I could readily understand that Nalte might be a very difficult young
person not to love. She was slender and dark, with an olive skin and a
mass of black hair in lovely disorder. Her eyes sparkled with health
and intelligence. Her features were regular and almost boyish, and over
all was the suggestion of a veil of dignity that bespoke her blood. I
could not doubt but that she was the daughter of a jong.
It seemed to be my fate to encounter daughters of jongs. I said as much
to Nalte.
"How many have you met?" she asked.
"Two," I replied, "you and Duare."
"That is not very many when you consider how many jongs there must be
in Amtor and how many daughters they must have. My father has seven."
"Are they all as lovely as you?" I asked.
"Do you think me lovely?"
"You know you are."
"But I like to hear people say so. I like to hear you say it," she
added softly.
The roars of hunting beasts came up to us from the dim forest aisles,
the screams of stricken prey; then the silence of the night broken only
by the murmuring of the river rolling down to some unknown sea.
I was considering a tactful reply to Nalte's ingenuous observation when
I dozed and fell asleep.
* * * * *
I felt some one shaking me by the shoulder. I opened my eyes to look up
into Nalte's. "Are you going to sleep all day?" she demanded.
It was broad daylight. I sat up and looked around. "We have survived
another night," I said.
I gathered some fruit, and we cooked some more of the meat left from my
kill of the previous day. We had a splendid breakfast, and then we set
off again down stream in our quest for--what?
"If we do not find Duare to-day," I said, "I shall have to admit that
she is irrevocably lost to me."
"And then what?" asked Nalte.
"You would like to return to your own country?"
"Of course."
"Then we shall start up the big river toward your home."
"We shall never reach it," said Nalte, "but--"
"But what?" I demanded.
"I was thinking that we might be very happy while we were trying to
reach Andoo," she said.
"Andoo?" I queried.
"That is my country," she explained. "The mountains of Andoo are very
beautiful."
There was a note of wistfulness in her voice; her eyes were
contemplating a scene that mine could not see. Suddenly I realized how
brave the girl had been, how cheerful she had remained through the
hardships and menacing dangers of our flight, all despite the probably
hopelessness of her situation. I touched her hand gently.
"We shall do our best to return you to the beautiful mountains of
Andoo," I assured her.
Nalte shook her head. "I shall never see them again, Carson. A great
company of warriors might not survive the dangers that lie between here
and Andoo--a thousand kobs of fierce and hostile country."
"A thousand kobs is a long way," I agreed. "It does seem hopeless, but
we'll not give up."
The Amtorians divide the circumference of a circle into a thousand
parts to arrive at their hita, or degree; and the kob is one tenth of
a degree of longitude at the equator (or what the Amtorians call The
Small Circle), roughly about two and a half earth miles; therefore a
thousand kobs would be about two thousand five hundred miles.
A little mental arithmetic convinced me that Nalte could not have
drifted down the big river two thousand five hundred miles without
food, and I asked her if she was sure that Andoo was that far away.
"No," she admitted, "but it seems that far. We wandered a long time
before we reached the river, and then I drifted for so long that I lost
track of time."
Nevertheless, if we found Duare, I was going to be faced by a problem.
One girl must go down the valley in search of her own country, the
other up the valley! And only one of them had even a hazy idea of where
her country lay!