"Good!" exclaimed the ape-man, clambering to her side. "You are
unharmed?" he asked.
"You came just in time," replied Pan-at-lee; "but who are you and how
did you know that I was here and what do you know of Om-at and where
did you come from and what did you mean by calling Om-at, gund?"
"Wait, wait," cried Tarzan; "one at a time. My, but you are all
alike--the shes of the tribe of Kerchak, the ladies of England, and
their sisters of Pal-ul-don. Have patience and I will try to tell you
all that you wish to know. Four of us set out with Om-at from Kor-ul-JA
to search for you. We were attacked by the Kor-ul-lul and separated. I
was taken prisoner, but escaped. Again I stumbled upon your trail and
followed it, reaching the summit of this cliff just as the hairy one
was climbing up after you. I was coming to investigate when I heard
your scream--the rest you know."
"But you called Om-at, gund of Kor-ul-JA," she insisted. "Es-sat is
gund."
"Es-sat is dead," explained the ape-man. "Om-at slew him and now Om-at
is gund. Om-at came back seeking you. He found Es-sat in your cave and
killed him."
"Yes," said the girl, "Es-sat came to my cave and I struck him down
with my golden breastplates and escaped."
"And a lion pursued you," continued Tarzan, "and you leaped from the
cliff into Kor-ul-lul, but why you were not killed is beyond me."
"Is there anything beyond you?" exclaimed Pan-at-lee. "How could you
know that a lion pursued me and that I leaped from the cliff and not
know that it was the pool of deep water below that saved me?"
"I would have known that, too, had not the Kor-ul-lul come then and
prevented me continuing upon your trail. But now I would ask you a
question--by what name do you call the thing with which I just fought?"
"It was a Tor-o-don," she replied. "I have seen but one before. They
are terrible creatures with the cunning of man and the ferocity of a
beast. Great indeed must be the warrior who slays one single-handed."
She gazed at him in open admiration.
"And now," said Tarzan, "you must sleep, for tomorrow we shall return
to Kor-ul-JA and Om-at, and I doubt that you have had much rest these
two nights."
Pan-at-lee, lulled by a feeling of security, slept peacefully into the
morning while Tarzan stretched himself upon the hard floor of the
recess just outside her cave.
The sun was high in the heavens when he awoke; for two hours it had
looked down upon another heroic figure miles away--the figure of a
godlike man fighting his way through the hideous morass that lies like
a filthy moat defending Pal-ul-don from the creatures of the outer
world. Now waist deep in the sucking ooze, now menaced by loathsome
reptiles, the man advanced only by virtue of Herculean efforts gaining
laboriously by inches along the devious way that he was forced to
choose in selecting the least precarious footing. Near the center of
the morass was open water--slimy, green-hued water. He reached it at
last after more than two hours of such effort as would have left an
ordinary man spent and dying in the sticky mud, yet he was less than
halfway across the marsh. Greasy with slime and mud was his smooth,
brown hide, and greasy with slime and mud was his beloved Enfield that
had shone so brightly in the first rays of the rising sun.
He paused a moment upon the edge of the open water and then throwing
himself forward struck out to swim across. He swam with long, easy,
powerful strokes calculated less for speed than for endurance, for his
was, primarily, a test of the latter, since beyond the open water was
another two hours or more of gruelling effort between it and solid
ground. He was, perhaps, halfway across and congratulating himself upon
the ease of the achievement of this portion of his task when there
arose from the depths directly in his path a hideous reptile, which,
with wide-distended jaws, bore down upon him, hissing shrilly.
Tarzan arose and stretched, expanded his great chest and drank in deep
draughts of the fresh morning air. His clear eyes scanned the wondrous
beauties of the landscape spread out before them. Directly below lay
Kor-ul-GRYF, a dense, somber green of gently moving tree tops. To
Tarzan it was neither grim, nor forbidding--it was jungle, beloved
jungle. To his right there spread a panorama of the lower reaches of
the Valley of Jad-ben-Otho, with its winding streams and its blue
lakes. Gleaming whitely in the sunlight were scattered groups of
dwellings--the feudal strongholds of the lesser chiefs of the Ho-don.
A-lur, the City of Light, he could not see as it was hidden by the
shoulder of the cliff in which the deserted village lay.
For a moment Tarzan gave himself over to that spiritual enjoyment of
beauty that only the man-mind may attain and then Nature asserted
herself and the belly of the beast called aloud that it was hungry.
Again Tarzan looked down at Kor-ul-GRYF. There was the jungle! Grew
there a jungle that would not feed Tarzan? The ape-man smiled and
commenced the descent to the gorge. Was there danger there? Of course.
Who knew it better than Tarzan? In all jungles lies death, for life and
death go hand in hand and where life teems death reaps his fullest
harvest. Never had Tarzan met a creature of the jungle with which he
could not cope--sometimes by virtue of brute strength alone, again by a
combination of brute strength and the cunning of the man-mind; but
Tarzan had never met a GRYF.
He had heard the bellowings in the gorge the night before after he had
lain down to sleep and he had meant to ask Pan-at-lee this morning what
manner of beast so disturbed the slumbers of its betters. He reached
the foot of the cliff and strode into the jungle and here he halted,
his keen eyes and ears watchful and alert, his sensitive nostrils
searching each shifting air current for the scent spoor of game. Again
he advanced deeper into the wood, his light step giving forth no sound,
his bow and arrows in readiness. A light morning breeze was blowing
from up the gorge and in this direction he bent his steps. Many odors
impinged upon his organs of scent. Some of these he classified without
effort, but others were strange--the odors of beasts and of birds, of
trees and shrubs and flowers with which he was unfamiliar. He sensed
faintly the reptilian odor that he had learned to connect with the
strange, nocturnal forms that had loomed dim and bulky on several
occasions since his introduction to Pal-ul-don.
And then, suddenly he caught plainly the strong, sweet odor of Bara,
the deer. Were the belly vocal, Tarzan's would have given a little cry
of joy, for it loved the flesh of Bara. The ape-man moved rapidly, but
cautiously forward. The prey was not far distant and as the hunter
approached it, he took silently to the trees and still in his nostrils
was the faint reptilian odor that spoke of a great creature which he
had never yet seen except as a denser shadow among the dense shadows of
the night; but the odor was of such a faintness as suggests to the
jungle bred the distance of absolute safety.
And now, moving noiselessly, Tarzan came within sight of Bara drinking
at a pool where the stream that waters Kor-ul-GRYF crosses an open
place in the jungle. The deer was too far from the nearest tree to risk
a charge, so the ape-man must depend upon the accuracy and force of his
first arrow, which must drop the deer in its tracks or forfeit both
deer and shaft. Far back came the right hand and the bow, that you or I
might not move, bent easily beneath the muscles of the forest god.
There was a singing twang and Bara, leaping high in air, collapsed upon
the ground, an arrow through his heart. Tarzan dropped to earth and ran
to his kill, lest the animal might even yet rise and escape; but Bara
was safely dead. As Tarzan stooped to lift it to his shoulder there
fell upon his ears a thunderous bellow that seemed almost at his right
elbow, and as his eyes shot in the direction of the sound, there broke
upon his vision such a creature as paleontologists have dreamed as
having possibly existed in the dimmest vistas of Earth's infancy--a
gigantic creature, vibrant with mad rage, that charged, bellowing, upon
him.
When Pan-at-lee awoke she looked out upon the niche in search of
Tarzan. He was not there. She sprang to her feet and rushed out,
looking down into Kor-ul-GRYF guessing that he had gone down in search
of food and there she caught a glimpse of him disappearing into the
forest. For an instant she was panic-stricken. She knew that he was a
stranger in Pal-ul-don and that, so, he might not realize the dangers
that lay in that gorge of terror. Why did she not call to him to
return? You or I might have done so, but no Pal-ul-don, for they know
the ways of the GRYF--they know the weak eyes and the keen ears, and
that at the sound of a human voice they come. To have called to Tarzan,
then, would but have been to invite disaster and so she did not call.
Instead, afraid though she was, she descended into the gorge for the
purpose of overhauling Tarzan and warning him in whispers of his
danger. It was a brave act, since it was performed in the face of
countless ages of inherited fear of the creatures that she might be
called upon to face. Men have been decorated for less.
Pan-at-lee, descended from a long line of hunters, assumed that Tarzan
would move up wind and in this direction she sought his tracks, which
she soon found well marked, since he had made no effort to conceal
them. She moved rapidly until she reached the point at which Tarzan had
taken to the trees. Of course she knew what had happened; since her own
people were semi-arboreal; but she could not track him through the
trees, having no such well-developed sense of scent as he.
She could but hope that he had continued on up wind and in this
direction she moved, her heart pounding in terror against her ribs, her
eyes glancing first in one direction and then another. She had reached
the edge of a clearing when two things happened--she caught sight of
Tarzan bending over a dead deer and at the same instant a deafening
roar sounded almost beside her. It terrified her beyond description,
but it brought no paralysis of fear. Instead it galvanized her into
instant action with the result that Pan-at-lee swarmed up the nearest
tree to the very loftiest branch that would sustain her weight. Then
she looked down.
The thing that Tarzan saw charging him when the warning bellow
attracted his surprised eyes loomed terrifically monstrous before
him--monstrous and awe-inspiring; but it did not terrify Tarzan, it
only angered him, for he saw that it was beyond even his powers to
combat and that meant that it might cause him to lose his kill, and
Tarzan was hungry. There was but a single alternative to remaining for
annihilation and that was flight--swift and immediate. And Tarzan fled,
but he carried the carcass of Bara, the deer, with him. He had not more
than a dozen paces start, but on the other hand the nearest tree was
almost as close. His greatest danger lay, he imagined, in the great,
towering height of the creature pursuing him, for even though he
reached the tree he would have to climb high in an incredibly short
time as, unless appearances were deceiving, the thing could reach up
and pluck him down from any branch under thirty feet above the ground,
and possibly from those up to fifty feet, if it reared up on its hind
legs.
But Tarzan was no sluggard and though the GRYF was incredibly fast
despite its great bulk, it was no match for Tarzan, and when it comes
to climbing, the little monkeys gaze with envy upon the feats of the
ape-man. And so it was that the bellowing GRYF came to a baffled stop
at the foot of the tree and even though he reared up and sought to
seize his prey among the branches, as Tarzan had guessed he might, he
failed in this also. And then, well out of reach, Tarzan came to a stop
and there, just above him, he saw Pan-at-lee sitting, wide-eyed and
trembling.
"How came you here?" he asked.
She told him. "You came to warn me!" he said. "It was very brave and
unselfish of you. I am chagrined that I should have been thus
surprised. The creature was up wind from me and yet I did not sense its
near presence until it charged. I cannot understand it."
"It is not strange," said Pan-at-lee. "That is one of the peculiarities
of the GRYF--it is said that man never knows of its presence until it
is upon him--so silently does it move despite its great size."
"But I should have smelled it," cried Tarzan, disgustedly.
"Smelled it!" ejaculated Pan-at-lee. "Smelled it?"
"Certainly. How do you suppose I found this deer so quickly? And I
sensed the GRYF, too, but faintly as at a great distance." Tarzan
suddenly ceased speaking and looked down at the bellowing creature
below them--his nostrils quivered as though searching for a scent.
"Ah!" he exclaimed. "I have it!"
"What?" asked Pan-at-lee.
"I was deceived because the creature gives off practically no odor,"
explained the ape-man. "What I smelled was the faint aroma that
doubtless permeates the entire jungle because of the long presence of
many of the creatures--it is the sort of odor that would remain for a
long time, faint as it is.
"Pan-at-lee, did you ever hear of a triceratops? No? Well this thing
that you call a GRYF is a triceratops and it has been extinct for
hundreds of thousands of years. I have seen its skeleton in the museum
in London and a figure of one restored. I always thought that the
scientists who did such work depended principally upon an overwrought
imagination, but I see that I was wrong. This living thing is not an
exact counterpart of the restoration that I saw; but it is so similar
as to be easily recognizable, and then, too, we must remember that
during the ages that have elapsed since the paleontologist's specimen
lived many changes might have been wrought by evolution in the living
line that has quite evidently persisted in Pal-ul-don."
"Triceratops, London, paleo--I don't know what you are talking about,"
cried Pan-at-lee.
Tarzan smiled and threw a piece of dead wood at the face of the angry
creature below them. Instantly the great bony hood over the neck was
erected and a mad bellow rolled upward from the gigantic body. Full
twenty feet at the shoulder the thing stood, a dirty slate-blue in
color except for its yellow face with the blue bands encircling the
eyes, the red hood with the yellow lining and the yellow belly. The
three parallel lines of bony protuberances down the back gave a further
touch of color to the body, those following the line of the spine being
red, while those on either side are yellow. The five- and three-toed
hoofs of the ancient horned dinosaurs had become talons in the GRYF,
but the three horns, two large ones above the eyes and a median horn on
the nose, had persisted through all the ages. Weird and terrible as was
its appearance Tarzan could not but admire the mighty creature looming
big below him, its seventy-five feet of length majestically typifying
those things which all his life the ape-man had admired--courage and
strength. In that massive tail alone was the strength of an elephant.
The wicked little eyes looked up at him and the horny beak opened to
disclose a full set of powerful teeth.
"Herbivorous!" murmured the ape-man. "Your ancestors may have been, but
not you," and then to Pan-at-lee: "Let us go now. At the cave we will
have deer meat and then--back to Kor-ul-JA and Om-at."