“Courage!” cried Grôm, lifting his head and dashing his great hand across his eyes. “We must get through. We must find air.”
Shaking off the deadly sloth, they ran on again at full speed, peering through the stems in every direction. The effort made their brains throb fiercely. And still there was nothing before them and about them but the endless succession of slender gray stems and the downpour of that sinister rosy light. At last A-ya’s steps began to lag, as if she were growing sleepy.
“Wake up!” shouted Grôm, and dragged so fiercely at her arm that she cried out. But the pain aroused her to a new effort. She sprang forward, sobbing. The next moment, she was jerked violently to the left. “This way!” panted Grôm, the sweat pouring down 170 his livid face; and there, through the stems to the left, her dazed eyes perceived that the hated rosy glow was paling into the whiteness of the natural day.
It was a big white rock, an island thrust up through the sea of treacherous bloom. With fumbling, nerveless fingers they scaled its bare sides, flung themselves down among the scant but wholesome herbage, which clothed its top, and filled their lungs with the clean, reviving air. Dimly they heard a blessed buzzing of insects, and several great flies, with barred wings, lit upon them and bit them sharply. They lay with closed eyes, while slowly the throbbing in their brains died away and strength flowed back into their unstrung limbs.
Then, after perhaps an hour, Grôm sat up and looked about him. On every side outspread the fatal flood of the rose-red oleanders, unbroken except toward the north-west. In that quarter, however, a spur of the giant forest, of growths too mighty to feel the spell of the envenomed blooms, was thrust deep into the crimson tide. Its tip came to within a couple of hundred yards of the rock. Having fully recovered, Grôm and A-ya swung down, with loathing, into the pink gloom, fled through it almost without drawing breath, and found themselves once more in the rank green shadows of the jungle. They went on till they came to a thicket of plantains. Then, loading themselves with ripe fruit, they climbed high into a tree, and wove themselves a safe resting-place among the branches. 171
For the next few days their journey was without adventure, save for the frequent eluding of the monsters of that teeming world. Grôm had his club, A-ya her broken spear; but they were avoiding all combats in their haste to get back to their own country of the homely caves and the guardian watch-fires. At the approach of the great black lion or the saber-tooth, or the wantonly malignant rhinoceros, they betook themselves to the tree-tops, and continued their way by that aërial path as long as it served them. The most subtle of the beasts they knew they could outwit, and their own anxiety now was Mawg, whose craft and courage Grôm could no longer hold in scorn. He was doubtless at large, and quite possibly on their trail, biding his time to catch them unawares. They never allowed themselves, therefore, to sleep both at the same time. One always kept on guard: and hence their progress, for all their eagerness, was slower than it would otherwise have been.
On a certain day, after a long unbroken stretch of travel, A-ya rested and kept watch in a tree-top, while Grôm went to fetch a bunch of plantains. It was fairly open country, a region of low herbage dotted with small groves and single trees; and the girl, herself securely hidden, could see in every direction. She could see Grôm wandering from plantain clump to plantain clump, seeking fruit ripe enough to be palatable. And then, with a shiver of hate and dread, she saw the dark form of Mawg, creeping noiselessly on Grôm’s trail, and not more than a couple of hundred 172 paces behind him. At the very moment when her eyes fell upon him, he dropped flat upon his face, and began worming his way soundlessly through the herbage.
Her mouth opened wide to give the alarm. But the cry stopped in her throat, and a smile of bitter triumph spread over her face.
If Mawg was hunting Grôm, he was at the same time himself being hunted. And by a dreadful hunter.
Out from behind a thicket of glowing mimosa appeared a monstrous bird, some ten or twelve feet in height, lifting its feet very high in a swift but noiseless and curiously delicate stride. Its dark plumage was more like long, stringy hair than feathers. Its build was something like that of a gigantic cassowary, but its thighs and long blue shanks were proportionately more massive. Its neck was long, but immensely muscular to support the enormous head, which was larger than that of a horse, and armed with a huge, hooked, rending, vulture’s beak. The apparent length of this terrible head was increased by a pointed crest of blood-red feathers, projecting straight back in a line with the fore-part of the skull and the beak.