Tired at last of playing with my clothing the creatures threw it to the
ground, and catching me, one on either side, by an arm, started off at
a most terrifying pace through the tree tops. Never have I experienced
such a journey before or since—even now I oftentimes awake from a deep
sleep haunted by the horrid remembrance of that awful experience.
From tree to tree the agile creatures sprang like flying squirrels,
while the cold sweat stood upon my brow as I glimpsed the depths
beneath, into which a single misstep on the part of either of my
bearers would hurl me. As they bore me along, my mind was occupied with
a thousand bewildering thoughts. What had become of Perry? Would I ever
see him again? What were the intentions of these half-human things into
whose hands I had fallen? Were they inhabitants of the same world into
which I had been born? No! It could not be. But yet where else? I had
not left that earth—of that I was sure. Still neither could I reconcile
the things which I had seen to a belief that I was still in the world
of my birth. With a sigh I gave it up.
III
A CHANGE OF MASTERS
We must have traveled several miles through the dark and dismal wood
when we came suddenly upon a dense village built high among the
branches of the trees. As we approached it my escort broke into wild
shouting which was immediately answered from within, and a moment later
a swarm of creatures of the same strange race as those who had captured
me poured out to meet us. Again I was the center of a wildly chattering
horde. I was pulled this way and that. Pinched, pounded, and thumped
until I was black and blue, yet I do not think that their treatment was
dictated by either cruelty or malice—I was a curiosity, a freak, a new
plaything, and their childish minds required the added evidence of all
their senses to back up the testimony of their eyes.
Presently they dragged me within the village, which consisted of
several hundred rude shelters of boughs and leaves supported upon the
branches of the trees.
Between the huts, which sometimes formed crooked streets, were dead
branches and the trunks of small trees which connected the huts upon
one tree to those within adjoining trees; the whole network of huts and
pathways forming an almost solid flooring a good fifty feet above the
ground.
I wondered why these agile creatures required connecting bridges
between the trees, but later when I saw the motley aggregation of
half-savage beasts which they kept within their village I realized the
necessity for the pathways. There were a number of the same vicious
wolf-dogs which we had left worrying the dyryth, and many goatlike
animals whose distended udders explained the reasons for their
presence.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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