Again and again the girl tried to convince herself that she was dreaming. All her past experience, all her acquired knowledge stipulated the utter absurdity of the fantastic experiences of the past few hours. There could be no such things as gorillas that spoke English, tilled fields, and lived in stone castles. And yet here were all these impossibilities before her eyes as concrete evidence of their existence.
She listened as one in a dream while her captors demanded entrance that they might take their prisoner before the king; she heard the guard demur, saying that the king could not be disturbed as he was engaged with the Privy Council.
"Then we'll take her to God," threatened one of her captors, "and when the king finds out what you have done you'll be working in the quarry instead of sitting here in the shade."
Finally a young gorilla was summoned and sent into the palace with a message. When he returned it was with the word that the king wished to have the prisoner brought before him at once.
Rhonda was conducted into a large room the floor of which was covered with dried grass. On a dais at one end of the room an enormous gorilla paced to and fro while a half dozen other gorillas squatted in the grass at the foot of the dais—enormous, shaggy beasts, all.
There were no chairs nor tables nor benches in the room, but from the center of the dais rose the bare trunk and leafless branches of a tree.
As the girl was brought into the room the gorilla on the dais stopped his restless pacing and scrutinized her. "Where did you find her, Buckingham?" he demanded.
"At the foot of the falls, Sire," replied the beast that had captured her.
"What was she doing there?"
"She said that she was looking for her friends, who were to meet her at the falls."