“The night must not catch us here.
It will be a week of darkness and frightful cold.
We couldn’t live through it here.”
But it was already sunset when they mounted the last divide.
They looked across a vast plateau, lifeless so far as they could see, black and grimly desolate.
It was piled with masses of dark rock, riven and scarred from old volcanic cataclysm.
A wild waste of utter black.
In the darkling sky hung the dying sun, its sinister disk already bitten with fangs of ebon stone.
“We would die, here, surely,” said Jay Kalam.
“We must go on.”
And they went on, breathless in the thin, bitter air, as the sun’s red disk was slowly gnawed away by the western horizon, and a chill wind rose about them.
18 Night and the City of Doom
For hours they hastened on, across that high black plateau, the bitter promise of approaching night increasing hi the air.
The huge dome of the sun went down before them.
It was gone.
In the lurid crimson twilight they came to the chasm’s rim.
Sheer walls dropped a full thousand feet.
A mighty gorge crossed the plateau, a huge, cliff-walled trench filled with red, murky dusk.
“A river,” Jay Kalam pointed out, “with forest along it.
That means firewood and the chance of food.
We might find a cave in the cliffs.
We must climb down.”
“Climb down!” snorted Giles Habibula.
“Like a lot of human flies!”
But they found a slope that looked less menacing.
John Star led the descent, clambering down over heaps of fallen, colossal black rocks, sliding down banks of talus, scrambling and dropping down sheer precipices.
All of them were bruised and lacerated against jagged rock; all of them took reckless chances, for the dread night came swiftly.
Only the faintest crimson glow marked the slash of sky between the canyon walls when at last they stumbled into the strip of strange black forest at the bottom.
They were trembling with cold, violent as had been their exertions; ice-crystals already fringed the river.
Giles Habibula started a blaze, while the others gathered dead wood among the cruel-bladed trees.
“We must find shelter,” said Jay Kalam.
“We can’t live outside.”
With torches they explored the frowning canyon wall.
John Star came upon a round, eight-foot tunnel.
He shouted for the others, and entered, flaring torch in one hand and spear in the other.
The air had an acrid fetor and he found great strange tracks on the sandy floor.
The cavern proved vacant.
At the rear was a twenty-foot hollow.
“Made to our order,” he cried, meeting the others in the entrance.
“Some creature has lately used it, but it’s gone.
We can carry in firewood, and wall up the entrance———”
“Mortal me!” shrieked Giles Habibula, who had been cautiously in the rear.
“We’re trespassing, and here comes the frightful owner!”
They heard a crashing in the fringe of dark trees, as the thing came up from the river.
Then torch-light gleamed yellow and green on a crown of seven enormous eyes, glistened red on close-scaled armor, glinted black on terrible fangs.
It met them at the tunnel-mouth; they had no time to choose to fight or not.
John Star and Jay Kalam and Hal Samdu braced their long black spears against the floor to face its charge.
Giles Habibula shouted, scrambling back behind them and holding up his torch:
“I’ll give you light!”
A river-creature, it must have been, by day, wont to hibernate through the dreadful night.