It was serpent-like, thick as an elephant, covered with hard red armor; it had innumerable limbs, the foremost armed with savage talons.
John Star’s spear, set against the floor, was driven by the force of its charge into the side of its armored snout.
With a screaming, evil-odored blast of air and sound, the creature tossed up its head, splintering the shaft against the roof.
A black tongue, hooked with cruel spines, darted at him.
He ducked too late.
It impaled his shoulder through garments and flesh, yanked him spinning toward black-toothed, yawning jaws.
He struck with his torch the seven great eyes set in a crown of armor, and thrust it ahead of him into that hot, reeking maw.
The monster screamed again.
The tongue lashed, flailing him from side to side of the passage; it drew him back, numb, bleeding, half-conscious, into that black, fetid throat.
Hal Samdu’s spear came past him, sank deep in the roof of the yawning mouth.
He was vaguely aware of the gigantic club, raining pile-driver blows on the crown of eyes and the armored skull.
Then he saw the black fangs, closing down.
His shoulder was bound, when he came to; he was lying by a fire in the cave.
The others were busy, carrying in firewood, and great pieces of meat from the huge carcass at the entrance.
“‘Tis fearful cold, outside, lad!” Giles Habibula informed him thr%igh chattering teeth.
“Snowing, with a wicked blizzard roaring down the canyon.
The river’s already ice.
Poor old Giles is too feeble for such a life as this, bless his dear old bones!
Killing dragon-monsters in the wilderness of a world where men never ought to be!”
Even by the fire in the cave, the long night reached them with cruel fingers.
When they at last emerged again, after the long, grim battle with merciless cold, they found the river a racing torrent.
Fed by melting snows, it rose almost to the cave-mouth.
“We shall build a raft,” decided Jay Kalam.
“And follow the rivers across the continent to the Medusas’s city.”
With improvised tools of stone, they laboriously fastened fallen logs together.
The slow sun had already reached the zenith when they poled the clumsy vessel out into the rushing stream, to begin the voyage to the black and unknown city by the western sea.
Four painfully built rafts they lost.
Two broke up on the rocks, leaving them to struggle ashore as best they might, through angry, icy rapids.
One was wrecked by a green, lizard-like water animal.
One they abandoned—at the last instant—before it went over a mighty fall.
The onslaught of the red gas in the air was less sudden and severe than John Star had feared.
They all developed persistent coughs, but nothing more alarming.
He came to suspect that Adam Ulnar had exaggerated the danger.
Week-long days came and departed, and eternal nights of savage cold, when they fastened the raft and came ashore to fight for food and warmth.
Below the thundering fall the canyon was a Cyclopean gorge; the river ran between black and topless walls hi perpetual red twilight.
Then they came out upon a larger stream, that carried them away from the mountains, and out across an interminable plain.
For endless days they floated between low fringes of black vegetation— plants that died in the bitter nights, and grew amazingly again by day.
The river grew wider, deeper, its yellow torrent swifter.
The somber, menacing jungles along its banks mounted ever higher, the animal life in water and jungle and air grew larger and more ferocious.
With spear and dagger and club, with fire and bow and fist, they fought many times for possession of the raft.
They had become four lean, haggard men—even Giles Habibula was skin and bone and plaintive protest—black from exposure, rag-ged, unkempt, shaggy, scarred from many wounds.
But they had gained an iron endurance, a new courage, an absolute confidence in one another.
Through all of it, Giles Habibula carried his bottle of wine.
He defended it when the camp was attacked by a great flying thing, with splendid wings like sheets of sapphire; a thing that sought their bodies with a deadly, whipping sting.
He dived for it when the green river-creature destroyed the raft.
Many times he held it up to the red heavens, gazing at it with bitter longing hi his fishy eyes.
“Ah, dear life, but a sip of it would be precious now,” his plaintive voice would wheeze.
“But when it’s gone there’ll be none—not a blessed drop of wine on the whole evil continent.
Ah, I must save it for a greater need.”
They were drifting one day near the middle of the river, vast now, a deep, mighty yellow flood, ten miles wide.