If only she could find some sort of pathway that would allow her to make progress without battling this ocean of pulpy, slimy vegetation—a footing solid enough to prevent sinking to her ankles with every step. Three different times she narrowly avoided treading on snakes—small, brightly colored reptiles whose bite would have meant a lingering death; and once she nearly collapsed with fright when a looping vine caught her about the neck unexpectedly and she thought it the folds of a python.
And then, after an hour of this, she stumbled unexpectedly into an elephant path, its powdery surface marked by the passage of numerous other animals. Unfortunately for her purpose it ran almost east and west instead of north and after following it into the east for the better part of two hours, it began gradually to veer southward, taking her further and further from the caves of her father.
Her only hope was that sooner or later she would come upon an intersecting trail that would lead northward. The thought of leaving the narrow strip of open ground and plunging back into that green maze was more than she could endure. And so she went on, staggering now and then under the lashes of heat and weariness, finding an occasional waterhole to quench her thirst and stripping fruit from trees and bushes to satisfy hunger.
Near nightfall she came upon a large clearing through which flowed a wide shallow stream. It had been several hours since last water had passed her lips and sight of the river lifted her spirits. She pushed her way through a heavy growth of reeds on the near bank, knelt and drank thirstily, then slipped out of her tunic and submerged her entire body in the brackish liquid.
Emerging at last, she dried her body with handfuls of grasses, her lithe, sweetly rounded figure gleaming like an image molded of pure gold in the fading sunlight. Her spirits were soaring again, for when first leaving the water she had glimpsed the beginnings of a second trail into the forest—a trail pointing straight as a spear shaft toward the north.
Already her plans were made. She would spend the night among the high-flung branches of that tree at the trail's entrance, when dawn came again she would start out once more—this time toward home.
Donning her tunic she ran lightly toward the tree, its base buried among a heavy growth of bushes.
While from the depths of tangled undergrowth near the bole of that tree, a pair of glowing yellow eyes were fixed in an unblinking stare upon the swiftly approaching girl!
A storm was blowing up. Tharn, belly flat against a broad branch while he gnawed the sweet pulpy interior of a hard-shelled fruit, caught the signs of it in the scent of the air, in the uneasy pattern of a shifting breeze, in the faintly yellowish cast of the sky overhead. He mentioned the possibility to Trakor, who, wedged into a fork nearby, was dozing in the heat of day.