The cave girl

by Edgar Rice Burroughs

And as he saw her dancing in the circle of hand-clapping tribesmen, in the light of the brush wood fire, his desire for her became a veritable frenzy.

He could scarce restrain himself from rushing single-handed among his foes and snatching the girl before their faces. However, caution came to his rescue, and so he waited, albeit impatiently, until the last of the cave folk had retired to his cavern.

He had seen into which Nadara had withdrawn—one that lay far up the face of the steep cliff and directly above the cave occupied by Thandar. The moon was overcast, the fire at the foot of the cliff had died to glowing embers, all was wrapped in darkness and in shadow. Far in the depths of the wood Nagoola coughed and cried. The weird sound raised the coarse hair at the nape of Thurg's bull neck. He cast an apprehensive backward glance, then, crouching low, he moved quickly and silently across the clearing toward the base of the cliff.

Flattened against a protruding boulder there he waited, listening, for a moment. No sound broke the stillness of the sleeping village. None had seen his approach—of that he was convinced.

Carefully he began the ascent of the cliff face, made difficult by the removal of the rough ladders that led from ledge to ledge by day, but which were withdrawn with the retiring of the community to their dark holes.

But Thurg had dragged with him from the forest a slim sapling. This he leaned against the face of the cliff. Its uptilted end just topped the lowest ledge.

Thurg was almost as large and quite as clumsy in appearance as a gorilla, yet he was not as far removed from his true arboreal ancestors as is the great simian, and so he accomplished in silence and with evident ease what his great bulk might have seemed to have relegated to the impossible.

Like a huge cat he scrambled up the frail pole until his fingers clutched the ledge edge above him. Ape-like he drew himself to a squatting position there. Then he groped for the ladder that the cave folk had drawn up from below.

This he erected to the next ledge above. Thereafter the way was easy, for the balance of the ledges were connected by steeply inclined trails cut into the cliff face. This had been an innovation of Thandar's who considered the rickety ladders not only a nuisance, but extremely dangerous to life and limb, for scarce a day passed that some child or woman did not receive a bad fall because of them.

So Thurg, with Thandar's unintentional aid, came easily to the mouth of Nadara's cave.