Night came on slowly. He’d never wanted to see it before. Where was the vaunted swift nightfall of the tropics, which was supposed to drop like a curtain? It came on slowly, but at last it came. The sun began to redden for its landfall.
He waited, biding his time. The spangled disks slowly went out. Then the shell-like glow, reflecting from above on her upturned face, dimmed too. Cool green and blue shadows began to settle in the hollows of everything, like fungus. Light was leaving the world.
When a gas-green sky over the black jungle was the only remaining vestige of daylight, he finally woke her. He woke her in a strange way. Or at least, it seemed so to him at the time. For when the whisper of her name close down beside her ear and a light touch upon her shoulder failed to rouse her, he put his lips on her forehead and woke her with a kiss.
She was frightened for a moment, upon first awakening in the dark and in a place she didn’t remember, and stared up at the smothering leaves and clung to him.
“It’s all right,” he soothed her. “We’re in here, don’t you remember? That place we crawled into. We’ve got to go on soon.”
He brought her some more water, and they waited just a brief while longer. Then he crawled out and helped her to her feet after him, and they started on the second lap. This one would-have to decide their safety or destruction, he knew. Their strength and ability to stay on their feet wouldn’t survive another night without food.
In a little while there was more light to see by. The process of extinguishment was arrested, even reversed itself partially. A coppery haze appeared in the eastern sky, like brick dust floating around in the night. A little open space and a rise of ground in one place gave them a direction finder. From there they found one pole, and by going opposite to it, that gave them the other. Off in the distance the shape of the temple was silhouetted against a late rising apricot moon. That meant that in a straight line from there, if they continued with their backs toward it, they were bound to find the mountains. The jungle closed around them again as they resumed their way, and blotted it out.
The going was hard. He hadn’t the use of a machete or anything to cut with. He had to find other ways of getting through. He detoured around obstacles, crawled under them when they weren’t too low, and often used his own body as a breastwork to give her passage through some thicket or bramble that was particularly thorny.
Once they had a bad few moments with some sort of spongy, fibrous creeper, about the thickness of a gas tube. It snarled around her throat and tightened, and she couldn’t go forward and she couldn’t go back. They even thought for a horrifying moment it might be something animal, a snake of the boa or anaconda variety, but it wasn’t, it didn’t move, it was vegetable. He found he couldn’t sever it with his hands, and when he tried to do so, that only tightened it more. He had her spade her hands in under it, as a sort of protective pad between it and her throat. He cursed his own witlessness in leaving the knife in the body of the warrior back in the temple. As it was, he had only one cutting edge about him to use against it, and so he used it, though she pleaded with him not to. His teeth.
“It may be poisonous. Look out. Don’t.”
“It won’t be,” he said, and hoped he was right.
He gnawed through it. Some kind of juice came out of it that was flamingly bitter and flowed around in his mouth, but he did the job. At last his teeth met through it, and it was in two.
They flung it off her and went on. He spent the next five minutes expectorating energetically as he traveled along.
They put on every ounce of speed the night and the jungle and their weakened, punished frames would allow them. The mountains, frosty blue along their tops in the moonlight and visible only when the curtain before them dipped low enough now and then, looked nearer than they had in the daylight the day before, but that might have only been because of the moonlight.
“We’ve got to hit that tomb entrance pretty accurately, don’t forget. There isn’t any other way out.”
“Suppose they’ve already got there ahead of us, and are waiting?”
He’d thought of that himself, long ago, and hadn’t liked the thought much. “We’re not there yet. Don’t let’s worry about that till we are.”
They had no way of telling whether their pursuers were ahead of them or behind them, or even dispersed all around them, so that they were advancing blindly through a sac of them. They never knew from one minute to the next when they might blunder into them, and once a racket of outraged parrots and monkeys, starting up spontaneously out of the slumbering jungle drone around them, showed they very nearly had.
They crouched low in sudden immobility and waited. It didn’t come again, just that once, and then after a long cautious time they went on again.
“It might not have been,” he whispered guardedly. “Some big cat, maybe, springing for one of those monkeys.”
It took will power to keep pushing on; the brief tumult had come from ahead of them, rather than in their wake. They diverged a little, bypassing the exact direction as far as they were able to determine it.
He noticed something that he didn’t like. Her mind was beginning to wander a little from time to time. He knew it was probably nothing more than excess fatigue, but it was a bad sign, a warning signal. Once she said unexpectedly, “Is my dad going to be waiting for us, where we’re going?”
He didn’t know what to say. And then before he could answer, she asked in self-startlement, “What did I say just then?”
The ground was already starting to rise under them. Not steadily, but by fits and starts that augured well. They should be out of the tangle sometime before the end of the night if they could hold out that long.
The moon set again — the same moon that had seen Mitty’s death the night before — and now the night was on the wane. They kept going steadily for some time after that, to squeeze the last possible inch of distance they could out of the sheltering darkness. Then they had to drop down again and rest, even if it meant extinction on the spot. Flesh and blood couldn’t possibly stand any more.
She didn’t sleep this time. He wouldn’t let her. He wouldn’t let himself either. He kept digging his own nails into the soft underpart of his hands, so the pain would keep his eyelids up. He counted off ten minutes, and just when rest was beginning to penetrate their racked frames to a depth sufficient to take hold, he broke it off short again.
In pulling her up after him this time, he nearly toppled down again himself. They leaned against one another inertly for a moment, like two slanted poles that support one another by their very inclination, then tottered on. The stars overheard were flickering to contraction point, the sky behind them was turning pewter-colored.
Day and the jungle broke nearly simultaneously. Just as it got light enough to see by, they came out of the lush vegetation into an arid foothill region, dotted with occasional clumps of stunted trees that dwindled as they went along and finally died out altogether.
“Look,” he whispered almost in awe. “Look, Chris, the mountains.” He saw her eyes brim with tears of exhaustion and thankfulness. He stroked her tangled hair inattentively, his own eyes sighted upward to their still remote, serried tops. “On the other side, Chris,” he breathed, “on the other side of those mountains it’s the twentieth century.”
They stood there and they scanned the looming tilt before them for the tomb entrance, which was the only possible way through to the other side. They searched frontally first, and it was nowhere in evidence. Then over to the left as far as eye could reach. It wasn’t there either; no sign of it. Then over to the right, the only direction left. Nor was it there either.