PART III: MEN OF THE STONE AGE

CHAPTER 9

CAPTIVES OF THE CAVEMEN

The next two or three days I will skip over, partly because my memory of them is rather blurred, but mostly because there really wasn’t much that happened to us that will bear repeating.

The Neanderthal men seem to have been on a slave-hunting expedition, and were on their way back home with a dozen other captives when they encountered the two of us. One-Eye, as I came to call the chief of the expedition, didn’t mind adding a couple more captives to his collection, although I understand he thought the Professor a bit too scrawny to be worth carrying along. One of his cronies, an ugly customer I came to think of as Fatso from his triple chin and enormous belly, must have persuaded him otherwise, for when I came out of my little nap, there the two of us were, tied together.

I was being carried over the shoulder of one brawny youth who was quite glad to put me down once it was understood I was awake and could walk. These men bore little resemblance to the Neanderthals; in fact, if you shaved them and put some clothes on them, they would not look out of place on Broadway or Main Street, being tall, bronzed, athletic young fellows with straw-yellow hair and blue eyes.

“Obviously, descendants of Cro-Magnon man,” the Professor explained when I got a chance to ask him about our fellow-captives. “The two major genera of Homo sapiens were contemporaneous to some extent; their respective eras overlapped a trifle.”

The differences between the two were certainly distinct. The blond Cro-Magnons stood tall and straight, and walked with a lithe, limber step that was very unlike the bowlegged shamble of the apelike Neanderthal men. Also, they kept themselves cleaner and wore well-tanned hides and furs. They even sported something like boots: well, high-laced buskins, anyway. And whereas the Apemen wore seashells threaded on a bit of gut, the Cro-Magnons wore polished, colored pebbles and the fangs of beasts on thin leather thongs. More than a few of them had ornaments of hammered copper or bronze, which fascinated the Professor.

“Obviously, time has not stood still for the higher orders, even here in Zanthodon,” he mused thoughtfully. “They were men of Stone Age back in Europe before the glaciers came down from the north…but here, they have already entered the Bronze Age…this is fascinating, my boy! What a book I shall be able to write, once we have returned to civilization!”

I didn’t bother pointing out to him that our return to civilization was probably going to be postponed for a while, due to slavery.

The Apemen—I’m going to call them that from now on, because “Neanderthal” is a bit of a jaw-breaker—led us along through the jungles at a rapid trot. They used scouts which fanned out to all sides of the slave column, which I thought was a rather sophisticated strategy for such primitives. And they seemed to know just where they were going, although how they managed to find their way home in this land of eternal and unaltering daylight puzzled me. They seemed to know where they were going, however, and from the speed at which they forced us to jog along, and the occasional, apprehensive backward glances they cast over their hulking, hairy shoulders, I got the distinct impression that they were in a hell of a hurry—as if someone were following them.

I noticed that we were following the curve of the coastline, never penetrating too deeply into the jungle to lose track of the sea, which remained at our left hand. The reason for this I did not learn until much later.

My fellow-captives were tethered to a long rope of tough, braided grasses that extended the length of the slave column, and whose ends were tied to the waists of One-Eye in front and Fatso behind. We all wore slave collars of leather and these were lashed by thongs to spaces along the length of the rope, one captive to either side. We moved along, then, in a column of twos at a rapid trot.

I have never worn anything more galling and irksome than that slave collar, and I never hope to.

The pace was grueling, and we were only given rest stops three times a “day” (I am going to start dividing time in this narrative between “days” and “sleeps,” since it was always day down here, and “night” is hardly an apt term); during those stops, which were of brief duration, water was passed back along the line in a hollow coconut shell pierced at one end: We had a chance at such times to lie down, rest a bit, catch our breath.

The Professor and I—he was directly behind me in the column—used these opportunities to talk, while the other captives eavesdropped curiously. (I later came to understand that it was bewildering to them to hear men conversing in a language they had never before heard, since all of the human denizens of Zanthodon speak the same universal tongue.) You may be wondering why I had not as yet fought my way free. The answer is simple: after One-Eye had nearly brained me with that stone axe of his, he and his boys went through our clothing and possessions, taking anything they fancied. One-Eye now sported my wristwatch on one hairy arm, Fatso had taken the revolver, which he wore stuck through the hides wrapped about his middle, below his enormous paunch, and another one of the Apemen had taken my hunting-knife. As for my backpack, it had vanished among the others.

Without weapons of any kind, I couldn’t have put up much of a fight against a dozen savage Neanderthal men, so I concluded to hold onto my temper and bide my time. In this decision, the Professor heartily concurred.

“Rest easy, my boy; a diversion is bound to occur sooner or later, just as the mammoth appeared in time to divert the triceratops from making us his luncheon! And, besides, I am gathering valuable anthropological data…”

I am, of course, much too gentlemanly to have yielded to the impulse; thus, I held my tongue and didn’t tell the Professor what he could do with his data.

* * * *

Looking back over this part of the manuscript, I notice with some amusement that I have not yet mentioned the captive who was directly in front of me in the line of slaves.

Her name was Darya, and she was about seventeen and absolutely the most beautiful girl I have ever laid eyes upon.

Nearly naked, save for a skimpy apron-like garment of soft, elegantly-tanned furs, which extended over one shoulder but left one perfect breast bare; her slim, lithe, beautifully tanned body was as supple and graceful as a dancer’s. Like all of her people, she was blond and blue-eyed: in Darya’s case, the description is too sparse. She had a long, flowing mane of soft hair the color of ripe corn, and wide, dark-lashed eyes the hue of rainwashed April skies, and a full, luscious mouth the tint of wild strawberries.

She was fastidious in her cleanliness and never failed to set aside a portion of her share of water to cleanse her person.

Darya was a revelation to me: imagine a girl who has never used cosmetics, never chewed gum, never gone to the hairdresser for a permanent…a young woman totally ignorant of deodorants, perfume, eyebrow-plucking, and the latest fashions!

For all of her primitive innocence, though, this Cro-Magnon Eve was every inch a lady—and all woman.

She exposed her naked breast indifferently to the gaze of men, because her society has never found a reason to hide natural beauty away behind clothing, never having gotten around to inventing puritanical shame and prudery. When we paused during a rest stop to relieve nature, she performed her bodily functions with the rest of us, without the slightest mortification or self-consciousness.

She endured without a murmur of complaint our exhausting trek, and, although she suffered along with the rest of us from the lack of water, of sufficient rest, and of food, I never once saw her weep. Except when one of the older Cro-Magnon captives gave out and could run no more, and was callously brained by One-Eye, his corpse untied from the slave rope and carelessly tossed into the bushes. As I saw the gleam of tears in her great blue eyes, I wondered to myself if the victim had been a friend or relative.

After a couple of days of traveling across fairly level country, still within close range of the shoreline, we began to ascend a rise of low hills, and were no longer beaten until we ran at the same pace as our brutish captors. Darya seized this opportunity to attempt a conversation with me. She had spoken to me on more than one occasion, but as I could not understand a word of her speech, or she a word of mine, expressions and gestures were the most we could exchange.

I have heard it said that curiosity is the vice of women. Well, if so, I presume her curiosity must have gotten the better of her, because Darya, no longer able to endure my inability to answer or even understand her questions, promptly took the obvious course of action, and began to teach me hers.

I have always enjoyed a natural-born knack for picking up foreign tongues, which has amply served me during my travels, so it did not prove too difficult to pick up Cro-Magnon. What made it so remarkably easy was the simple fact that Darya’s language was an extremely simple one, a stark matter of the verbal necessities—all nouns and verbs, with just enough adjectives to lend it tang. A language uncluttered with all the complicated tenses more sophisticated languages seem to have.

As we walked along, the cave-girl gave me lessons in the one universal tongue spoken the length and breadth of Zanthodon. She did this with a direct simplicity that I found refreshing—pointing to a bush, she enunciated the word for “bush,” for example, and made me repeat it back to her until I got the pronunciation to please her. In a single day we got through the items visible in the landscape immediately around us, and progressed to the parts of the body. On the next day we moved on to verbs, and I memorized the words for “jump” and “walk” and “run” and “stand” and “sit” and “lie down” and “sleep,” “eat,” “drink,” and so on.

Each morning when we awoke, she made me repeat back to her the words she had taught me the day before, correcting me when it was necessary. But it was seldom necessary. As a matter of fact, learning her primitive tongue came so swiftly and easily that I was impressed myself—I had always been good at picking up a smattering of things like Arabic or German or Swahili, but never this good.

It was almost…almost like remembering a language you once knew but had since forgotten, if that makes any sense.

Well, it made quite a lot of sense to the Professor, who, being tied to the chain gang right behind me, was near enough to overhear our language lessons. In fact, he became absolutely livid with excitement.

“…Did you hear that, my boy?” he burbled, awe-struck. “The word for ‘father’ is vator…amazing!”

“What’s so amazing about it?”

“Because the ancient Sanskrit word for ‘father’ is very, very close to it in sound: pitar.…I have been noticing how very many of the words your little lady has been teaching you are remarkably similar to the words in our own language of the Upper World…and I have always had a theory about the common source of all languages.…”

“Well, why not?” I grinned, shaking my head. “You seem to have a theory about nearly everything.”

Darya listened uncomprehendingly to this exchange, her head tilted a little to one side and a quizzical expression on her sweet face.

Paying me no attention, the Professor rambled on excitedly.

“You must know, my boy, that English, French, Italian, German, Spanish and many other modern languages stem from the decay of the ancient Latin tongue…well, Latin, Greek, Hindi and other of the languages of antiquity derive from a common source, Sanskrit.…Sanskrit itself descends from Proto-Sanskrit, which came from the almost-forgotten Aryan tongue, and that language can be dated back nearly twenty thousand years, to the last of the great Ice Ages.

“…Suppose that the original of Aryan, let us call it ‘proto-Aryan’ was the language spoken before history began by our own direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnon men of 50,000 B.C. Which is about when I imagine this young lady’s ancestors began drifting into Zanthodon, having fled from the endless winter of the glacial period…if my theory proves correct, we are learning earth’s first and oldest tongue, my boy—what a sensational chapter for my book!”

“What does he say?” inquired Darya, impressed by the monologue. I shook my head.

“No matter,” I grinned. “Old men talk a lot!”

She giggled at the Professor’s glare of frosty reproof.

Just then, our captors came down the line with sticks and clubs; urging us to greater speed. So we wisely decided to save our breath for running.

* * * *

When our language lessons had gotten to the point where we could make each other understand what we were saying, Darya wasted no time in asking me about myself. In particular, she was fascinated by the clothing I was wearing—or what was left of it by this time, for my khaki shirt was ripped to rags and my whipcord breeches equally the worse for wear. I awkwardly tried to explain the secret of weaving cloth to the savage girl, but with minimal success.

She was also curious about my people—my “tribe” as she thought of it. I think she was fascinated by the differences between myself and all the other men she had ever known or seen.

The Neaderthal men, you understand, are brown-haired or red-headed, and the Cro-Magnons are almost always blonds. But I happen to have curly black hair. Another difference was my eyes, for they are of a shade of pale gray rare even in the Upper World (I was beginning to think of it that way, in caps, by this point).

I tried to explain to Darya that my “tribe” consisted of very many millions of men and women who control an entire continent, and live in enormous cities connected by airlines and railways and bus routes…well, you can see the problems I had. Darya could count to a hundred, but the concept of “a million” was beyond her; and the Stone Age tongue lacked words for “continent” and “city.”

I think she thought me a colossal fibber as I tried to describe New York City and airplanes and subway trains. Her eyes were frosty and her manner became noticeably cool; after a time, she tossed her head, turned her back and ignored me for about an hour.

“Just like a woman,” the Professor observed, with a chuckle, at my obvious embarrassment and distress.

CHAPTER 10

WE STRIKE FOR FREEDOM

With time my familiarity with the Stone Age language of Zanthodon became such that I was able to talk to my fellow captives, and through these brief exchanges of conversation I learned much that I had not known before.

The beautiful blond girl, Darya, for example, came from a country called Thandar. At least, I assume it to be a country: it might be a city or village for all I know, since the Stone Age language does not seem to differentiate between such political divisions.

She was the only daughter of the chief of that country, whose name was Tharn. The Apemen had captured her while she had been on a hunting expedition with some of her people.

Among these was a handsome, sturdily built young Cro-Magnon hunter named Jorn whom I instantly conceived a liking for. He had been the fellow who had helped me along while I was still unconscious from the blow on the head which One-Eye had given me with his stone axe. He had a fearless glint in the eye and I rather liked the firm set of his jaw. And I could not help noticing his courtesy and solicitude toward Darya, how he helped her over rough country and tried to shelter her from the mistreatment dealt out at random by the Apemen. I got to know Jorn pretty well, because he was tethered at my left, while Darya was tied to the rope directly ahead of me in line, and to her left was a fellow called Fumio.

While I took an instant liking to Jorn, I must admit my dislike and distrust of this Fumio were equally swift and instinctive. He was a magnificent specimen of primitive manhood, it’s true—taller than I by half a head, and with the most impressively muscular arms and breadth of shoulder I had yet seen. He was also remarkably handsome, in a slick, oily sort of way—all in all, Fumio was a bit too “pretty” for my taste. And he had a sly glint in his eye that made me instantly distrust him. In all honesty, I have to admit my dislike for Fumio may have been shaped by bias, for Jorn acquainted me with the fact that back in Thandar, Fumio was a great chieftain, a rival of Darya’s father for the chiefship of the whole country, and also a suitor for Darya’s hand.

That certainly didn’t make me like him any better!

Thandar lay somewhere behind us, down along the shores of the prehistoric sea which the Professor and I had been admiring when the Neanderthal men came upon us. This sea was known to the people of Zanthodon as the Sogar-Jad, or “Great Sea.” There was another sea somewhere ahead of us and farther inland called the Lugar-Jad, or “Lesser Sea,” which I heard mentioned when I was sufficiently familiar enough with the language to be able to understand conversations between the savages.

As for the Apemen, their country was called Kor, and it lay across the sea on a large island called Ganadol. It was toward this country of Kor that we were presently heading with all such speed as the Apemen could force out of us. I presumed their urgent desire to return to Kor stemmed from the fear that Darya’s father, Tharn, and his warriors, might be on their tracks at this very moment, striving to recapture his daughter.

I had no way of guessing how the Apemen planned to cross the Sogar-Jad to their island kingdom; from their primitive weapons and accouterments, they certainly didn’t seem sophisticated enough to have invented anything like boats.

* * * *

During one of our brief rest stops, I fell into conversation with Jorn, the young hunter whom I liked. I asked him why the Apemen—they were called “Drugars” by the Cro-Magnons: the name meant something like “the Ugly Ones”—had come so far down the coast of the Great Sea, merely to capture a few slaves.

He gave me a solemn look. “In your country, Eric Carstairs, are not the women considered sacred?” he inquired.

“We treat them with considerable respect,” I admitted. He shrugged his strong, tanned shoulders.

“Well, in Thandar we regard them as the precious vessels of the future,” he said firmly. “For it is from their wombs that the warriors and chieftains and hunters of the next generation will spring into being.

Without women, a tribe will soon perish.”

“I can understand that way of thinking,” I nodded.

“The Drugars have no women of their own, or very few,” he continued. “And those that are born are very ugly—”

“Uglier even than the males?” I asked with a grin. “That is difficult to believe, Jorn!”

He flashed white teeth in a somber smile. “Nevertheless, Eric Carstairs, it is so. Even the male Drugars loathe and shun them. Therefore, they steal the women from other tribes, whenever they can find them.

Always, the most beautiful women, for they hope thereby to breed stronger sons and less repulsive females…”

Something within me tightened at the thought of the slim, tender body of Darya crushed in the hairy embrace of a shaggy Ape-man like One-Eye. And my revulsion must have been visible in my features, for Jorn smiled, and laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Now you understand why there has always been war between the men of Thandar and the Drugars,” he said quietly. “For they are stronger and more numerous than we, and for generations we have seen our wives and daughters and sisters carried off into the most horrible form of slavery by the Ugly Ones.”

“Why, then, did they capture only one woman?” I inquired.

His face was somber. “The Drugars were not on a woman-hunting expedition this time, and seized the maiden Darya only by chance. Once they realized who she was, they knew that they had captured a valuable prize, and they are making tracks to return to the safety of their island country before Darya’s father, Tharn of Thandar, catches up to them.”

“I see…”

“Yes, Eric Carstairs: she is the gomad, and they mean to demand of her father many young and beautiful women in ransom for her safe return.”

I already understood that the High Chief of the Cro-Magnon tribe was called the Omad, or king. Darya, then, was the gomad, or princess of her people, and would doubtless inherit the rule after her sire. If she had been a boy, she would have been the jamad or prince. This struck me as rather sophisticated for what were, after all, only a Stone Age people, so I asked Jorn about that.

“Is the chiefship of your tribe, then, a matter of inheritance rather than a prize to be won in personal combat by the strongest challenger?”

He shrugged. “Not exactly…if an Omad has only a daughter to succeed him, the strongest and most brave of the warriors contest for her hand, and the gomad must wed the victor.…”

That certainly gave me something to think about.

“Since Tharn is still the Omad of your tribe, how, then, can you call Fumio the leading suitor for her hand?” I demanded, unable to understand the implied contradictions.

Jorn smiled. “It is a little complicated, Eric Carstairs…what I meant to say was that Fumio has already declared his willingness to do battle against any challenger for the hand of Darya. And thus far, none of the warriors or chieftains of the tribe have dared accept his challenge, for he is the mightiest of us all.”

I had to admit that Fumio was a tall and very powerfully built man, for all his pretty looks and sly, cunning ways. He was, in fact, the most muscular of all the men of Zanthodon I had yet encountered, except for the Apemen themselves.

“And how does Darya feel about this?” I dared to ask. Jorn spread his hands in resignation.

“Our women are not permitted to select their own mates,” he told me. “Since her mate will father the children who will grow into future chieftains of the tribe, it is her duty toward the future of Thandar to accept the greatest and most powerful champion.”

“But does she like Fumio?”

“That you shall have to inquire of Darya herself,” he replied.

* * * *

By the middle of the next day we reached a point along the coast from which, I was given to understand, we were to embark for the island of Ganadol.

Concealed beneath the reeds I was surprised to discover a row of crude canoes—mere hollowed-out logs they were, but doubtless seaworthy for all their crudeness.

The Apemen made haste to drive their captives into these rude seacraft, but this required untying us from the long rope, since otherwise all of the captives would have had to ride in the same canoe, and there was not one that was capacious enough to accommodate so many.

And this looked to me like the best chance to escape that had yet come our way. I said as much to the Professor and to Jorn and Darya in a low voice. The Professor blinked at me dubiously from behind his owlish spectacles.

“And how do you plan to fight off a dozen Neanderthals, my boy?” he inquired testily.

“I don’t,” I replied. “The important thing is to get Darya away from the Apemen. We will stage a slave-revolt, and half of the Cro-Magnons will run in one direction while you and I, Darya and Jorn will go in the other. In the confusion, it may well prove that the Drugars will pursue the wrong bunch. Listen, it’s worth a try, anyway! Once we get across the sea to Kor, there will be no chance of making an escape with half an ocean between us and safety. Now pass the word along.”

While the Drugars were engaged in loading aboard their weapons and provisions, the word of my plan went down the line of tethered captives in a whisper. I saw the glint of approval in the eyes of the stalwart blond savages; it was obvious that they would risk all for the chance of getting their princess to freedom.

Grunting coarse oaths in their guttural voices, the Apemen waddled down the line of their captives, untethering us one by one from the main rope to which our slave collars were attached. When they were finished and we stood, for the moment, free, I seized my brief opportunity—

Roaring a wild rebel yell, I slammed my balled fist into the hairy paunch of the Drugar who was nearest me. He gasped, gagged, clutched at his belly, and fell forward into the mud.

That blow was the signal the Cro-Magnons had been waiting for. Hurling themselves upon the ponderous and slow thinking Neanderthals, they broke free, sprinting to freedom. The larger group of men ran up along the shore, vanishing in a tall stand of tree-ferns. I caught the Professor and Darya by the arm, propelling them forward in the other direction.

As my companions pelted along ahead of me, I dropped back, glancing over my shoulder. Most of the Apemen hovered indecisively, flapping their long arms and uttering bestial growls of rage, working themselves up into a fury. One or two of them were already heading in our direction, with Fatso waddling along in the fore. My eye dropped to the girdle of skins which circled his fat stomach.

Therein gleamed the blued-steel barrel of my .45!

As my companions entered the shelter of the trees, I permitted my pace to slow, falling back so as to allow Fatso to catch up to me. I affected a limp, dragging my left foot as though I had injured it when I broke free.

Raising his heavy club over his head and uttering thunderous growls of vindictive rage, the Apeman descended upon me—

Only to fall flat on his face when I whirled and kicked his clumsy feet out from under him!

I leaped upon him, setting my knee in the small of his back and pressing his face into the earth with one hand while, with my other, I clutched for the automatic pistol. Alas, it was pinned beneath his writhing bulk and I could not prise it free without permitting the Apeman to get to his feet again. As he probably outweighed me by ninety pounds, at least, and had worked himself into a murderous fury by this time, I did not care to face him, much preferring to kneel astride the Neanderthal.

* * * *

The first of the other Apemen to catch up to me was the one I called One-Eye, the leader of the slave-raiders.

He was in a roaring fury, spittle foaming at the corners of his loose lips, bedabbling his matted beard.

Forgotten was the stone axe at his waist: arms spread wide, he came thundering down upon me like a charging grizzly, murderous fury blazing in his one good eye.

I sprang from Fatso’s back and faced him with balled fists. There was no chance to turn and flee, no weapon wherewith to defend myself, and the huge brute outweighed me by over a hundred pounds—

So I stepped forward and slammed one fist deep into the pit of his stomach!

Unprepared for the blow, One-Eye staggered, air whooshing from collapsing lungs. He stopped dead, as if he had run into an invisible wall.

Then he spread his arms again, attempting to seize me in a bear hug. If ever those heavily muscled, apelike arms closed about me, I knew that One-Eye could break my back.

I slammed a hard right to his jaw which rocked him on his heels, then followed with a triphammer left that made him stagger. He seemed utterly bewildered at what was happening to him, and I suddenly realized that the fine art of fisticuffs must be completely unknown to these primitive savages.

Another of the Apemen, one called Hurok, had reached the scene by now, and he was armed with a stone-bladed spear. He remained at a respectful distance, not wishing to interrupt his chief’s battle: but I noticed a gleam of something like admiration flash in his small eyes as he watched me pound the larger, heavier man to a pulp.

Finally I caught One-Eye with a terrific uppercut that toppled him, just like a woodcutter’s axe fells a forest giant. He went down for the count, and stayed down. I drew an unsteady breath, flexing my bruised and aching hands.

Then Hurok stepped forward, leveling his spear at my breast, the jagged flint blade just touching the smooth skin over my heart. He had me, and there was no fighting: I lifted my empty hands in token of surrender.

By this time, Fatso had climbed heavily to his feet and was glaring at me with a maniacal light in his little pig-eyes. Foam beslavered his whiskery, dripping jaws, like those of a mad dog. Balling his huge fists, he shambled forward and struck me a terrific blow in the face. I half-managed to roll with the slap and it did me little harm besides jarring every tooth in my head. But I did not resist as he drew back for another open-handed slap.

Every moment I held the Apemen here, gave the Professor and Jorn and Darya more of a margin of time to conceal themselves in the woods. I figured that while I was a goner, at least I could sell my life to buy freedom for my friends.

As Fatso drew back to strike me again, much to my surprise Hurok interposed the shaft of his spear, forcing the other to drop his hand. Growling savagely, Fatso turned to face the other Neanderthal, who said, simply:

“Black hair is unarmed and has surrendered; do not strike him again.”

At this astounding statement, Fatso stopped short, blinking incredulously. Gradually, the import of Hurok’s brief statement percolated through his thick skull. His fury ebbed, replaced by slack-jawed amazement.

And as for myself, I was amazed as well. I had not thought to find even the barest rudiments of gentlemanliness among these Stone Age primitives. But such nobler sentiments were to be found, at least, within the breast of Hurok.

Fatso was a cowardly bully, and did not enjoy a fight even under the best of circumstances, so he subsided, growling, eyeing me with surly menace.

Hurok gestured with his spear.

“Assist One-Eye to the boats and revive him with water,” he instructed the other. Then he prodded me in the back, and drove me to where the dugouts were beached.

Thus it was that I again became captive to the Apemen. But this time I was alone.…

CHAPTER 11

THE JAWS OF DOOM

From the upper branches of a great Jurassic conifer, Jorn the Hunter grimly watched as the Apemen forced me into one of the dugout canoes, and pushed forth into the waters of the Sogar-Jad.

One by one the clumsy primitives cast off from the shore. Paddling with long sticks, they fought the tide, emerging into the wider seas beyond. Soon the row of hollow logs, with their bestial rowers and their lone, hapless captive, blurred and faded in the steamy fogs which floated over the face of the waters.

Jorn uttered a stern oath. The young Cro-Magnon, it seems, had conceived of an instant liking for me as had I for him. It was, he thought, fatalistically, cruelly unfair for me to have been captured again, when by my plan and daring, I had freed them all: but life in the savage jungles of Zanthodon is cruel and unfair; in this primitive realm beneath the earth’s crust, survival does not always go to the best, but often to the luckiest.

Clambering lithely down out of his tree, the young Hunter stood motionless for a moment, savoring the air with sensitive nostrils and straining his keen ears for the slightest sign that might betoken the whereabouts of his erstwhile comrades.

Detecting nothing, he struck out for the higher ground, sensibly striving to put as much distance between the Apemen and himself as could be done. He could not be certain that all of the Drugars had taken to the dugouts; and, even if they had, it might well be a ruse. It was not beyond the dull wits of the Apemen to circle back to the shore at another point, scheming to take their former captives by surprise.

Jorn had not fled with the Professor, Darya and myself, but had taken another route, running for his life.

He had briefly glimpsed another of his countrymen ducking between the boles of the trees at the jungle’s edge, and thought him to be Fumio, but he could not be sure.

Finding a jungle aisle, Jorn picked up his pace, breaking into a long, loping stride that he could hold for hours, if necessary, without flagging.

But it was not his intention to attempt to return to his homeland of Thandar alone and empty-handed.

Not while Darya his princess was lost, accompanied only by the old man.

He intended to search every square foot of the jungle until he found them, whether alive or dead.

* * * *

Darya and the Professor did not go very far into the jungle before they became hopelessly lost. They paused to rest beside a pool of calm, clear water whose source was a rocky spring. Fanning his perspiring brow with his sun helmet, the Professor sagged limply onto a fallen log while Darya began searching along the margins of the pool.

“Whatever are you looking for, my dear?” the Professor inquired, after a time. The jungle girl showed him a handful of flat, smooth stones she had selected out of the mud.

“Indeed? And of what use to us are those pebbles?” he asked.

I have already described the one-piece, abbreviated fur garment that was Darya’s only attire, with its brief short skirt covering her upper thighs. Well, she reached down and pulled the fur aside, revealing a long leather thong bound snugly about her upper leg—and revealing quite a lot of naked, curvaceous leg at the same time.

The Professor flushed, and hastily averted his gaze, trying to remind himself that the innocent jungle maid had never learned the puritanical trait of shame at the exposing of her bare body. To her way of thinking, her body was young and healthy and in no wise ugly or deformed: why, then, be ashamed of it or strive to conceal it behind thick garments?

Ignoring the Professor’s flush of outraged modesty, the girl untied the thong, revealing a crude sling.

“Like this,” said Darya, fitting one of the smooth stones into the thickest place in the thong. Then, whirling the makeshift sling about her head, she loosed the stone with a practiced flip of her hand.

The flat stone whizzed through the air, striking the trunk of a nearby tree with much the impact of a bullet. Indeed, the flat edge of the stone remained imbedded in the hard wood until Darya pried it loose, showing it to the Professor.

He pursed his lips in a silent whistle of approval.

“David and Goliath, eh, my dear? Remarkable!” he wheezed.

The savage girl, of course, did not understand his Biblical allusion; but she sensed the approval and admiration in his voice, and smiled.

Then she sobered, looking wistfully back along the way they had come. Her perfect breasts rose and fell in a deep, disconsolate sigh. It did not take a mind-reader to ascertain the direction of her thoughts.

“You are thinking of Eric, are you not, my dear?” murmured the old man sympathetically. “Indeed, I am, too…I fear that we shall both miss the dear boy…ah, if only he had not turned back to delay the pursuit, he might be standing here with us now…and I, for one, would feel a lot more secure, I can assure you! Your skill with the sling is remarkable; but it will hardly serve to halt a charging dinosaur—”

“The men of my people have slain a goroth with such, ere now!” the girl informed him with flashing eyes, lifting her small, stubborn chin challengingly.

A goroth is an aurochs, and an aurochs is a prehistoric bull. The feat which Darya described was a remarkable one.

The Professor nodded. “I am quite impressed, my girl…but nonetheless, let us hope the larger saurians do not stray into these portions of the jungle—eh? What are you doing now—?”

His voice rose to a treble, for without a sign or word the jungle maid had reached up and slipped the strap of her brief fur garment off one rounded shoulder; the garment dropped about her waist and she shrugged out of it with a lithe twist of her flawless hips. Beneath the furs she wore nothing at all.

“Really, my dear young woman, what do you think you are doing?” the Professor gasped, blushing scarlet to the tips of his ears and hastily averting his eyes from the tempting expanse of bare girl-flesh so artlessly exposed to his gaze.

“’Darya shall bathe now,” said the girl, gesturing at the pool.

“Really! You might have asked me to turn my back!”

“Why?” the jungle girl asked, frankly curious, glancing down at herself as if to see what had alarmed the old man. The women of her tribe were accustomed to wear brief fur or hide garments for the sake of comfort, rather than modesty; and, for the life of her, the girl could see nothing wrong with the nudity of her flawless young body.

The Professor uttered a strangled croak, and hurriedly turned his back upon the scene. Shrugging with a little humorous frown, as if to say that she would never understand the ways of these strangers who wore so much clothing, the girl turned and slipped into the pool. Dunking herself to the shoulders she bent down, scooped up a double handful of the wet sand from the pool bottom, and began to scrub herself clean of the dust and stain of the long overland trek, while the Professor, his back stiff and the tips of his ears glowing scarlet, resolutely kept his back turned on this idyllic and innocent scene.

* * * *

But other eyes were riveted upon the scene, and they belonged to a tall man whose muscular body was stretched along a low branch which extended partway across the clearing.

The man was Fumio. He had fled with the others, but, doubling back, had striven to catch up with Eric Carstairs, the Professor, and the woman he desired. To find me separated from the other two was to Fumio an unexpected stroke of good fortune. And to find the naked girl bathing, while he was able to look on from a place of concealment, was to his thought a delightful opportunity.

Cold eyes glowing with lust, he gloated upon the sleek, wet body of the naked girl as she innocently exposed her bare breasts and thighs to his lascivious gaze. For very long had the chieftain Fumio lusted for Darya the gomad and yearned to take her for his mate. Only her father, the High Chief of the tribe, resisted his overtures: Tharn of Thandar was in the lusty prime of his manly strength, and required no mate for his daughter in order to secure the peaceful succession of the office into which his stalwart and iron strength had elevated him years before.

While he lived, Tharn could rebuff Fumio’s suit, as Darya had begged him to do. The High Chief was sensible of the strength and war-skill of the tall chieftain. But he doted upon his daughter and her wish was his law; so long as Darya did not wish to mate with Fumio, Tharn did not intend to force her to do so. Time enough to settle those matters when he was grown old and long past his prime.…

A man as strong and handsome as Fumio becomes accustomed to having his own way. To be denied the object of his desires only fed the flames of his lust, until that object grew into an overwhelming obsession with Fumio. Many and lovely were the young women of Thandar: but for Fumio, there was only one woman, and she remained cool to his advances and well beyond his reach.

But now she was well within his reach; now they were alone and in a hostile wilderness, with the rest of their fellow captives scattered afar. There was no one near to see or tell if Fumio should dare take the Chief’s daughter against her will, no one but one old man whom Fumio could break in half with his bare hands.

An unholy fire kindled in his cold gaze as Fumio, trembling with desire, caressed the nude, glistening body of the young girl with his gaze, lustfully drinking in her naked beauty.

At last he could withstand the temptation no longer. Soundless as a great cat, the savage warrior dropped from the tree branch to the ground. One powerful hand whipped out, catching the old Professor across the back of his head with a cruel, cowardly blow that toppled the older man forward into unconsciousness.

Then, wetting his lips with the tip of his tongue, Fumio sprang upon the girl as, humming a careless tune, she splashed cold water over her long, glistening bare legs. Seizing her with one strong arm about her slim waist, he dragged the shocked girl out of the water and flung her down upon her back in the long grasses.

Then he fell upon her, crushing her flat, crushing her soft mouth beneath his own in a long, ravenous kiss—

* * * *

It had puzzled me, when the Apemen forced me into one of their dugout canoes and cast off hurriedly, why they made no attempt to recapture their escaping prisoners, who surely could not have gone far. The apprehensive glances they cast down the shore, however, told me all: they feared that the pursuit which had for so long followed in their tracks was now close at hand.

It also puzzled me that One-Eye made no attempt at reprisal for the whipping I had given him. I believe now that the brutish wits of the Apemen were befuddled by the pummeling I had dealt him, and he had yet to figure out just what had felled him. Anyway, he was more afraid of the force of warriors he suspected to be at his heels, than he was interested in knocking me about. So into the canoes we went.

By the time we had reached the midpoint of our voyage and the shores of the island of Ganadol could dimly be glimpsed through the thick mists which cloaked the primeval sea, I understood the answer to the first puzzle.

I had been baffled by the reasoning of the Apemen…why they had been content with my capture alone, rather than pursuing the other fleeing captives. Eventually, as I saw them double back farther down along the shore, I understood their plan. The Neanderthal men might be slow and sluggish of thought, but their little brains were wily and cunning. They assumed—rightfully, as it turned out—that, once assured of their freedom, the Cro-Magnons would seek the edge of the sea of Sogar-Jad and follow it down the coast to their own kingdom of Thandar.

By beaching their dugout canoes below the point to which the escaping captives could have come, the Apemen planned to wait in ambush, hoping to recapture their captives.

It was not a bad scheme at all.

But something intervened.

Our first glimpse of “something” was a sudden turmoil is the slimy waters of the Sogar-Jad; the waves broke, seething, as a snake-like head as big as a rain barrel broke above the surface. The Apemen gobbled, pointing, eyes wide with naked fear.

“Yith! Yith!” they yelled in a fearful wail.

The flat-browed head rose on the end of a long and seemingly endless neck which upreared far above us, swaying snakily against the steamy skies of Zanthodon.

I couldn’t blame them for squalling. For the yith of the Sogar-Jad was a monstrous plesiosaur!1

As I sat there in the dugout canoe, frozen with astonishment and awe, the enormous aquatic reptile overturned two of the dugout canoes with his vast flippers. The Neanderthal men fell, squalling fearfully, into the sea. Then the beast turned to survey our craft, squinting down with hungry eyes. White foam sheeted before its breast as the plesiosaurus headed straight for us.

Our canoe wobbled unsteadily, as Fatso sprang to his feet, mad with fear.

I tensed: with my hands bound behind me, I was bound for a watery grave, without the slightest hope of survival. A vision flashed before my inward eye as the yith bore down upon us: the fine-boned, flawless face of a beautiful young girl with long, sleek hair like ripe corn and huge, luminous eyes of April blue—

Behind me, Hurok grasped my wrists. The blade of a flint knife sawed through my bonds. “Save yourself if you can, panjan,” he grunted.

My hands free, I sprang lithely to my feet.

Swifter than thought, I reached out, plucked my automatic from the waist of Fatso’s hide garment, clenched the barrel between my teeth, and jumped feet first into the waters of the sea!

I went down like a stone, then rose to the surface with a kick of my booted feet—

Whipping the water from my eyes, I stared up—

Into the jaws of Doom!

CHAPTER 12

I FIND A FRIEND

Treading water furiously, I reached up and snatched the automatic from between my teeth. I had been so briefly immersed beneath the waves, that it seemed unlikely to me that the gunpowder could have become too wet for the gun to fire; but I was about to find out—

Pointing swiftly, I fired in the very face of the monster reptile.

It was a lucky shot, and caught the plesiosaur full in one glaring eye. That eye vanished in a splatter of snaky gore; braking with a backwards flip of his flippers, the sea monster gave voice to a piercing screech of fury and pain, and, turning, dived beneath the waves again to assuage his hurt in the cool depths.

His plunge had overturned the canoe from which I had just dived into the sea. A floundering form broke the waves, arms waving wildly. I recognized him—it was Hurok, the one Neanderthal more friendly and chivalrous than his fellows, the warrior who had cut my hands free. He sank with a gurgle and I knew at once that he was unable to swim.

I shall never quite be able to explain my next action, even to myself; but it all happened so swiftly that rational thought played little part in the decision, which I reached by sheerest instinct.

I waited until he rose floundering and roaring to the surface again. Then I swam over to him and knocked him senseless with a good hard right to the jaw!

Well, there was nothing else to do: in his mindless terror, a drowning man will get a stranglehold on a would-be rescuer and drag him down to death with him.

Then I turned the unconscious Apeman over until he was floating on his back. Catching his heavy jaw in the crook of my arm, I struck out for shore as best I could. I have always been a good swimmer, but that was the most grueling ordeal any swimmer could ever have endured. Not only was I encumbered by my breeches and boots—but the Apeman I was towing along must have tipped the scales at three hundred pounds, dead weight. Also, I could scarcely breathe, with my automatic still clenched between my teeth.

How I ever made it to the shore is something I have not quite decided, myself. Suffice it to say that, after an interminable battle with the slimy waves of that steamy sea, I found myself lying face down in wet, sticky sand, with the undertow of the sea pulling at my legs as if trying stubbornly to suck me back into the clutch of the waves again.

Not far off, Hurok lay like a dead thing.

I lurched to my knees, dragged myself and the Apeman farther on up the beach, before collapsing again.

Then, utterly exhausted, I slept.

* * * *

When I awoke, I rolled over onto my back and squinted up into the sun, trying to estimate exactly how much time had elapsed while I had been unconscious. Then I remembered, ruefully, that here in Zanthodon there was no sun, and it was forever impossible to measure time. I could have slept an hour or a year, for all that I could ascertain from the heavens.

My clothes were dry, however, and so was my hair; so it would seem I had slumbered for at least two or three hours. I sat up, stiffly, and looked around me.

Hurok squatted on his hams, hairy arms propped on hairy knees, regarding me with a fathomless expression on his homely visage.

I grabbed for my gun, then drew back my fingers sheepishly. For the Neanderthal man had not moved nor flinched.

Neither did he say a word.

I looked beyond him, sniffing the air. A tantalizing aroma of cooked meat drifted on the sea wind.

A hole had been scraped in the sand of the beach. Therein a pile of driftwood had been touched afire, and the carcasses of two plucked seafowl had been spitted on sticks and were toasting over the snapping flames. I had not known there were actual birds in Zanthodon until that moment, but the pile of feathers was unmistakable.

“Why did you not attack me and slay me while I slept, Hurok?” I asked curiously. “For I have been given to understand that there is perpetual war between your kind and my own.”

“Hurok does not know,” he said in his slow, deep voice, and within his murky little eyes a gleam of thoughtfulness flickered. Then, after a moment, he attempted a question of his own.

“Why did you save Hurok from the death-of-water?”

I shook my head with a helpless grin. “I’m not entirely sure! I guess, because you cut my hands free just before I jumped, and gave me a chance to fight for survival…why did you do that, anyway?”

He shrugged, a ponderous heaving of furry shoulders, but said nothing. His long gaze was steady upon me, and there was some unreadable emotion in his dull gaze.

“How did you slay the yith?” he asked after a time. “It was like thunder from the sky. Are you sujat, Black Hair? Hurok thought you merely a panjan, but no panjan commands the thunder…”

I understood the meaning of panjan, which was what the Apeman called the Cro-Magnons: the word meant something like “Smooth-skin.” The plural was panjani. But sujat was a word new to me, and I was eager to add it to my growing vocabulary.

Hurok shrugged helplessly when I asked him to define the word, and searched for a way to describe what the term meant.

“The great beasts are sometimes sujat,” he said in his slow, dull way. “And storm and flood and fire.

Sometimes when Hurok sleeps he enters the sujat country…”

I gathered that the word was used for all inexplicable and mysterious phenomena, especially the convulsions of nature, but also dreams, if that is what he meant by his nocturnal journeys.

In other words, the supernatural! He had asked me if I were a ghost, a devil; or, perhaps, a god.

I sat up and began removing my boots to pour the sea water out of them. I set them near the fire to dry out.

“In the first place, old fellow, I doubt if I killed the plesiosaurus. I knocked out an eye, merely wounding him. But anyway, I am certainly no god.”

“How did Black Hair do it, then?” he demanded, reasonably. I showed him the automatic.

“With this: it is a weapon of my people.” He looked it over gingerly, daring only to touch it with one horny forefinger.

“Your people must be mighty in war, if they go armed with weapons that smite down the great beasts with the force of thunderbolts,” he grunted.

I shrugged.

He gestured. “Let Black Hair share Hurok’s kill. Later, Hurok and Black Hair will speak on what to do next.”

* * * *

Barbecued archeopteryx tasted pretty good, I must admit: oh, sure, the outside was burnt black and the inside was dripping and raw, but hunger is the best sauce, and I had worked up a ravenous appetite, what with battling Neanderthal men and plesiosaurs.

While we silently munched our bird-steaks, I did a bit of thinking.

I was not entirely sure that I could trust the Apeman. My lucky shot at the monster reptile had impressed him mightily, and my inexplicable kindness in saving him from drowning had stirred to life within his savage breast some murky emotion akin to gratefulness, true. But how long these feelings would hold in check his natural instinct to kill or take captive a panjan was another question entirely, and one whose answer was mightily important to me. I resolved to trust Hurok only as far as I had to, and not to turn my back on him.

His feelings in regard to myself were unfathomable. He stolidly chewed down his kill, glancing at me from time to time with a somber, frowning gaze, as if trying to make up his mind about something.

And I had other things to worry about.

For instance—where were we?

The Apeman had rowed their dugouts about halfway between Kor and the mainland, before turning about to double back along the coast. In the confusion, I had not really paid any attention to which direction I was swimming.

Now…were we on the coast of the mainland of Zanthodon, with the Professor and Jorn the Hunter and the girl Darya perhaps only a mile or two away?

Or had I dragged us up on the shores of the island of Ganadol, and were we within earshot of the Apemen of Kor?

The answer to that question was terribly important. Summoning up my nerve, I asked Hurok his opinion.

He squinted in every direction, then slowly shook his head.

“Hurok sees nothing that he has seen before,” he grunted. “But there are parts of the island he does not know, and parts of the mainland he has never seen.”

“What, then, should we do?” I asked. “Which way should we travel?”

He shook his head again, helplessly.

“Hurok and Black Hair shall go forward until they meet either panjan or Drugar,” he suggested simply.

“Then they will know where they are.”

There was, after all, nothing else to do.

* * * *

And so began a very unlikely friendship! Hurok was no better than the average of his kind, but from some rare gene he had inherited traits toward fairness and a certain rough justice that gave us at least a common ground whereon to meet.

He had cut my wrists free on sheerest impulse, unwilling to see a brave warrior drown without being able at least to fight the waves or cling to the overturned canoe. And I had carried him to shore, because it was not in me to watch a man who had done me even a simple kindness drown while I stood idly by.

Neither of us really understood the other—a half million years of evolution loomed between his kind and my own, and that is a formidable barrier—but survival is something we both understood. And survival is easier with teamwork.

Alone in the jungle, he or I might have fallen prey to the first hungry monster or enemy tribe we encountered. Standing together, sharing the toils and the dangers of the wilderness, we doubled our chances of coming out of this experience with a whole skin.

And that was something both of us could understand.

But neither trusted the other overmuch; both remained wary, and a trifle suspicious.

“Let us take the remnants of the zomak with us, Black Hair,” suggested Hurok with a grunt, zomak being his word for the archaeopteryx. I agreed, so we packed the leftovers from our lunch by the simple expedient of rolling the scraps of archaeopteryx-steak in the broad, flat leaves of a primitive tree. These Hurok thrust within his one-piece hide garment while I looked over my own clothing with a sour eye.

My boots were still sodden and the sea water and various earlier immersions in the mud of the swamps had cracked the leather.

My khaki shirt was a collection of rags, so I ripped it off and flung it aside. My breeches were in slightly better condition and I thought it likely that something could be salvaged of them. Borrowing Hurok’s flint knife, I cut the legs away, turning them into a pair of shorts. Not bad, I thought, looking them over; and certain to be more comfortable in this steamy climate!

My boots were hopeless, though. Various immersions in swamp mud had cracked and blistered the leather, and a long soak in sea water had finished them off: using the knife again, I cut away the sodden leather, trimming them down to merely the soles and a few long thongs; from this I manufactured a pair of strong sandals.

Then we plunged into the brush and began our trek.

Neither of us quite trusted yet in the other’s friendship or trustworthiness. That would come, I supposed, with time. In the meanwhile, we kept our distance from each other, warily, keeping an eye peeled for treachery.

At least while we were awake. The time would come, as it soon did, when we would be too weary to do aught but sleep, and then we must trust each other.

In the timeless noonday of Zanthodon, the urge to rest comes upon you unpredictably. One moment you are plodding doggedly along; the next, you can hardly keep your eyes open. When this happened to Hurok and me, after some hours of striking down the coast (or was it up the coast?), we simply climbed the tallest of the nearer trees, tied ourselves to the trunk, straddled a branch with spread legs, and caught such sleep as we could in a position so confoundedly uncomfortable.

There was no use in worrying about whether Hurok was going to stab me in my sleep, I decided. I was so bone-weary I could keep my eyes open no longer, and if he was going to stab, he was going to stab.

He must have felt the same way, for we both fell to sleep and only awoke, some hours later, to find ourselves staring into the fanged and dripping jaws of a gigantic cat—

1 Eric Carstairs appends a note to the effect that the cavemen of Zanthodon have their own names for the fearsom predators who share the Underground World with them. They call the Triceratops the grymp, for example, and the wooly mammoth is known as the thantor. At the end of this book I have added a brief appendix, listing and defining all of the words in proto-Aryan which Carstairs includes in the manuscript.