It was about three days later that Fate again took a hand in our affairs.
We had been working our way due east, or as due east as we could ascertain, for it was difficult to tell directions on a world in which no sun lights the sky, arcing from east to west like a natural compass needle. According to what we could tell, the nearest settlement of men should be a dozen korads in that direction.
We covered quite a bit of territory in three days―the bulk of the Grand Kumala, in fact. Our progress through the jungle country was greatly facilitated by the discovery of a swift-flowing river which poured out of the mountains and curved away east, probably joining with the Ajand further on.
It had not been difficult to cut supple lianas, lash together fallen logs into a crude and flimsy raft, and set ourselves adrift. The rushing current carried us many leagues, and we traveled faster and easier than had we been forced to hack a path through the dense jungle underbrush on foot. Poling our way past obstructions, battling off the attacks of nameless river creatures―I shall not bore my reader with a drawn-out account of our struggle downriver, for it is easily told in summary.
We were forced, towards the close of the third day, to leave the river and press forward on foot, for here it angled away sharply to the south.
Towards nightfall disaster struck.
Without the slightest warning, as we were making our way across an open glade, a gigantic beast sprang roaring from the underbrush right into our midst, scattering us to all sides.
It was a full-grown deltagar, a horned, scarlet, tigerlike beast such as the one I had ridden to its death in the arena of Zanadar, as big as four tigers rolled into one, armed with claws like steel hooks and glistening bared fangs like naked scimitars―a fearsome opponent even for a heavily armed hunting party to encounter. And we were but three men and a girl, and armed but lightly.
The monster charged Koja and me. The arthropod snatched me up under one arm and leaped out of the way, his grasshopper-like lower limbs carrying the two of us halfway across the jungle clearing with a single bound.
Baffled, snarling, the deltagar whirled to charge Darloona, who was on the other side of the glade from our position. She turned on her heel and ran into the shelter of the thick underbrush to avoid its charge. The beast went crashing after her but gallant Lukor sprang in its path, brandishing his rapier and yelling to capture its attention.
Alas, the brute was in no mood for a challenge. Hunting must have been poor in this sector of the Kumala, for the deltagar looked half-starved, ribs thrusting like curved struts through the scarlet fur of its sides. So it did not swerve to engage Lukor but merely clouted him aside with a terrific buffet from one mighty paw, and sprang after the fleeing girl. In an instant the jungle had swallowed it up, but we could hear it crashing and floundering through the bushes, getting further and further away.
The savage blow of the deltagar's forepaw had knocked the old Swordmaster reeling. He lay sprawled some distance away, white-faced, scarlet leaking from his scalp. Koja sprang after the deltagar, in search of Darloona, while I paused to see what I could do for Lukor. As soon as I ascertained that the old man was not seriously harmed―merely unconscious and bleeding freely from a light scalp wound―I followed Koja to help in the search. But I met Koja returning to the clearing: neither Darloona nor the deltagar were to be found. She must have fled far into the depths of the jungle to avoid the hungry predator.
The next two days were consumed in a grim and desperate search for the lost Princess of Shondakor. We searched day and night for any sign of the missing girl, but we found nothing.
The deltagar, however, left a clear track due to its enormous size and weight. Acting on the assumption that the beast was also tracking the Princess, we tracked the beast. I was in a restless fever of impatience, for I was horribly conscious of the fact that Darloona was completely unarmed.
Towards dawn on the third day of her disappearance we burst suddenly through a screen of trees and gazed in amazement at an incredible sight.
At first my heart lifted with buoyant hope. But ere long those hopes were dashed into despair.
For the sight upon which we stared in grim silence was more terrible than words can express.
I shall never exorcise from my memory the profound horror of what I saw as we stepped through the fringes of the jungle and stared at that which lay before us on the broad plain under the golden skies of morn . . .
16. DARLOONA―FAREWELL!
As I sit here in my tent, day after day, laboriously inscribing this account of my adventures on the weird and marvelous world called Thanator, I am possessed of a curious sense of futility and of hopelessness.
I watch as the brilliant and varicolored moons of Thanator one by one ascend her strange skies of golden vapor. They are familiar to me now, those gorgeous orbs of colored fire―tiny Juruvad, a disk of bright gold, lime-green Orovad, the immense frosty azure sphere of mighty Ramavad, and the rose-red globe of glorious Imavad, the nearest of the four moons.
Like goblin lanterns they fill the world with rich and marvelous hues, casting weird multiple shadows from the gnarled black trunks of the many trees along the edge of the Grand Kumala. Like the glaring eyes of a host of Cyclops they stare down at me as they drift through the dim skies of this jungle moon.
They are old friends, by now. No longer do I miss the wrinkled, pitted, gray-silver face of Earth's own satellite.
But then the colossal arc of Jupiter thrusts above the dark and distant horizon. Bit by bit the Lord of the Sky lifts his titanic globe to fill the heavens. A vast surface of luminous yellow and ocher is his shining face, banded with horizontal zones of darker sulphur and curdled brown and gloomy puce. And in the southern hemisphere, the great Red Spot blazes like an angry crimson eye―vast-dwarfing even the moons.
And in the presence of that banded giant of the skies, suddenly I am a stranger to this world again and crave to return to dwell under skies that are blue and not golden, and where but one moon rides the tides of darkness.
For the rising of mighty Gordrimator brings back to me the fact that I am farther from my home than any man who has ever lived. For I am three hundred and ninety million miles from the planet whereon I was born―and three hundred and ninety million is a lot of miles.
Although I have lived for months on Thanator, and made good friends, and found a life for myself, a cause and a mission, it still is not home to me. Nor will it, perhaps, ever be ....
My hands are weary from writing. With a sigh I put down the pen I have cut from a thaptor quill, set aside the neat stack of coarse fibrous brown papyrus, and step forth from my tent onto the lawn of crimson grass that slopes down from the edge of the jungle.
Like exiled Lucifer staring at the locked gates of Heaven, I stare down through the gloaming at that which stands, an eternal enigma, on the slope below me.
A ring of monoliths, encircling a thick broad disk of milky substance like pallid Soochow jade.
The Gate Between The Worlds ....
It is the irony of all ironies that I have found it at last―now that― I can never use it to return again to the world where I was born!
Perhaps I am an obstinate fool. For, indeed, the way lays open before me―in two nights, the Ku Thad tell me, that flickering shaft of throbbing light that is the mode of travel between the worlds will thrust up from the disk of lambent jade amidst the ring of standing stones.
I could enter there, naked as first I came, and after that timeless interval of flashing speed, of cruel cold, of absolute darkness, find myself yet again within that Lost City in the jungles of Cambodia. Or such, at least, is my assumption; for whether the Gate links together yet other worlds than Callisto and the Earth, I cannot be certain.