I did not until much later learn the circumstances whereby I came upon Darloona alone in those jungles, battling against the vastodon; but she later told me the story, a simple one of a hunting party broken up by a pack of yathribs, the members dispersing in all directions and thereby losing track of each other. If I had not come along, and if the vastodon had been elsewhere, it would only have been a matter of an hour or two before she would have found her way back to the rest of her party.
I did, however, come along. So did the vastodon. And it is upon such small happenings as these that the fate of worlds may Bang.
It is hard for me to estimate the number of nights and days I spent slaving at the wheels of the flying ship. The monotony of the grinding labor, the bewildering succession of work shifts and sleep shifts, the cumulative fatigue, all prevented me from keeping an accurate measure of the passage of time. But these ungainly flying contraptions, I now know, are capable of making at least three hundred miles cross-country in a single day, so I was at my wheel for a week at the very least.
While this speed is not remarkable, compared to the velocity at which a terrene jet liner travels, it's fast enough for a ship propelled by muscle power alone.
The Skygull was the personal flagship or yacht of Prince Thuton. The pun in its name, incidentally, exists in both Thanatorian and English. There is a species of small flying reptile on Thanator, found generally in desert regions, called the zell. A branch of the same species can be found along the shores of the two Thanatorian seas. To differentiate this branch from the desert-inhabiting zells, the shore branch is known as the sea-zell, or lajazell, as laj is the Thanatorian word for "sea." Kaja is the Thanatorian word for "sky," hence the pun in the name of Thuton's ship, the frigate Kajazell.
I call it a frigate for, technically, being a light, speedy scout ship, that is what it was. But it looked more like a heavily ornamented Spanish galleon. The Skygull was eighty-seven feet long, very broad in the beam and flat-bottomed. It was built up very high in poop and forecastle: the forecastle rising to about forty-two feet above the keel level and the sterncastle to thirty-five feet. The upper works of the forecastle bulged out sharply, an exposed belvedere with wide, high windows giving a good view on all three sides, and a flat, balustraded observation deck on top of this. The belvedere served as the pilothouse and from there the frigate was controlled and directed. A bowsprit protruded from the fore of the observation deck just above the curved row of windows, with an elaborate figurehead depicting a winged warrior with a fishtail. Further down the curve of the hull, below the pilothouse and at about what would be the water level on a seagoing ship, were two bulging observation balconies, one on either side of the hull. The sterncastle had a similar belvedere, pointing aft, and a vertical rudder fin, ribbed like an enormous fan, was attached to the rudderstock below this belvedere. The rudderstock was linked to the sternpost and thence to the rear steering gear.
The hinged wings thrust out to either side amidships and belowdecks. The spread must have measured at least one hundred and twenty feet from wingtip to wingtip, fully extended. The portion of the wings, or vans, which were attached to the sides of the ship were fixed rigid; but about one-third of the way out, the vans were hinged in a most ingenious and complicated manner, with enormous pulleys and guy-stays which manipulated the outboard wingsections which actually flapped up and down. The movements of the vans were powered and controlled from between-decks. The huge wheels we slaves turned communicated kinetic energy through sequential cogwheels, pinion wheels successively engaging with larger cogs, and the whole connecting with the guy-stays, which were thin and strong as nylon cord. There was a ratchet-and-pawl arrangement on the wheels to prevent sudden reversal; for otherwise, a contrary gust of wind could have stripped the gears disastrously. The guy-stays wound about gigantic winches above our level, the stays communicating from the winches to the wing sections through a row of circular ports in the sides of the hull.
The concept of a bird-winged aircraft was not uniquely Thanatorian. I remembered that the Renaissance genius of Leonardo da Vinci, however, had not been able to invent a practical model of such a craft although his notebooks are filled with elaborate drawings of ornithopters. Weight and motive power were the main problems.
I was fascinated by the ingenuity with which the Zanadarians made practical the use of genuine ornithopters. For example, the flying frigates were not, as I had thought at first, made of wood at all, but of specially treated paper. Huge sheets of strong woven-reed papyrus were soaked in glue and stretched over plaster forms, layer after layer. When baked dry in brick ovens and stripped from their forms, the result was something like sections of molded plastic. The glue-impregnated paper hulls were incredibly thin, lighter than plastic or even balsa wood, and tough, strong, and durable.
The entire ship was made of paper wherever possible. The beams and masts and keel, sternpost and stempost, bowsprit and van ribs, were hollow tubes. Even the huge figurehead was a hollow paper mold. The vans, the flapping sections at least, were constructed like the wings of a giant bat, narrow hollow paper tubes, like unsegmented bamboo rods, splayed out from a center rib. Between these ribs, however, silk webbing was used instead of the glue-impregnated paper. Tough silk, tightly stretched and pegged like drumheads, was then soaked in wax for extreme stiffness, the interstices sealed with wax. Paper plates had proved impractical here.
But this use of strong, light paper construction alone would still not have made the eighty-seven-foot-long frigates skyworthy had it not been for the gas compartments. The entire lower deck, the bilge, of the frigates was pumped full of a buoyant natural gas like helium or hydrogen, whose enormous lifting power rendered the ornithopters virtually weightless. Geysers of this gas were found in the White Mountains; they were tapped, and the bilge compartments of the frigates were pumped full of gas under high pressure. The nozzles were unscrewed and detached from the input hoses, then transformed by the addition of a simple snap-on valve to pressure cocks which permitted some of the buoyant gas to be ejected at need, permitting the ship to sink to a lower level. The bilge compartment, once full, was then sealed and caulked until it was airtight. And the ships were skyworthy.
There were two masts amidships, set side by side rather than fore and aft as on a seagoing schooner. Light shrouds stretched from mast to mast, and then to the bowsprit and the poop, for the display of signal pennants and for the use of the sailors who manned the lonely and rather windy topmast observation cupolas.
The ships had a crew strength of thirty-five officers and men, and eighty wheel slaves. It was the number of wheel slaves required to power the vans that kept the number of the Zanadarian vessels at a minimum. Otherwise, with such an amazing technological advance over the other nations of the jungle moon, they could have controlled a world empire.
And if ever the Zanadarians discover the steam engine, God help Thanator!
8. ZANADAR, THE CITY IN THE CLOUDS
As it happened, our arrival at the city of the Sky Pirates came about during one of my sleep shifts.
For days we had been soaring at two thousand feet above the dark crimson carpet of the Grand Kumala. But yesterday, towards evening, we at last reached the foothills of the Varan-Hkor mountains, and by dawn the towers of Zanadar were in sight.
My wheel gang slept in a cubicle on an upper level, just under the row of ventilation louvers. Thus I had a splendid view of the City in the Clouds, as Zanadar was sometimes called.