From the lower, circular edge, like the ropes that would have suspended the car of a balloon, hung a fringe of black and whiplike tentacles.
John Star could see the superficial likeness, the dome shape, the fringing tentacles, that had earned them the name Medusa?.
In the distance they did not look impressive.
There was about them a certain grotesqueness, a slow awkwardness.
They didn’t look intelligent. Yet in the way they moved, floating apparently at will above the black wall, was a power and mystery that made for respect.
And in the knowledge that they were the builders of this black metropolis was room for awe and terror.
The raft drifted on until the black wall shadowed them.
Smooth metal towered sheer to the zenith, hiding the machines and the drifting Medusae.
The raft scraped hard metal where it rose from the water; then the boiling yellow current tossed them back again.
“We’ll land,” said Jay Kalam, “in the edge of the jungle below the wall.”
They threw aside the screening branches, and seized long sweeps; they fought for the shore, where the river drew away from that metal precipice.
19 Giles Habibula and Black Disaster
They abandoned the raft when it touched bottom, taking only their crude weapons, and Giles Habibula, his priceless bottle of wine.
Hal Samdu stood in the shallows, a giant hand knotted about his club, staring at the dark barrier shadowing the black jungle ahead—staring, helplessly shaking his head.
“How———?”
“There’ll be a way,” promised Jay Kalam, though even his confidence seemed a little strained.
“First, let’s get through the jungle.”
They attacked the living wall, dared the death that lurked within.
Spear-sharp, poisoned spines.
Bloodsucking moss.
Coiling tentacles of purple vines.
Blooms of fatal perfume.
Animal death, that crawled and leaped and flew.
But the four had learned in a savage school to meet that jungle on even terms.
A dozen hours of swimming and floundering through sucking mud, of hacking deadly vines and creeping through chevaux-de-jrise of venomous thorns, of meeting with level spear or lifted dagger the hungry things that charged from the undergrowth or rose from the mud or dropped from above, and they emerged from the riverbed upon the higher plain—Giles Habibula still with his bottle of wine.
Close on the right hand rose the wall, sheer and black, a mighty, overwhelming mile of it.
The plain reached off to the left, covered luxuriantly with fine-leafed grass, a bright metallic blue.
It sloped up in the murky distance to blue bills.
From blue hills to black city ran the aqueduct.
Jay Kalam’s thoughtful eyes surveyed it, a straight channel of dull black metal, miles long, which was carried from hills to ebon city on ancient, soaring arches.
“One chance,” he said gravely.
“We shall try.”
They skirted the jungle to keep out of sight, marched twenty miles, and climbed into the blue hills.
They had eaten, slept for a time, but it was still many hours till sunset when they came under the immense dam of black metal below the reservoir.
No guard was visible, but they crept up very cautiously beneath the dam.
They climbed slippery, wet walls and flanges of black metal, until they came to the lip of the uncovered channel.
Below roared the cold clear torrent from the floodgate, three hundred feet wide, dark and deep.
“The water,” Jay Kalam observed laconically, “gets into the city.”
He dived.
The others followed, leaving all but their thorn-daggers.
The clear icy torrent rushed them along the black channel; the mighty dam drew back; the city’s ramparts marched to meet them.
They kept afloat as the yellow river had taught them, and tried to save their strength.
Ahead, in the black wall, appeared a tiny arch.
It grew larger, and abruptly swallowed them up.
They were hi roaring darkness; the arch framed a bit of crimson sky, swiftly dwindling.
The steady current plunged on into utter darkness.
Thunder drummed against thek ears, increasing, deafening.
“A fall!” warned Jay Kalam.
His shout was swept away.
They shot into a battle of mad waters.