soon she
was by my side and had cut my bonds.

“We talked then, and I offered to make the attempt to take her away and
back to the land of Sari, where she told me she would be able to learn
the whereabouts of her mate. Just now I was going to the other end of
the island to see if a boat lay there, and if the way was clear for our
escape. Most of the boats are always away now, for a great many of
Hooja’s men and nearly all the slaves are upon the Island of Trees,
where Hooja is having many boats built to carry his warriors across the
water to the mouth of a great river which he discovered while he was
returning from Phutra—a vast river that empties into the sea there.”

The speaker pointed toward the northeast. “It is wide and smooth and
slow-running almost to the land of Sari,” he added.

“And where is Dian the Beautiful One now?” I asked.

I had released my prisoner as soon as I found that he was Hooja’s
enemy, and now the pair of us were squat-ting beside the boulder while
he told his story.

“She returned to the cave where she had been imprisoned,” he replied,
“and is awaiting me there.”

“There is no danger that Hooja will come while you are away?”

“Hooja is upon the Island of Trees,” he replied.

“Can you direct me to the cave so that I can find it alone?” I asked.

He said he could, and in the strange yet explicit fashion of the
Pellucidarians he explained minutely how I might reach the cave where
he had been imprisoned, and through the hole in its wall reach Dian.

I thought it best for but one of us to return, since two could
accomplish but little more than one and would double the risk of
discovery. In the meantime he could make his way to the sea and guard
the boat, which I told him lay there at the foot of the cliff.

I told him to await us at the cliff-top, and if Dian came alone to do
his best to get away with her and take her to Sari, as I thought it
quite possible that, in case of detection and pursuit, it might be
necessary for me to hold off Hooja’s people while Dian made her way
alone to where my new friend was to await her. I impressed upon him the
fact that he might have to resort to trickery or even to force to get
Dian to leave me; but I made him promise that he would sacrifice
everything, even his life, in an attempt to rescue Dacor’s sister.

Then we parted—he to take up his position where he could watch the boat
and await Dian, I to crawl cautiously on toward the caves. I had no
difficulty in following the directions given me by Juag, the name by
which Dacor’s friend said he was called. There was the leaning tree, my
first point he told me to look for after rounding the boulder where we
had met. After that I crawled to the balanced rock, a huge boulder
resting upon a tiny base no larger than the palm of your hand.

From here I had my first view of the village of caves. A low bluff ran
diagonally across one end of the mesa, and in the face of this bluff
were the mouths of many caves. Zig-zag trails led up to them, and
narrow ledges scooped from the face of the soft rock connected those
upon the same level.

The cave in which Juag had been confined was at the extreme end of the
cliff nearest me. By taking advantage of the bluff itself, I could
approach within a few feet of the aperture without being visible from
any other cave. There were few people about at the time; most of these
were congregated at the foot of the far end of the bluff, where they
were so engrossed in excited conversation that I felt but little fear
of detection. However I exercised the greatest care in approaching the
cliff. After watching for a while until I caught an instant when every
head was turned away from me, I darted, rabbitlike, into the cave.

Like many of the man-made caves of Pellucidar, this one consisted of
three chambers, one behind another, and all unlit except for what
sunlight filtered in through the external opening. The result was
gradually increasing darkness as one passed into each succeeding
chamber.

In the last of the three I could just distinguish objects, and that was
all. As I was groping around the walls for the hole that should lead
into the cave where Dian was imprisoned, I heard a man’s voice quite
close to me.

The speaker had evidently but just entered, for he spoke in a loud
tone, demanding the whereabouts of one whom he had come in search of.

“Where are you, woman?” he cried. “Hooja has sent for you.”

And then a woman’s voice answered him:

“And what does Hooja want of me?”

The voice was Dian’s. I groped in the direction of the sounds, feeling
for the hole.

“He wishes you brought to the Island of Trees,” replied the man; “for
he is ready to take you as his mate.”

“I will not go,” said Dian. “I will die first.”

“I am sent to bring you, and bring you I shall.”

I could hear him crossing the cave toward her.

Frantically I clawed the wall of the cave in which I was in an effort
to find the elusive aperture that would lead me to Dian’s side.

I heard the sound of a scuffle in the next cave. Then my fingers sank
into loose rock and earth in the side of the cave. In an instant I
realized why I had been unable to find the opening while I had been
lightly feeling the surface of the walls—Dian had blocked up the hole
she had made lest it arouse suspicion and lead to an early discovery of
Juag’s escape.

Plunging my weight against the crumbling mass, I sent it crashing into
the adjoining cavern. With it came I, David, Emperor of Pellucidar. I
doubt if any other po

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