John Star leaped after him, dagger lifted, but already he had been carried out of reach.
“Throw me, Hal!” he gasped.
The giant seized him by knee and thigh, flung him mightily upward toward the red-lit roof of thorns.
With one grasping hand he seized a coil of the tough purple cable.
Immediately it shortened, drawing him higher, forming another loop to throw about his body.
Hanging on with one hand, he sawed at it with his dagger in the other, above Jay Kalam’s shoulder.
Tough purple skin cut through; a thin, violet-colored fluid streamed out and down his arm—sap or blood, he did not know.
Hard fibers, inside, formed a core that did not cut so easily.
A coil slipped about his shoulders, constricted savagely.
“Thank you, John,” Jay Kalam whispered faintly, voiceless, but without panic.
“But turn loose, while you can.”
He sawed and hacked away, silently.
Suddenly there was red in the streaming fluid—it was, he knew, Jay Kalam’s blood.
The purple cable contracted spasmodically, with agonizing, bone-cracking force.
“Too—too late! Sorry—John!”
Jay Kalam’s white face went limp.
He made a last, fierce effort, as unendurable pressure forced the breath from his lungs in a long gasp of agony.
The live cable parted, they fell.
They were, the next John Star knew, outside the jungle.
He was lying on his back, in a little glade covered with some soft, fine-bladed plant, of a brilliant and metallic blue.
Below, over the top of the black thorn-jungle, he could see the oily yellow ocean, a glistening golden desert under the low and sullen sun.
Above towered black mountain ranges.
Vast sloping fields strewn with titanic ebon boulders. Bare, rugged, jet-black precipices.
Barrier of peaks beyond barrier of somber, Cyclopean peaks, until the jagged dark line of them scarred the red and murky sky.
Jay Kalam lay beside him on the blue grassy stuff, still unconscious.
Hal Samdu and Giles Habibula were busy over a little fire by the edge of a tiny, flashing stream that crossed the glade.
Incredulous, he caught the scent of meat cooking.
“What happened?” he called, and sat up painfully, his body aching from the inflamed wounds of the jungle thorns.
“Ah, so you’re awake at last, lad?” Giles Habibula wheezed cheerfully.
“Well, lad, Hal and poor old Giles got the two of you out of the mortal jungle, after you fell back wrapped in the end of that evil tentacle.
It wasn’t so far.
Here in the valley, Hal threw his spear at a little creature grazing on the blue grass, and I struck sparks with stones to make a fire.
“That’s the story, lad.
We’re through the jungle.
But we’ve got these mortal mountains to climb, when you and Jay are able, and good life knows what dreadful terrors are lying in wait beyond.
Ah, if that wicked purple rope is a fair sample———
“Mortal me, lad! This life’s too strenuous for such a precious feeble old man as Giles Habibula, that deserves to be sitting somewhere in a blessed easy chair, with a sip of wine to lift his dear old heart from the woe that weighs it down.”
He cast a fishy eye at the bulge in his pocket.
“Ah, yes, I’ve one mortal bottle.
But that must wait for the hour of greater need—it will come, soon enough, life knows, with a continent of wicked, crawling horror just ahead!”
Up the mountain barrier they clambered, when Jay Kalam and John Star were able. Over tumbled heaps of colossal black boulders.
Up sheer, rugged slopes.
Mountain range after wild range they mounted, always to find a wilder, more rugged range beyond.
Slowly the enormous, scarlet sun, which was their compass, wheeled across the gloomy crimson sky, through the long week of its progress.
Often they were hungry, and often thirsty, and always deadly tired.
The air grew thin and colder as they climbed, until they were never warm, until the least exertion meant exhaustion.
Sometimes they killed the little animals that grazed the blue grass, to cook them while they rested.
They drank from icy mountain torrents.
They slept a little, shivering in the sunshine, one of them always on guard.
“We must go on,” Jay Kalam urged forever.