Читать книгу The Lost World MEGAPACK® - Lin Carter - Страница 62

CHAPTER 18

THE PEAKS OF PERIL

It was hopeless for Jorn the Hunter and Professor Potter to expect to keep up with the pterodactyl. Even heavily burdened as the winged reptile was by Darya’s weight, it could traverse the misty skies of Zanthodon far more swiftly than could the two men go the same distance on foot.

However, they persevered: for Jorn would not abandon hope of rescuing his princess until he became absolutely certain that she was dead. And, as for Professor Potter, mourning what he believed to be my own demise, he was equally determined to affect the rescue of the Stone Age girl, if only as a tribute to my memory.

“It is no more than the dear boy would have expected of me,” puffed the Professor, valiantly striving to keep up with the younger man.

They had left the edge of the jungle, finding before them an immense and level plain which stretched to the foothills of the cliffs which rose, dim and purple, in the distance.

In the misty air of Zanthodon’s eternal day, the two could perceive little of the plain which lay about them, save that it seemed a broad and level tract of thick grasses.

Jorn searched the plain with keen eyes, but nowhere could he discern the slightest token of human habitation. And neither did he discover any signs of dangerous predators, although a herd of wooly mammoths could be seen browsing on the long grass in the middle distance.

These the Hunter ignored, knowing well that the thantors are grass-eaters and not of carnivorous habits.

He knew, as well, that they are relatively harmless unless men disturb or attack them, and he had at present no intention of doing either.

“Do you happen to know this part of the country at all, young man?” inquired the Professor, panting slightly from his exertions. The Cro-Magnon man nodded slightly.

“Only by reputation,” he admitted. “During the time when Jorn was in the captivity of the Drugars, he overheard them discussing their route. They had intended to set forth in the dugout canoes for the island of Ganadol at a point where the edges of the jungle approached very closely to the shores of the Sogar Jad. And they hoped that Tharn of Thandar and his warriors were not so close upon their heels that they would have to venture any farther up along the coast, for—as they said—that would bring them too near to the Peaks of Peril for comfort.”

The Professor shuddered suddenly, as if a chill breeze had blown upon his naked skin. The Peaks of Peril…in truth the name had an ominous and frightening ring to it!

“Why did the Neanderthal men call those cliffs by such a name?” he inquired timidly.

His companion shrugged his bronzed and brawny shoulders.

“That Jorn does not know,” admitted the Hunter.

But the Professor had a feeling that before long they would find out for themselves.

Without another word, Jorn again broke into a rapid, jogging stride, trotting across the plains in the direction of the purple peaks.

There was nothing else for Professor Potter to do but follow him.

* * * *

When Darya awoke from her swoon, it was a time before the Cro-Magnon girl quite remembered where she was, or realized her present danger.

At some point during her dizzy, swooping flight across the misty skies of Zanthodon, consciousness had left the girl and she hung unconscious from the hooked claws of the thakdol, which were still sunk deeply in the carcass of the uld.

Thus she had not been awake when the flying reptile reached its noisome lair and deposited therein its double burden.

She recovered her consciousness in conditions so weird and frightful that, for a long, breathless moment, the Neolithic princess believed herself either blind or dead. For all about her stretched inky blackness, a gloom so intense as almost to be palpable to the touch. And to such as Darya of Zanthodon, reared in a cavern-world of perpetual day, the darkness was a thing of utter terror—

She screamed…then fell into a shocked silence as the echoes of her frightened cry boomed and resounded about her. From this the girl quickly discerned that she had not, after all, been deprived of her eyesight, but was trapped in an enclosed space of some sort. And, looking up, she discerned a faint trace of day far above her head.

Above her present place of confinement, daylight gleamed at the end of a tall natural chimney of naked rock, and the brave heart of the Cro-Magnon girl fainted within her at the knowledge of her predicament…for never could she hope to climb that chimney to reach the exit she could see far above her.

Or could she? For, if the huge pterodactyl had been able to descend through the shaft to leave her and the dead uld in this place, why could she not climb up it again? She was, after all, slender and slim, and her agile body was less than the bulk of the winged reptile.

Something crunched underfoot. The girl glanced down to see, dimly as her eyes adjusted to the unnatural gloom, that she was in a gigantic nest of woven reeds, littered with filth and noisome with the fetid droppings of the winged reptile.

Reaching out her arms, the girl explored the confines of her prison. Her fingers met rough stone walls, slimy stone floor, and the jagged curve of the ceiling.

It puzzled Darya that the thakdol had merely deposited her within its nest, mysteriously refraining from devouring both the unconscious girl and the carcass of the uld whose bloodscent had attracted the huge scavenger in the first place.

Then as the nest crackled under the gliding, waddling weight of some unseen creature, and a pang of terror lanced through Darya’s heart, she understood the reason for the thakdol’s forebearance—and the true horror of her deadly trap!

Stirring to wakefulness, small scaly forms wriggled and flopped toward where Darya crouched, hooked claws extended and sharp beaks clacking hungrily.

The pterodactyl had left her here to be devoured—by its hideous young!

* * * *

Hurok of the Stone Age strode through the dense undergrowth of the primeval jungle, his every sense alert and wary for the presence of danger. Well did he know, that hulking veteran of a thousand hunts, that the aisles of the jungle were the dominion of the savage vandar, the ponderous, slow-moving grymp, and of the dreaded omodon, or cave bear. But, rather to his surprise, naught moved or stirred within the jungle—or, if it did, his keen nostrils and sensitive ears could discern no token of its presence.

The Neanderthal man dismissed the evidence of his senses, although he knew that betimes the predators of the jungle slept, and that within the eternal day of Zanthodon, sleep is a matter of individual need and individual choice.

Still, he did not trust the peculiar absence of danger. It might well be that all of the monsters of the jungle had selected this particular hour of all hours to fall asleep, but such a coincidence he considered to be most unlikely.

No: there is only one creature that is the enemy of all of the beasts, and which many of them have learned to fear.

And the name of that enemy is Man.

And if men were in this portion of the jungle, in such numbers that even the giant reptiles remained prudently in hiding, Hurok grimly knew that they could only be the savages of Kor. And that meant deadly danger?

Danger not to Hurok, of course, for he was one of the warriors of Kor himself, and had naught to fear from his fellow Apemen. But the horizons of Hurok’s heart had but recently widened to include others besides his own countrymen. And if a large force of warriors had landed upon the mainland from Kor, they were a potential danger to his friend Black Hair, as he named Eric Carstairs, and to his friends, the panjani warriors of Thandar.

Walking now with some care, the mighty Apemen traversed the jungle, gliding through the thick underbrush as silently as ever an Algonquin brave trod the savage wilderness of early America. No more silently than the moccasinclad feet of the Indian stepped the huge, splayed feet of the Neanderthal.

And, ere long, he paused, freezing immobile in the shadow of a great tree. For the breeze had brought to his nostrils a familiar aroma, that of the hairy and unwashed bodies of his kind.

Cautiously parting the branches before him, Hurok peered therethrough.

Lumbering along down the aisles between the tall boles of the trees there advanced into view a great force of Korians Hurok could not count higher than the ten digits upon his huge hands, but he knew at a glance that there were many tens-of-tens. Among them he saw and recognized Uruk the High Chief and Xask his cunning vizier, and One-Eye. A grunt of surprise escaped the thick lips of Hurok when he observed the panjan Fumio to be among the host of the war party, and that he went freely and was not bound.

For a long moment, Hurok debated within his savage and primitive heart: he had only to step forward and join his fellow Korians, to be restored to his place among his people and for his adventures with the stranger Black Hair to become only an episode in his experience, quickly over and soon forgotten…or he could turn about and strive to warn the panjani of their peril, thus forever making himself an outlaw and an exile, shut out from the companionship of his tribe and the communion of his kind.…

And there passed through the dim mentality of Hurok the Neanderthal a vision of that which was yet to come, and which only he could prevent from happening. In his rudimentary imagination, the Apeman pictured a howling horde of his fellows, falling upon the unsuspecting panjani as they toiled at the building of their camp. From concealment the Korians would charge whooping, swinging their stone axes and heavy clubs, jabbing with their flint-bladed spears. And the blood of the hated panjani would flow in rivers. And the blood of Black Hair-would be among them.…

Without a word or a change of expression, Hurok whirled and plunged into the underbrush, heavy feet pounding the earth as he hurtled back the way he had come with all the speed his lumbering form could muster.

To warn the enemies of his race that his people were upon them—to commit a crime against his own kind so horrendous as to be unthinkable—and to prove to Eric Carstairs that even a hulking, apelike Neanderthal can understand kindness, mercy, justice, and the meaning of friendship.