The first thing I remember clearly is that I was staggering back to the shaft with a heavy rock in my arms, when I caught a whiff of acrid smoke and awoke to the realization that the purple sky was darkened with drifting clouds, and the air was already heavy with the suffocating pungent odor of the burning red vegetation. My instinctive alarm at the thought of fire served to bring me to myself, and I was suddenly fearful for the safety of Melvar.
I knew that, had the red-hot rocket-ship in which we had crossed the Silver Sea chanced to fall in the jungle instead of on the barren hilltop, a conflagration would have spread from it at once. Abruptly I remembered that the glowing fragments of the one we had wrecked had fallen in the northern forest. Austen's cabin lay in that direction! I knew that the red vegetation was peculiarly inflammable, and that the fire fed on the oxygen of the heavy atmosphere, would advance with terrible speed.
For a moment, in a panic of indecision, I listened. From the north I heard the crackling roar of a mighty conflagration. Then my mind was made up. Any attempt to find Austen and induce him to give up his plan of self-sacrifice would be terribly uncertain. Melvar was in immediate danger, and I knew that Austen valued her life above his own. But even then, I knew in my heart that it was too late, though I would not let myself believe it. Fire is a pitiless and remorseless enemy.
At a dead run I started up the trail by which we had entered the clearing. Ever the smoke became thicker and more acrid, while the crackling roar of the fire rang ever louder in my ears. I ran on through the ghastly gloom of the scarlet jungle, in mad desperation, even after hope was gone, until the hot suffocating breath of the flames was choking me, until the bright lurid curtain of the fire was spread before my eyes, and the intense heat radiation blistered my skin. The vast wall of flame swept forward like a voracious demoniac thing of crimson, implacable, irresistible, overwhelming. It plunged forward like a rushing tidal wave of red. Already the fire had passed the site of the cabin!
I was suddenly hopeless, and despairing, and very tired. The flames rushed forward faster, by far, than a human being could force a way through the jungle. With the knowledge that I had just lost the only two beings that in all the world of men ever mattered to me, it hardly seemed worth while to try to save my own life. For a moment I stood there, about to cast myself into the flames. But it is not the nature of an animal to die willingly, no matter how slight the promise of life may be.
When I could endure the heat no longer, when the pain of my blistered skin, and the outcries of my tortured lungs had grown unsupportable, I turned and ran toward the clearing again. Behind me, the flames roared like a lightning express. The fern-like fronds burned explosively, like gun-cotton. My nostrils and lungs were seared and smarting. The hot wind dried my skin and left it scorched and cracked. I was blinded by the smoke. I longed to throw myself down and seek the temporary ecstasy of a breath of clear air from near the ground, of a cooling plunge into a muddy pool. The red jungle reeled about me, but I fought my way on, like a man in a dream.
At last I staggered into the open space. The last of the giant trees exploded into flames not a score of yards behind me. Sparks rained upon me. My clothing caught fire. I ran on, fighting at it with my hands. The jungle back of me roared deafeningly, an angry, surging sea of lurid red flames, awful, overwhelming, fantastically terrible. Heat radiation poured across the clearing in a pitiless beam. I struggled on across the white sand, away from flames that tossed themselves up like volcano-ridden ranges of scarlet alps, until I reached the shelter of a great boulder on the slope below the cliff.
I flung myself down behind the rock, gulping down the cool air and rubbing out the fire in my clothing with my blackened hands. For many hours I lay there, tortured by thirst and pain. At last I fell into a light sleep of troubled dreams, in which huge, winged, green ants flew after me through burning crimson forests and in which I saw the dear form of Melvar devoured again and again by the flames.
I was awakened, after a time, I know not how long, by a cool wind that had sprung up from the north. For a moment my mind was lost in blank wonder, and then came the desolate memory that Melvar and Austen were lost. In hopeless misery I got weakly to my feet and walked unsteadily around the boulder until I could look across the clearing.
As I leaned against the rock, gazing eastward, it was a strangely altered and desolate scene that lay before my eyes. The red forest was gone. Below me was a region of low rolling hills, black and grim beneath the lowering, smoky purple sky. The white sand about me stood out in sharp contrast to the charred and gloomy waste beyond, from which a few slender wisps of dark smoke were still rising. All life was gone. It was a dead world. But still the dense purple clouds poured out of the shafts of the underworld, adding their weight to the dismal sky.