John Star caught his breath, and tried to shake off that hypnosis of slow horror, and peered around him desperately.
Sullenly red was the sky above.
An angry, brighter red, the enormous, sinister disk of the sun burned low in the east.
The wind, freshening out of it, ruffled the surface of the yellow sea.
Yellow horizons melted into reddish haze.
Around and around the log, in endless circles, sliced a curved, saw-toothed fin.
The colossal amoeba reached the middle of the log.
“When it gets here,” suggested John Star doubtfully, “we might dive off and try for the other end again.”
“And be swallowed alive in the mortal water!” predicted Giles Habibula dolefully.
“Old Giles is going to stay where he can see what eats him.”
“The wind,” said Jay Kalam, hopefully, “is drifting us toward the shore—I hope.
And it should be near, or there wouldn’t be driftwood.”
The creeping horror was three-fourths of the way down the log when sharp-eyed Hal Samdu shouted:
“The shore!
I see land!”
Far off, under the smoky red horizon at the rim of the yellow sea, was a low dark line.
“But it’s miles,” said John Star.
“We must get past this monster, somehow———”
“We can rock the log,” suggested Jay Kalam. “Turn it. And run past while our fellow-passenger is underneath.”
“And likely spill ourselves off to feed the wicked things hi the water, when it turns over!”
But they stood up, perilously, on the rough bark, and stepped hi unison, at Jay Kalam’s word, from side to side.
At first their huge craft showed no visible motion; the great amoeba continued its unhurried flowing.
Gradually, however, under their combined weight, the log began to spin lazily back and forth, each tune a little farther. The wet bark was slippery; Giles Habibula sprawled, once, and gasped in terror as John Star dragged him back:
“Bless my bones!
Poor old Giles is no nimble monkey, lad———”
The black fin cut close beneath; his fishy eyes rolled after it.
The nearest reaching arm of formless, avidly flowing, green jelly was not five feet away, when the log passed the point of equilibrium; it turned suddenly, and set them scrambling desperately on hands and knees to keep on top.
“Now!” breathed Jay Kalam.
Clinging to one another, they scrambled unsteadily along the wet surface, toward the other end, safe again for a tune.
But the great mass of hungry protoplasm appeared again above the log, green and dripping.
Its senses somehow found them.
It flowed again.
Twice they repeated that awkward maneuver, before the log touched bottom.
A black world lay ahead, ominous and dreadful.
The yellow shallows lapped on a beach of bare black sand.
Beyond the beach rose an amazing jungle—a dark wall of thorns. Straight, dead-black spines, flaming with innumerable huge violet blooms, bristling with thousands of barbed and savage points. An impenetrable barrier of woven swords, easily a hundred feet high.
Above the gloomy jungle of thorns rose the mountain ranges; immense peaks towered up, rampart behind gigantic rampart, a rugged, precipitous, sky-looming wilderness of crags, bare, grimly and lifelessly black.
The last somber wall drew its ragged edge across the crimson, sullen sky midway to the zenith.
Black sand, black jungle of thorns, black barrier of nightmare ranges, under a scarlet sky; the world ahead was shadowed by a spirit of hostile malevolence; it slowed the heart with nameless dread.
“Ashore!” exulted John Star, as they splashed through the shallows, waving a mocking farewell to the amoeba on the log.
“Yes, we’re ashore,” agreed Jay Kalam.
“But, you observe, on an eastern coast.
The city of the Medusae is somewhere on the west coast, the Commander said.
That means we have this jungle to cross, and those mountains, and all the continent beyond.”
“Ah, yes, a black continent ahead, full of mortal horrors,” wept Giles Habibula.
“Ah, me, and we’ve no weapons, we’re naked as blessed babes.
Not even a bite to eat!
Poor old Giles, destined to starve on the alien shores of evil———”
17 The Rope in the Jungle
“Weapons,” began Jay Kalam, “are what we must first———”