The Lost World MEGAPACK®. Lin Carter

in their natural habitat, and at such close range.

      “Fascinating!” breathed Professor Potter to himself, his vague blue eyes gleaming with interest through his spectacles, which, as usual, tilted askew on the bridge of his nose. He stared at the enormous beasts, taking in the thick, shaggy, wavy hair, faintly reddish, which clothed the sides and shoulders of the browsing monsters, and the way the daylight gleamed on the polished ivory of their fantastic, curling tusks.

      He studied the appearance of the young mammoths, their fat sides virtually bald save for a red-gold fuzz, and how their mothers tended them as they waddled about, squeaking and playing.

      “What a chapter this will make for my book!” the Professor wheezed. Jorn the Hunter looked discomforted.

      “I think we should be gone from here,” he grunted shortly. “For the thantors can be dangerous, you know, even though they are not meat-eaters…if they feel their young to be in danger, they can become formidable adversaries.”

      “Like any other herbivores, of course,” nodded the Professor. “Another moment,” he added in a pleading tone. “I really wouldn’t have missed this sight for the world—!”

      On the edge of the herd there stood a great bull with his back to the females and the young, for all the world as if standing guard. As his tiny eyes spied the two men crouched resting in the long grasses, the sentinel flapped his enormous ears and lifted his trunk, giving voice to a warning cry.

      As if by prearranged signal, the females crowded around, sheltering their young, while the other bulls echoed the sentinel’s challenging cry and came shuffling through the long grasses to spy out the danger the first thantor had discovered.

      “Let’s get out of here—now!” urged Jorn, tugging at the Professor’s arm.

      The skinny savant blinked nervously and wet his lips. He yearned to linger, to observe the protective system utilized by the Ice Age monsters, but the danger of alarming the mammoths into a charge was obvious.

      “I suppose you are right, young man,” he said reluctantly.

      “This way,” said Jorn. And springing to his feet, he began running at right angles to his former path, leading the Professor away from the grazing herd, hoping thus to relieve their fears.

      But it didn’t quite work.

      The trouble was that the bulls were sufficiently aroused by now to charge after anything that moved, and when they saw the two humans in flight away from them, they burst into a stumbling, heavy-footed pursuit.

      Jorn knew the lumbering monsters could not run as fast as he, but the old man was not as fleet of foot as was Jorn, and would slow them both down. But Jorn could not desert the Professor, leaving him to be gored and trampled by the mammoths. His mind racing even as his feet flew across the plain, he strove to envision a way out of their dilemma. Long before he and the Professor could reach the shelter of the cliffs, where deep and narrow ravines would afford them shelter from the bulky thantors, the enraged bulls would be upon them. And no man that has ever lived could hope to slay a wooly mammoth with his bare hands.…

      “We cannot hope to outdistance the brutes,” wheezed the professor, at his heels. “What shall we do?”

      “I do not know,” answered Jorn stolidly. “Save your breath for running!”

      * * * *

      Marooned helplessly atop the flat, mesa-like peak, Darya of Thandar came to realize the danger she was in as she looked about her, despairingly.

      All about her rose pinnacles and ledges of rock, and therein she espied many thakdol nests, some dilapidated and evidently abandoned, but others containing odd-looking; leathery eggs or squalling, slithering young.

      The Peaks of Peril must be, she realized with growing horror, the breeding grounds of the dreaded flying lizards. Some of their huge nests were built atop slender spears of stone; others had been wedged into the nooks and crannies which pocked the face of the crumbling cliffs. And a few were built upon the narrow ledges that wound down the sides of the peaks.

      The fresh breeze raised to her nostrils the unholy stench of the thakdol’s droppings, and the fetid reek of rotting meat. Here and there about the peaks flapped or soared the flying reptiles, and the girl knew that at any moment one might spy her clinging to the broad shelf of the mesa, and descend to rend and rip her tender flesh with horrible, hooked claws.

      It was imperative that Darya leave her precarious perch; but where could she go? Not down into that black chimney again, to descend once more into the loathsome darkness of the thakdol’s nest, for death awaited her at the bottom of that dark hole as surely as it did aloft.

      Seized by a sudden notion, the girl crept to the edge of the flat rock and peered down. As she had surmised, narrow stone ledges zigzagged down the steep sheer cliff. It was similar ledges along the face of the nearer of the peaks that had given her the idea.

      For such as the Stone Age girl, to think was to act.

      Without a moment’s hesitation, she flung herself prone and wrapped her lithe arms about a projecting boss, slid her legs over the edge of the mesa. Her probing feet found the upper slope of the ledge.

      Testing her weight, she decided that the ledge could bear her without collapsing, and thus began her descent down the side of the cliff.

      To the pampered children of civilization such as you or I, that descent would have been an endless giddy nightmare of creeping along, inching your way down a steep shelf of rock that, at times, narrowed to mere inches. Nor did Darya find the experience exhilarating or particularly enjoyable: but the daring girl did not falter or give way to her fears. Her small, stubborn chin firmly set and resolve glinting in her blue eyes, she set her back against the cliff and inched her way along the ledge which led down the cliff by slow and tortuous stages.

      The savage girl knew all too well that the slightest miscalculation, the briefest moment of imbalance, a single false step, could plunge her to a swift and horrible death against the sharp rocks far below.

      But she went on, and in time the edge widened into a large shelf which extended several yards from the cliff wall.

      Here she paused to still the trembling of her limbs and to catch her breath in safety.

      As she relaxed, staring out across the broad plain, she espied of a sudden two tiny figures fleeing from the stampeding herd of mammoths.

      The bright yellow hair and bronzed, lithe figure of the taller of the tiny figures seemed to her familiar.

      As did the scrawny legs and wobbling sun helmet of the second.

      It was her countryman, Jorn the Hunter, and Professor Potter, the friend of Eric Carstairs!

      Catching her breath, she saw and realized their deadly peril, for the rampaging bulls of the herd were almost upon the two.

      Even as she watched they halted suddenly, the two fleeing figures, and fell prone in the grass for some inexplicable reason.

      And then her view of the two was blotted out by a mystery…a blaze of flame sprang out of nowhere, and a plume of thick black smoke obscured her view.

      CHAPTER 20

      THE DWELLER IN THE CAVE

      Puffing along at the heels of his Cro-Magnon friend, Professor Percival P. Potter, Ph. D., groaned and grumbled to himself. His predicament was perilous, he knew, and this infuriated him. That a scientist of his keen perception, vast learning, and brilliant intellect should be so utterly helpless before the brute strength and tiny intellect of the enraged herd of mammoths that thundered along behind them, coming closer and closer with every ominous moment, exasperated the short-tempered savant.

      “What is the use of all those degrees,” he panted angrily to himself, “if one cannot outthink a herd of prehistoric pachyderms?”

      It was hard to do any serious, constructive thinking while running for one’s life, he noticed. So he forced his mind to analyze