IV
I go back now to that moment when Ama and I, pursued by the roaming band of Orgs, plunged into a tunnel passage that led from the gully, near the wrecked Roberts' spaceship. It was quite evident that Ama was aware of the dangers of the wind-storms of her little world. There was a swift air-current sucking into this passage. But it was not powerful enough to do more than hurry us along. Once, where the tunnel branched, there seemed an open grotto up a little subterranean ascent to the right. It glowed with a brighter pallid light than was here in the passage. I turned that way with an interested gaze, but at once she clutched at me.
"No—no. In times of the storm, very bad sometimes in places under the ground."
There seemed no sign of pursuit behind us. "The Orgs—they run heavy," Ama said when I mentioned it. In the pale opalescent glow of the tunnel, I could see her faint triumphant smile as she gazed up at me sidewise. Strange little face, utterly foreign so that upon Earth, by Earth standards one would have been utterly baffled to identify her. But it was an appealing face, and now, with her terror gone, the sly glance she flung at me was wholly feminine.
"Those fire-mimes," I said. "Couldn't they rush ahead of their masters, trailing us?" I explained how on Earth dogs would do that, following their quarry by the scent. She looked puzzled, and then she brightened.
"I remember. The Captain Roberts told us about that. The mimes are different. The male and female both—they follow what it is they see, nothing else."
Then she told me about the weird, dog-like creatures. The male, exuding a scent—if you could call it that—a vapor which in the air bursts into spontaneous combustion as it combines with the atmospheric oxygen.
How long we ran through what proved to be a maze of passages in the honey-combed ground, I have no idea. Several Earth-miles, doubtless. Several times we stopped to rest, with the breezes tossing about us as I listened, tense, to be sure the Orgs were not coming. Then at last we emerged; and at the rocky exit I stood staring, amazed.
It was a wholly different looking world here. The pallid underground sheen was gone; and now again there was the dim twilight of the interminable Vulcan night. From where we stood the ground sloped down so that we were looking out over the top of a wide spread of lush, tangled forest. Weird jungle, rank and wild with spindly trees of fantastic shapes, heavy with pods and exotic flowers and tangled with masses of vines. Beyond it, far ahead of us there seemed a line of little metal mountains at the horizon; and to the left an Earth-mile or so away, the forest was broken to disclose a winding thread of little river. It shone phosphorescent green in the half light. The storm was over now, but still the colors lingered in the cloud sky—a glorious palette of rainbow hues up there that tinted the forest-top.