PART I: THE FUGITIVES

CHAPTER 1

THE HIDING PLACE

When the legions of Zar hurled themselves against the rearmost ranks of the corsairs, Jorn the Hunter found the moment he had been waiting for.

The Cro-Magnon boy gave Yualla the signal. Then he whirled, turning on the Zarian legionnaire assigned to guarding him, and kicked the astounded man in the stomach. As he sagged to his knees, gagging, the warrior could not have told which surprised him the most—the unexpected blow, or the fact that the hands of the youth were now free of their bonds.

In the same instant, Yualla had dispatched her own guard with her dagger. In the noise and tumult of battle, with the full attention of the Zarian warriors riveted on their foes, the Barbary Pirates, none but Murg noticed this burst of action.

Hastily stripping their guards of weapons, the boy and girl fled for safety behind tall boulders. From that vantage, they glided into thick bushes, seeking to circle the scene of battle and rejoin the tribe of Sothar from their rear.

As the two young people made their escape, Murg, who had been watching for just such an act, signaled to Xask, who was happy enough to have a reason to fall back into the rear. War was not one of Xask’s favorite recreations. After all, people can get themselves killed when swords are flashing and spears are flying!

As Zarys led her legions into the fray, Xask prudently retired to a safer position, well out of the way of the flashing scimitars, the thrusting tridents. Accompanied by his entourage of personal guards, he initiated pursuit of the escaping hostages. Along the way, Murg and his guard fell into step with them, although Murg was no happier in battles than was Xask, and heartily wished himself far away from all these brave, bloody events.

Having no way of reading Xask’s mind, then or now, I cannot say with certainty what motives urged the sly little vizier to race in pursuit of the youth and maiden. Perhaps he intended recapturing them, in order to trade their persons for my old friend, the Professor, whose brain held the secret of the thunder-weapon (as the folk of Zanthodon name my .45 automatic). Or perhaps he merely wished an excuse to put as much distance between his tender hide and the furious battle as could be done.

* * * *

Jorn and Yualla, once safely out of the sight of their former captors, took to their heels with alacrity. The handsome youth and his attractive blonde companion were young, their lithe bodies toughened by the adventures through which they had recently passed, and the Cro-Magnons are a hardy, healthy people. Hence it was not long before they outdistanced the men of Zar, who were smaller and less athletic and who were, of course, burdened by their bronze armor and heavy weapons.

The three-way battle between the Cro-Magnons, the Barbary Pirates, and the Zarians, had begun in an open, meadowy space at the mouth of the pass which wound its way through that soaring range of mountains known as the Peaks of Peril. It is perhaps ironic that so many of our adventures had taken place in the vicinity of this ominously and prophetically named range of mountains. The boy and girl had intended to circle through the underbrush until they reached the sheer and cliff-like wall of the mountains, then double back so as to rejoin their friends in the rear, where they stood embattled with their backs set against the cliff.

Once Jorn’s keen senses discovered that they were being pursued by armed men, of course, his plans required swift alteration. The two struck out into the midst of the grassy plain, hoping to evade their pursuers and probably, as well, hoping that the Zarians would give over the pursuit when it became impractical to continue it, and return to join their comrades in the fighting.

The plains north of the mountains were level and featureless, and afforded the fugitives scant opportunities for concealment. Once they had put a considerable distance between themselves and those that followed, it occurred to Jorn the Hunter that they might manage to hide themselves in the tall grasses. An act so obvious as that would not for long have managed to confuse the warriors or huntsmen of his own Cro-Magnon tribe, for of course they were seasoned veterans, accustomed to the rough and hardy life of the wilderness and the jungle, who spent much of their lives tracking beasts through the woods in order to hunt and kill. Such as they could swiftly and easily have followed the trail left by the fugitives in the disturbed leaves. and trampled grasses—as easily as you or I can peruse this printed page. But the Zarians were sophisticated city dwellers, no huntsmen, and to their dulled senses the trail left by the passage of Jorn and Yualla was all but invisible.

They had come to a shallow depression, where tall grass grew thick. It was here that the two sought to conceal themselves from their adversaries. It would have been but the action of mere moments for the two to crawl into the grasses, arranging the vegetation over them, and to lie still as rabbits seeking to evade the scrutiny of hawks.

Save for the unforeseen.…

Others had sought refuge in the shallow depression and had been hiding among the tall grasses, sensing the approach of tramping feet. These now exploded from their places of concealment, panicked by the two young people.

They were uld, small, edible, timid mammals resembling plump, diminutive deer. But deer they were not, for Professor Potter has identified them as eohippus, “dawn-horse,” the remote ancestors of the modern animal.

Jorn snarled an oath, for the scattering uld would draw attention to their hiding place; and attention was the last thing he wished at the moment, with half a dozen armed Zarian legionnaires on their tracks.

Even as Jorn had feared, the flight of the uld had caught the eye of one of the Zarians. He started, pointing. Xask snapped a command and the guards fell into arrowhead formation, plowing through the high grass in the direction from which the herd of uld had fled in all directions.

And Xask smiled thinly: it was only a matter of moments now before the fugitives were found and became his captives once again.

Things have a way of falling out differently from what you may hope or expect, in Zanthodon as in the world above. But only in Zanthodon could the next twist of fate have occurred.

For other eyes had sighted the flight of the panic-stricken miniature horses. Those eyes belonged to an omodon, and a hungry brute of an omodon. Generally, such as the mighty cave-bear of the Ice Age lurk among the rocky crags of the Peaks of Peril, but the lust to gorge its empty belly on raw red meat had driven this particular omodon down from the heights, to prowl and hunt upon the plain.

The great bear had small, weak eyes, for which reason it generally avoided the light of day, preferring the comfortable gloom of the mountainside cave it had seized for its lair. But its keen and sensitive nostrils more than made up for the inadequacy of its vision, and it had sniffed the tasty uld upon the wind.

The monster had been stealthily creeping through the tall grass to where it had smelled out the hiding place of the herd of uld. Now, as they exploded affrightedly in all directions, it came roaring to its feet, mad with fury and frustration.

And when the mighty cave-bear of the Ice Age rises to its full height, it is a fearsome thing to behold. Heavier and higher than two grizzlies was the omodon, and its huge paws, heavy as hammers, were armed with dreadful claws like scythes.

And this was the adversary that came bellowing and lumbering down on the place where Jorn the Hunter and Yualla of Sothar had sought to conceal themselves from danger and discovery among the tall grasses!

Jorn sprang to his feet, clutching his small bronze dagger futilely. It was, in fact, an imposing weapon filched from the guard he had felled, and long enough to hold at bay a human foe. But, against the giant bear that came lurching down upon him, seemingly as huge as a hill, the blade seemed small and useless. Nor was Yualla any better armed; now had both the youth and the maid good reason to regret not having taken up the spears their guards had let fall.

At the time, they had hastily reasoned the cumbersome weapons were too large and clumsy to be safely borne in flight.

Now they wished they had thought twice about that.

But now, of course, it was too late.

CHAPTER 2

AT THE BOATS

Intent on punishing the blond savages whom she believed to be the same host of barbarians that had earlier defeated her upon the great plains of the north, Zarys of Zar led her mailed legions forward at the charge, and assaulted the rear ranks of the Barbary Pirates who were also attacking the Cro-Magnons.

Who these other adversaries were, the Divine Zarys neither knew nor cared to know. It sufficed for the imperious and prideful young woman that they were in her way.

Her well-disciplined legions carved their way through the rear of the buccaneers, who scattered in all directions in surprise and consternation. The corsairs fell before the thrusting spears and tridents of the Zarian legion in the dozen and the score. In less time than it takes to tell, the Empress had cut a red path into the very heart of the strange, swarthy men who wore such curious and ridiculous garments.

As she did so, she came to the attention of Kâiradine Redbeard, who stopped fighting and stared at her with open mouth. She was certainly worth staring at, was Zarys of Zar: supple, half-naked, slim and lovely, her fiercely lovely face crowned with a curling mass of golden hair, her wonderful body clad in strangely shaped bits of gold-washed armor. High greaves, worked with scenes of the hunt and war, adorned her slender, graceful legs; a breastplate, cunningly molded to fit her figure, clad her high breasts and shielded her belly, and it was carven with mythological events and monsters. A sparkling, jeweled coronet completed her riding costume.

But it was not the stunning beauty of the ravishing girl that seized the astounded eye of the Redbeard, but the fact that he instantly recognized her as Darya, the jungle princess for whom he had conceived so violent a passion as to pursue her in her flight to this very scene of battle.

I have elsewhere remarked upon the fact that the Empress of Zar bore an amazing resemblance to my beloved Princess, despite the fact that they came of different races. Indeed, upon first laying eyes upon the Divine Empress of the Scarlet City, I myself had mistaken her for my darling Darya. So it is quite understandable that Kâiradine Redbeard made the same mistaken assumption.

He flung himself upon her without a moment’s hesitation, battering down her blade and seizing her lithe and supple body in his strong arms.

While he struggled to subdue the astounded and, naturally, infuriated young woman, Kâiradine directed his personal retinue of well-armed corsairs to engage the guards from whose midst he had seized Zarys. These were quickly dispatched.

The midst of a battle was no place to try to take captives, and had Kâiradine been less madly desirous of the girl he held in his arms, this might have occurred to him. But the Prince of the Barbary Pirates felt a violent and consuming lust for Darya of Thandar, and heretofore—quite maddeningly—she had managed to evade his embraces. Now that he had her at last, the farthest thing from his mind was to let her go.

When, exhausted, Zarys finally ceased struggling against him, the Redbeard swiftly bound and gagged the young woman. Then, turning abruptly to the amazed Moustapha, his second-in-command, who had watched these actions without comprehension, he curtly directed his lieutenant to take what actions he could to hold the corsair lines firm against their adversaries.

Without waiting for a reply, the Redbeard turned and began cutting his way through the confused and milling battle toward the distant beach where his longboats lay concealed.

In the whirling chaos into which the three-way battle had degenerated, he vanished from the knowledge of men and was gone, leaving the unhappy Moustapha to strive to hold together a rapidly deteriorating situation, which soon because quite hopeless.

* * * *

It had probably been in Kâiradine’s mind to leave his captive bound and helpless in the boats, returning to take command again. And here you see demonstrated one of the disadvantages of inditing a factual narrative, a difficulty not usually faced by the authors of mere fiction. This is, I have no way of knowing what was in the Redbeard’s mind and am only reconstructing the sequence of events from information which has come to me long after these events took place.

At length he reached that stretch of sandy shore bordering a swampy area, where pools of stagnant water were thickly grown with mangrove trees whose long and frondlike branches formed a veil of leafage. Here it was the corsairs had dragged their longboats up the beach to a place of hiding in the edges of the marsh, among the heavy shrubbery. They had chopped down with their cutlasses long palmlike leaves to drape across the boats, further concealing them from chance discovery.

And when he reached this place, the Prince of the Barbary Pirates found an unwelcome and unpleasant surprise awaiting him.

This beach formed part of the shores of the Sogar-Jad, as the subterranean sea was known to the Zanthodonians. And the waves of that steamy ocean are filled with innumerable varieties of marine life, dominant among which are the great aquatic saurians of Earth’s remotest dawn age.

Those who have perused the earlier volumes of these memoirs will recall the ferocious yith, or plesiosaur, which inhabits the depths of the Sogar-Jad. This monstrous reptile, and veritable double for the famous Sea Serpent of legend, had intervened in these adventures on two previous occasions. Most recently, one had attacked the flagship of Kâiradine himself, nearly biting off the right arm of the Redbeard.1

The monster which Kâiradine found browsing among the boats with no yith. It was seven times the size of the plesiosaur! Like a moving mountain of glistening, leathery flesh it was, with its slick hide covered with scaly excrescences and a neck long enough to top the tallest of the prehistoric conifers which lined the edge of the sandy beach.

Had Professor Potter been present, I imagine that the scrawny little savant would have identified the lumbering monstrosity as none other than the brontosaurus itself, the largest mammal that ever walked the world.

The Zanthodonians refer to the giant reptile as the gorgorog. I had yet to encounter a member of its species during my own travels and adventures through this prehistoric world, for they are few and but seldom encountered by men. The men of Zar had domesticated a smaller, lighter variety of the brontosaurus, which they call the thodar. But this was surely no thodar! It would have taken three of the smaller brutes to make up the huge bulk of this moving mountain.

Kâiradine shrank into the shelter of the trees, snarling Moslem curses. The Prince of the Barbary Pirates was no coward, but even his curved saber of shining Damascus steel would be as useless as a wisp of grass against six hundred tons of meat and muscle.

The reptile, unknown to Kâiradine, was no meat-eater but a vegetarian. It lumbered through the shallows on four legs thicker about than treetrunks, dipping its blunt-nosed head into the tidal pools, gulping and munching seaweed and other marine growths, as mild and harmless as a browsing milk cow.

As it lumbered through the marshy places, however, its huge and ponderous feet had heedlessly trampled into matchwood three of the longboats, and others had been dislodged from their moorings and were floating out to sea.

Kâiradine was in a quandary! He could hardly leave Zarys in one of the boats, so near to the giant reptile. Greatly daring, he might have gained one of the boats and rowed out to sea, where his ship lay at anchor. But the gorgorog was too close to the boats for him to attempt this.

What, then, to do?

The Redbeard narrowed his eyes, staring thoughtfully about. He noticed how the lazy washing of the waves caused the loose boats to drift to and fro. The tides were not strong enough at this point along the shore to suck them out to sea.…

I have never exactly understood why the underground ocean had tides at all, since, surely, the attraction of the moon as it waxed and waned could exert no influence on a body of water miles beneath the planet’s crust. Perhaps that the Sogar-Jad had tides at all, no matter how slight, was due to centrifugal force, caused by the Earth as it revolved upon its axis.

I do not know, and this is no place to inquire into such arcane matters. But one of the boats, freed of its mooring, had been carried a ways off down the shore, and lay floating in the shallows some considerable distance away from where the huge lumbering gorgorog browsed.

Kâiradine transferred his wriggling feminine burden to one broad shoulder, and crept through the trees, emerging from the cover of the trees at the point where the floating longboat was closest to the shoreline.

I suppose it was the plan of the Pirate Prince to board the boat, deposit his wriggling burden aft, and row her out to where the Barbary ship was anchored.

It was as good a plan as Kâiradine could have devised, given the circumstances.

But not quite good enough.

For the stealthy figure of the turbaned corsair with the half-naked blonde woman across one shoulder caught the glazed, indifferent eye of the brontosaurus.

Through what passed for its brain—a miniscule, atrophied organ probably no longer than a peanut—there flickered a gleam of idle curiosity.

Doubtless, never before in all its days had the monster reptile seen a bearded, swarthy man in brilliantly colorful silk pantaloons slinking along the beach with a struggling goldenhaired woman across one shoulder and a saber flashing in one gemmed fist.

Mild wonderment entered the gaze of the placid reptile. Its endless appetite momentarily lulled to repletion by the sea-salad which had served as its luncheon, the brontosaurus decided to investigate. A casual stroll along the beach, after all, is good for the digestion after a hearty meal.

Over his shoulder, Kâiradine looked and saw the great lumbering monster heading for him. Growling a curse, he turned on his heel and sprinted farther up the beach, away from where the empty long-boat bobbed up and down, so tantalizingly close.

At a leisurely pace, which shook the ground underfoot only slightly, the six-hundred-ton dinosaur followed inquiringly.

Soon both the pursuer and the pursued were far down the beach and out of sight.

CHAPTER 3

HUROK HAS A PROBLEM

While these things had been taking place, the battle had collapsed into a vast, noisy mob of confused, bewildered, leaderless men—in which only the Cro-Magnon warriors managed to keep their wits about them and press their advantage.

The corsairs had lost many of their number while trying to attack from the front and defend themselves from the rear. When Kâiradine Redbeard had vanished from their midst, many had lost heart and prudently flung down their weapons to take to their heels. Moustapha could do little or nothing about this, since even the leader of a host cannot be everywhere at once.

As for the Zarian legion, once their impetuous Empress had hurled herself into the van, only to disappear as if the earth had opened to swallow her up, they, too, fell into a demoralized disarray, which was only aggravated further with the discovery that the second-in-command, the nefarious Xask, had also mysteriously disappeared.

The Cro-Magnon tribe, augmented by the timely arrival of mighty Tharn of Thandar and his own host of warriors, found little difficulty in achieving the victory. The Barbary Pirates and the men of the lost colony of Minoan Crete, already deserting in droves, now flung down their weapons and sullenly surrendered.

Garth of Sothar and Tharn of Thandar, not wishing to needlessly encumber themselves with such a host of prisoners, simply confiscated and surrendered arms and let the captives go. Perhaps the defeated warriors would fall prey to the monstrous prehistoric beasts that roamed the wilderness, perhaps they would, after long wanderings, manage to find their way safely back again to their homelands. That was up to them, and, for their part, the Pirates and the Zarians departed hastily from the scene of their defeat.

The women and children, the aged and the injured, the twin tribes had sent through the mountain pass to the relative safety of the southern plains. Now heavily armed with sophisticated weapons of edged metal taken from the Barbary Pirates and the men of Zar, the fighting men of the tribes wasted no time in crossing the Peaks of Peril and rejoining those that had gone before.

* * * *

We made our camp on the plains of the south and rested and ate and took care of our wounds. Also, the chieftains conferred in council as to future courses of action.

“With the recovery of the gomad Darya, your daughter, my brother,” said Garth of Sothar, “no further reason exists to keep you and yours from returning to your homeland.”

Tharn solemnly agreed. He said: “My only remaining wish could be that your own daughter, the gomad Yualla, had survived the perils of the north, so that you could rejoice in the recovery of your child as I do in the recovery of my own.”

Garth thanked his fellow monarch for the sentiment, and said nothing further on this subject. At this time, my reader will understand, none of us had any way of knowing that Yualla still lived, or that young Jorn the Hunter had survived his dive into the mountain lake.

Once we were fed and rested and had bound our wounds, we departed, to cross the plain and enter the jungles. As explained earlier in these memoirs, the tribe of Sothar were homeless, for their country had been devastated by earthquake and volcanic eruption, precipitating them into hasty flight, followed by long wanderings. The two tribes had joined together out of a desire for the mutual protection afforded by numbers; since then, they had become close friends, and Tharn had offered them room in his country for their living places, for the forested plains of Thandar were broad and much land lay empty.

So the host that headed south into the jungles was far more numerous than the host that had originally marched north on the trail of the lost Princess Darya.

And to this number had also been added the many slaves who had fled with the Professor and me when the mad god, Zorgazon, had destroyed the Scarlet City of Zar2. These were men taken by the Zarian slavers from other scattered Cro-Magnon tribes which inhabited the little-known northern parts of the subterranean continent. Tharn and Garth had offered them a place among us, which they had gratefully accepted.

Several of them, in fact, had volunteered to join my own company of warriors, for I had become a chieftain high in the councils of the twin tribes. Among these were my stalwart friends, cheerful, merryhearted Thon of Numitor and that stolid but faithful giant, Gundar of Gorad, who had become my friends during the time we were penned up in the Pits of Zar, awaiting the Great Games of the God.

Also among my company were gallant Varak and his mate, Ialys of Zar, who had fled with us, and Grond of Gorthak and little Jaira, his mate, who had been slaves in the island fortress of El-Cazar. These, together with the other warriors of my company, such as mighty Hurok of Kor, had swelled the numbers in my service until we jestingly described ourselves as a miniature tribe, not just a company.

Each company seeks its own camping place, and lights its own cook-fires, and marches together. Hence, as we entered the edges of the jungle, we were a little apart from the others and forced to make our own path through the dense undergrowth and heavy foliage.

I was in the lead, of course, with Hurok the Neanderthal on my right hand, and Gundar on my left. The Cro-Magnon gladiator was the only panjani (as the Neanderthal Apemen of Kor refer to us) who could compare, in bulk and breadth of shoulder, in sheer physical might, to my old comrade Hurok, and venturing into the jungle I felt more comfortable with these two stalwarts at my side.

These jungles have many denizens, and among them are some of the most feared and savage beasts that ever roamed the upper world, the lumbering grymp, or triceratops, the vandar, as the Cro-Magnons name the dreaded sabertooth tiger, and the goroth (or prehistoric bull, known as the aurochs to science) are among these, and not the least among them, as you can imagine.

But the commotion made by the entry into the jungle country of such a host of warriors and their women, numbering over a thousand by now, drove even the more ferocious predators into hiding—a fact for which we all had cause to be thankful.

Still and all, we trod the jungle aisles warily, senses alert for the slightest sign of danger, weapons bared and ready in—

After a time, I began to notice that Hurok seemed unusually somber and silent, even for one given to few words. I glanced at the burly form of my friend curiously. Finally I spoke up.

“Why are you so silent, Hurok?” I asked. “Is anything bothering you in particular?”

“There is a certain matter on Hurok’s mind,” admitted the Apeman of Kor in his slow, deep voice, “but naught that concerns his friend Black Hair.”

“Anything that worries the mind of Hurok, worries his friend Black Hair,” I said. “For Black Hair and Hurok of Kor are more than friends: they are brothers.”

A gleam of pleasure momentarily brightened the small, dull eyes, buried under heavy neanderthaloid brow-ridges. Then it was gone, but I knew it for his version of a smile.

“Perhaps at a later time,” he said heavily, “Hurok the Drugar will apprise Black Hair the panjani of that which is in his heart.”

I was troubled by these words, and did not like the sound of them. For one thing, “Drugar” is the word by which the Cro-Magnons call the Apeman of Kor, and it is more or less to be considered a derogatory term. “Panjani” is the word the Apemen of Kor use for the Cro-Magnons: it means “smooth-skins.”

It bothered me that Hurok employed these terms. I could remember earlier occasions when he found himself unwelcome among the fighting men of Thandar because of his race, which they have good reason to detest. Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon have been at war since first their remotest ancestors found their way into the hidden cavern world of Zanthodon, and they remain blood foes to this day. But Hurok had long since earned the respect and the friendship of the Cro-Magnon comrades by whose side he had fought many battles and braved the perils of the wilderness.

I said nothing more, assuming that in his own good time, my huge, hairy friend would unburden his heart to me.

And made thereby a mistake I later had cause to regret.…one, if I may say so, among very many!

* * * *

The misty-golden skies of Zanthodon know neither sun nor moon, neither night nor day. A perpetual late-afternoon light illuminates the humid atmosphere of the Underground World, under the vast curve of its cavernous roof. This mysterious luminescence, which derives neither from sun nor moon nor stars, is belived to be caused by some chemical action akin to phosphorescence.

Lacking sun and moon, the men and women of Zanthodon know neither day nor night. Unaware of these divisions of time, they tend to sleep whenever they become sleepy, and to awaken when they are sufficiently rested.

After we had cut our way through the thick jungles below the plain of the thantors3 for what must have been many hours, weariness overcame us, and the desire for sleep.

Each company of warriors chose its own ground and posted its own sentinels. Hurok volunteered to take the first watch, with no particular reason; I think I assumed the glum old fellow wished to be alone with his thoughts.

When we awoke, he was gone.

CHAPTER 4

XASK RUNS INTO TROUBLE

When the great cave bear came rearing up on its hind legs and burst into a lumbering charge, Jorn and Yualla sprang from their places of concealment in the tall grass.

Since there was no way of fighting the monster with the weapons they held, their only recourse lay in flight. For the Cro-Magnon youngsters were young and lithe and swiftfooted, and could easily outrun the shaggy ponderous brute.

Instinctively, they took opposite directions so as to confuse the beast and make him pause to consider which fleeing youngster to pursue. Not looking back, they raced off into the plain.

The omodon paused uncertainly, peering with small, weak eyes after the two escaping morsels, growling hungrily, trying to make up what passed for its mind.

This was the scene which confronted Xask and Murg and the six guards when they came pelting up to the spot from which the uld had scattered. The Zarians came to a stumbling halt, staring at the shaggy monster. At its full height, the omodon towered twenty feet high, and seemed a veritable ogre to the small slightly-built legion warriors. Spying them, it opened an enormous fanged maw, roared its angry challenge, and came charging down upon them with an earthshaking stride.

In no time it was among them, hammer-heavy paws batting them aside. One guard went flying, his skull shattered. Another staggered back, pawing at the gory ruin of its face, slashed to ribbons with one swipe of the bear’s huge, fearsomely armed paw. A third screamed and fell, disemboweled at a stroke.

Only one guard stood and faced the lumbering hill of fury muscle that came thundering down upon him. He thrust with a lightning-swift stroke, sinking the keen points of his metal trident in the bear’s belly. Instead of felling or even slowing the cave-bear, the wound only seemed to infuriate him.

He caught up the guard in the grip of those great paws.

And bit his head off.

That was enough for Xask! Without further ado, watching his guards fall before the angry brute, the prudent vizier turned and took to his heels.

Murg hovered indecisively, squeaking, licking dry lips with a dry tongue. Then he took off in the same direction Xask had taken. A tall stand of trees stood in the midst of the plain, some distance away; it was the only thing in sight that might afford a safe haven, and toward it Xask had instinctively fled.

Murg followed.

Seeing its fleet-footed prey vanish in the distance, the bear grunted sourly. It quickly dispatched the last of the guards, then squatted on its hunkers to regard the gore-splashed corpses strewn and sprawled about amid the trampled grasses.

Most bears in the upper world prefer fat grubs, insects or leafy vegetation. The great cave-bear of the Ice Age, however, was less fussy in its tastes, and had developed a hearty fondness for raw meat.

Dragging the nearer corpse over to where it squatted, the bear sniffed at the bloody thing. It vastly preferred the timid, tasty uld—man-meat was stringy and sour. Still and all, hunters cannot be choosers.

It began to feed.…

* * * *

After about an hour, Yualla caught up with Jorn, having left the omodon far behind, finishing its meal. Neither of the young people was even winded by the rapid pace they had maintained across the plain, but it was good to pause and rest a little. They found a sheltered pool, nestled in the shoulder of one of the foothills of the Peaks of Peril, and satisfied their thirst therein.

Their flight from the cave-bear had carried them far into the midst of the plain, where it bordered the range of gray peaks. They were, in fact, near to the point at which the mountains petered out, diminishing into hills and hummocks.

While they rested, they discussed the situation.

“There is no point in retracing our steps to the scene of battle, for by this time our people have either won or lost the contest,” remarked Jorn thoughtfully.

“They will have sent the women and children, the aged and the injured, through the pass to the safety of the far side of the mountains,” Yualla said.

“It would be a lot easier to circle the end of the range here and rejoin the survivors on the other side,” murmured Jorn.

Yualla agreed with his choice of actions. Taking up their weapons, the two Cro-Magnon youngsters began making their way through the foothills at the end of the mountain range. They traced a path through narrow, rocky defiles, a mazelike labyrinth, which consumed much more time than it should.

Jorn and Yualla were alert for danger. These mountains were the haunts of many dangerous beasts, among whom the omodon was but one. Sabertooth tigers made their rocky lairs in the flanks of the mountains, and upon the summit of the peaks thakdols nested.

Having once been carried off by a hungry thakdol, Yualla had no particular wish to repeat the experience.

The thakdol is the bat-winged flying reptile the scientists of the Upper World call the pterodactyl, so you can imagine how the cavegirl felt.

The Peaks of Peril, you see, were aptly named.…

* * * *

Whatever gods watch over the wandering adventurers of Zanthodon seemed to have taken the Cro-Magnon couple under their care, for despite the numerous savage denizens of the Peaks of Peril, Jorn and Yualla encountered no further dangers during their journey through the hills.

Before the world was very much older, they found themselves on the southern side4 of the mountains, and saw before them the broad and level plain of the thantors, and, beyond these, the dark edges of the jungle country.

For a time they went along the flanks of the mountains, heading back in the direction from which they had fled. At length weariness overcame them and they prepared to sleep. They had also, by this time, developed hearty appetites—young Cro-Magnons being no different in that wise than the young people of the Upper World.

Since no game surfaced to visibility, there was nothing to do about their hunger except to attempt to forget it and seize the opportunity to sleep.

Finding a cozy nook among the rocks, they rolled up the long, dry grasses into a soft bed, and composed themselves for slumber.

Jorn was acutely aware of Yualla’s nearness. He had fallen in love with the pretty Cro-Magnon maid during their adventures together, and young blood ran hot in his healthy body. But he tried to ignore the tempting nearness and pretend he did not feel the desires that surged within him.

The Cro-Magnons, our remote ancestors, enjoyed a simpler and less complicated code of behavior than the cumbersome system of laws and restrictions our modern urban civilization imposes. They bare their bodies before members of the opposite sex indifferently, uncaringly, but when they mate it is a serious commitment for life.

Hence Jorn’s forbrearance and, also, his discomfort.

Perhaps it would have comforted him to know that Yualla was every bit as aware of his own nearness as he was of hers. Nor did she ache the less to feel his arms about her and his lips upon her own.

The two spent an uncomfortable night.

I use the word to simplify the need for explanations. In a world without sun or moon, a world bathed in perpetual day, there is no such condition as night.

* * * *

Jorn awoke first and lay very still and remained quiet. Sensing her companion, against whose naked body she lay nestled, Yualla roused herself, yawned hugely, stretched, and asked him how he had slept.

When he did not at once answer, she rolled over and looked at him. And quickly understood the reason for his silence.

It is hard to speak with the point of a long spear just tickling your Adam’s apple.…

CHAPTER 5

KÂIRADINE HAS A BAD DAY

Kâiradine looked distinctly unhappy, and indeed the Prince of El-Cazar was extremely unhappy. So would you have been, had you been misfortunate enough to have been in his predicament.

It is bad enough being chased by an inquisitive dinosaur, but it is even worse being treed by one. For the better part of an hour, the enormous brontosaurus had lumbered about the sandy beach, mildly curious as to what had become of the peculiar man-things she had followed all this way. It never occurred to the dim intelligence of the monstrous herbivore to look into the treetops: had she done so, she would have observed the hapless Redbeard uncomfortably stradding a branch, but she5 did not.

His gorgeous silken pantaloons were ripped and torn by the rough bark of the trunk he had so hastily climbed. His turbaned headdress had been knocked askew when his head collided with a branch he had not noticed.

To make it worse, it had begun to rain.

The sudden showers of Zanthodon are warm, for the climate is mild; also, they are quickly over. You get just as wet and miserable from them, however, as when you are caught in the rains of the Upper World.

To make things even less comfortable for the buccaneer, the drenching rains had made the red dye which stained his trim, small fringe of beard run, and the reddish stuff was trickling down his throat to stain his shirt.

As for Zarys, who sat side-saddle on the next branch, the Divine Empress of Zar had seldom gone through such a heady variety of violent emotions in so brief a time.

First there had been the unheard-of experience of having the tall leader of the corsair host fling himself so unexpectedly upon her, crushing her in his arms, and carrying her off, bound and helpless and in a fury such as the gorgeous young woman had never known. Incredulity stung her to venomous rage. Never in all of the years of her young life had the Sacred Empress of the Scarlet City been so rudely handled by a mere man—that he had dared attack her in the first place was amazing enough, but to have trussed her like a roped uld, tossed her across one broad shoulder, and carried her off into the wilderness was a lese majesté beyond description.

There was little or nothing she could have done about it at the moment, of course, although she struggled like an infuriated leopardess in the prison of his brawny arms, snarling imprecations, spitting curses, and uttering imperious commands which went completely ignored and which were, in fact, soon quite effectively cut off by the sudden imposition of a gag.

To make matters worse, all the while, obviously enjoying the pressure of her warm and supple, half-naked body against his own, the Redbeard had grinned down exultantly at his beautiful, if furious, and very helpless, captive.…

But now the Empress had gone from one extreme to another. If it was insulting and outrageous to be carried off like a slave girl by the corsair, it was distinctly less pleasant to be forced to climb a tall tree in order to escape the unwelcome attentions of the most enormous reptile she had ever seen, this side of Zorgazon himself, her co-divinity and, technically, her “mate.”

Now, panting, disheveled, soaked to the skin, weary from her exertions, she clung to the branch and endured the downpour as best she could.

At least, her hands and legs were free of their bonds; that was one good thing about her present uncomfortable predicament! Strong as he was, with his newly healed shoulder, Kâiradine Redbeard could hardly have climbed the tree encumbered by one hundred and fifteen pounds of furiously struggling woman. So he had cut her bonds and urged her up the trunk ahead of him at sword-point.

By this time, it had become perfectly obvious to the Pirate Prince that he had carried off the wrong girl. Not that the voluptuous descendant of the ancient monarchs of Crete was not worth carrying off, of course: it was simply that she was not Darya, although her resemblance to the Cro-Magnon girl was incredible.

For one thing, Kâiradine knew that the savage tribes which inhabited the Underground World—Cro-Magnon and Neanderthal alike—share in common the same universal tongue I have called Zanthodonian. Only the Zarians and the Barbary Pirates have languages of their own: the Zarians speak an obsolete, classical form of the little-known ancient Minoan tongue, while the corsairs converse in a debased form of Arabic.

Never before having encountered any of the people of the Scarlet City, the Pirate Prince had no idea what language it was that Zarys was cursing him in. But he knew that Darya of Thandar could speak only in Zanthodonian, so this could not be she.

Also, he had discovered to his surprise that the young woman was bald as an egg!

Her golden hair was thus revealed as naught but a wig of spun gold wire, which had been knocked askew as had his own turban by collision with the same unseen branch.

All in all, it just had not been Kâiradine’s day.…

* * * *

In time, things got a little better. For one thing, the rains stopped as abruptly as they had begun. For another, the great bronto had forgotten about the humans it had pursued out of harmless and idle curiosity, and went lumbering off in search of a second helping of sea-salad, dragging its huge and heavy tail behind it.

They clambered down the tree and stood there for a moment, looking at each other.

Kâiradine had never seen a woman clad in gold-washed armor and jeweled coronet—a woman who acted so imperiously as this one, being accustomed to harem women and tavern wenches. He looked her over puzzledly, rather liking what he saw.

For her part, Zarys had never encountered a man anything like Kâiradine Redbeard before, either, and she was looking him up and down with much the same curiosity.

He was lean and dark-skinned, this descendent of Desert Hawks and the Wolves of the Sea, and taller than the men of Zar, with an impressive musculature and long legs, wolfishly handsome with his aquiline nose and brilliant eyes.

He was quite a lot of man, was Kâiradine; a black-hearted villain, of course, but still…quite a lot of man. Zarys was intrigued in spite of herself. Accustomed from childhood to cringing and servile courtiers—all oily flattery and seductive gallantries—she rather liked the looks of this hard, rangy island princeling, with his unfamiliar but colorful raiment and sheer virility. He was so unlike the men she had always known…!

“Well?” she snapped, after a good long look. “Are you going to stand there gawking at me? Why did you carry me off—where are we—what are your intentions—where are you going—and what are you going to do?”

A bit dazed by the directness of this torrent of inquiries, the Redbeard hemmed and hawed a bit, trying to figure out just what he was going to do. He stared up and down the beach, striving to remember from which direction he had come. The tide had erased his footprints by now, and the rain had finished up the job. Also, he had turned this way and that, back-tracking and circling about, dashing hither and yon, crawling into thickets, hiding in tall grasses, all in a vain attempt to shake the pursuing brontosaurus off their trail. But the inquisitive, if slow-thinking, monster reptile had simply come lumbering on, refusing to become confused.

Anyway, all this running about and doubling back and so on—while it had not managed to confuse the inquisitive saurian—had certainly gotten Kâiradine Redbeard confused, to such an extent that he could not at once with any certainty reckon his present position in relation to the whereabouts of his embattled corsairs or his ship. Strain his hawk-sharp eyes as he might, he could see no sign of the corsair vessel. Either he had run a greater distance than he had first assumed, or it could not be seen because of the misty, humid atmosphere.

It did not at once occur to Kâiradine that his men, slouching back from the battle in which they had suffered so humiliating a defeat, had found the surviving boats and rowed back to their ship and sailed away for El-Cazar.

I suspect this was the case, for we never ran into the Barbary Pirates again, but I do not really know. The Empress seated herself on a fallen log, straightened her golden wig, and crossed her arms upon her perfect breasts, eyeing the Barbary Pirate with an aloof and lofty expression.

“We are hungry,” she informed him coolly.

Well, so was Kâiradine, by that time. He looked about in a determined but helpless fashion. Dirk and dagger and slim saber of Damascus steel were his only weapons, useless for slaying seafowl or bringing down a plump uld. He began to scout around for sustenance.

He was quite unhappy.

In time, with a disdainful sniff, Zarys deigned to join him in the food-shopping. It was Zarys who found the seaside nest of the zomak, or archeopteryx, filled with large, succulent and unhatched eggs. It was also Zarys who found clams and other edible shellfish in a tidal pool. All that the Redbeard was able to come up with was a few ripe fruits, berries, and a handful of nuts which the Empress disdained as too green to eat.

They made a fire in a hole dug in the beach, cooked the eggs and boiled the shellfish in a hollow gourd full of saltwater. They munched this crude repast moodily, and Kâiradine gamely and stubbornly chewed and swallowed down the green nuts which Zarys had rejected.

After this scant meal, weariness overcame them. They went to sleep in the bushes, Zarys careful to keep well apart from the Barbary Prince.

They slept.

Kâiradine awoke in acute discomfort, discovering that the woman had been right, after all: the nuts were too green to be safely eaten.

He trotted down the beach a ways and was noisily sick into the sand. Not yet asleep, Zarys smiled a catlike smile of deep, feminine satisfaction to hear him at it, then curled up cozily and fell into a deep, refreshing slumber.

It served him right.…

1 You will find this scene described at length in the fourth volume of these books, a novel entitled Darya of the Bronze Age.

2 The titanic Zorgazon, a tyrannosaurus rex, demolished the city of Zar in scenes described in the third volume of these memoirs a book entitled Hurok of the Stone Age.

3 So called because of the famous stampede of the herd of thantors, or woolly mammoths, which occurred on those plains, in which the host of the Apemen of Kor was virtually destroyed. See the first volume of this series, Journey to the Underground World.

4 Eric Carstairs adds a footnote here, to the effect that the compass directions are unknown in the Underground World, but in order to make clear the directions of travel, he adopted an arbitrary system of his own devising. Thandar lay to the south, the Sogar-Jad to the west, and the Scarlet City of Zar to the east. At the moment, Jorn and Yualla are in the north.

5 I have no idea why Eric Carstairs chose to refer to the huge gorgorog by the feminine pronoun, but it could hardly have been from any personal knowledge of “her” gender!