Battering down an ape in front of him, he jumped up on the corpse, and saw that already the vanguard of girls had reached the first sheltering corridor. Naida had been cut off from the others by eight or ten apes. But even so her fire made her mistress of the situation, and she seemed all right.
It was just as Kirby started to jump down from the corpse that he saw something which put another complexion on the matter, and left him frozen where he was.
Behind Naida, directly in the path in which her slavering aggressors were slowly forcing her, a huge stone slab in the temple floor had begun to tilt up as if it were a trapdoor raised by an invisible hand. Within the yawning opening, Kirby caught a glimpse of stone steps winding down into blackness.
In a flash he saw that it was Naida, and her alone, that the ape-men were after. The Duca’s determination was to capture her, and it was the presence of this trapdoor, making capture possible, which had brought on the second charge of the apes.
A scream, high and wild, from Naida released Kirby from his trance of horror. He leaped off the corpse, and smashed a suddenly presented skull like an egg shell. Momentarily he saw 405 Naida, too terrified to fire, staring at the open trapdoor. Kirby felled two apes and felt their blood on his arms.
“Ivana!” he yelled. “Help Naida, for God’s sake!”
An answering shout, not from Ivana alone but from many girls, encouraged him, and he swung his club with a speed and force which would let nothing stand before him. But then another scream from Naida rang in his ears.
“Naida!” he shouted. “It’s all right! We’re coming!”
He knew, though, that it wasn’t all right. Fighting like a maniac, he opened another lane down which he glimpsed her. Fighting still, in a last terrific effort to force his way down the lane to her side, he saw the black opening gape at her feet; and, as Naida screamed again, a dozen hairy arms reached it at once, twisted the empty rifle out of her hands, and lifted her shining body as if it had been a feather.