The Lost World MEGAPACK®. Lin Carter

some hours, the hunters returned. They had found signs of Darya’s presence in the jungle, they reported to her mighty sire, but not the girl herself. And a tall, leathery old scout with grizzled locks and beard described a small clearing where the soil had been disturbed as if by a struggle, and displayed upon his open palm a hide thong and collection of smooth, white stones.

      “It is Darya’s sling,” breathed Tharn of Thandar. “And stones such as she would have collected to rearm herself with! Beyond these things, Komad, found you aught else?”

      The old scout shook his head, reluctantly.

      “How far distant is this place where you found the sling and the stones?”

      The chief scout, Komad, indicated that the clearing and the pool lay half a mile or more in the direction of the cliffs which lifted in the distance.

      “Let us break camp here, and go thither,” suggested Komad. “If my Chief agrees, we would be wise to use the clearing of the pool as the center of our search, which can widen therefrom in circles until some further token of the gomad Darya is found.”

      Tharn nodded briefly, and the men at once began to dismantle the encampment, preparing to depart.

      During the orderly confusion, the old scout came over to where I stood on the sidelines.

      “The Drugar you call your friend bade me say unto you that he appreciates all that you would sacrifice in order to be true to his friendship,” he said to me in low tones.

      I had a premonition, and my heart leaped within me, knowing what was to come. I laid my hand on the fellow’s lean, sinewy arm.

      “Where is Hurok?” I cried.

      “He has gone forth alone into the jungle,” said Komad the scout, “and he begs you not to follow him. ‘Let Black Hair stay with his own kind, and Hurok will rejoin his,’ were his words. And he bade me give you this—”

      The old scout put something heavy, cold and metallic into my hand. I looked down, blinking through sudden tears.

      It was the automatic which the saber-tooth had struck from my hand!

      And it was thus that Hurok, hulking, illiterate savage from the Stone Age, taught to Eric Carstairs the true meaning of the word “friendship.”

      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