"Guess we'll have to wait a bit longer," Jim murmured. "But it seems to be easing, don't you think?"
In a sheltered recess of the forest we were crouching, forced to wait for the weird storm to pass. There had been no possible chance of finding the fleeing Jahnt. We could only hope now that he would go on to the broken city. The storm seemed to be lessening but still it was a roar of wind which cracked through the spindly giant trees, often bringing down great segments of branches which it had torn loose.
A lull came at last, and through a ragged, littered forest Jim and I pushed our tortuous way. Meeta could fly now. She guided us, and with little forays hummed ahead and to the sides, seeking some signs of Jahnt and Venta. But there were none.
The storm had been a torture of delay. In my heart now I had no thought that we would be able to locate Jahnt and Venta. I could only hope that they might be in the broken city. Had Curtmann received news of the Venus weapons? My mind was upon Venta, but still I could envisage that bloodthirsty band of Earth cutthroats advancing upon the Forest City.
"I say, is it much further?" Jim demanded suddenly of Meeta. "This is tough going for us."
"Master, no. It is ahead, just down that slope."
The dim forest glade was descending into a great shallow area of deeper shadow. And presently we could see the ruins of tumbled, broken buildings lying here, half buried by the rank forest growth. In the turgid dimness, with a faint orange luminosity that seemed inherent to the great trees, it was an eerie place of colored shadows. Great buildings were everywhere around us now, weird of shape and substance, some of them still partly erect with the spindly trees growing through them.
It was a place of the ghosts of Venus' past.
"It is down in here," Meeta said, pointing.
A littered rocky depression was before us. A ruined amphitheatre, with its walls almost gone and the forest like a monstrous clump in its middle. We descended into it. The ground in places was rocky. Some natural cataclysm must have torn this ground since the original arena was built.