The others growled resentfully, but when Skruk took up the pursuit
again they followed him. Being from a low country they found strenuous
exertion in these high altitudes exhausting, it is true, but the actual
basis for their disinclination to continue the pursuit was the terror
which the dizzy heights inspired in them and the perilous route along
which The Red Flower of Zoram was leading them.
From above Jana saw them ascending, and knowing that they were again
upon the right trail she stood erect in plain view of them. Her single,
soft garment made from the pelt of tarag cubs, whipped about her naked
legs, half revealing, half concealing the rounded charms of her girlish
figure. The noonday sun shone down upon her light, bronzed skin,
glistening from the naked contours of a perfect shoulder and imparting
golden glints to her hair that was sometimes a lustrous brown and again
a copper bronze. It was piled loosely upon her head and held in place
by slender, hollow bones of the dimorphodon, a little long-tailed
cousin of the thipdar. The upper ends of these bone pins were
ornamented with carving and some of them were colored. A fillet of soft
skin ornamented in colors encircled her brow and she wore bracelets and
anklets made of the vertebrae of small animals, strung upon leather
thongs. These, too, were carved and colored. Upon her feet were stout,
little sandals, soled with the hide of the mastodon and from the center
of her headband rose a single feather. At her hip was a stone knife and
in her right hand a light spear.
She stooped and picking up a small fragment of rock hurled it down at
Skruk and his companions. "Go back to your swamps, jaloks of the low
country," she cried. "The Red Flower of Zoram is not for you," and then
she turned and sped away across the pathless granite.
To her left lay Zoram, but there was a mighty chasm between her and the
city. Along its rim she made her way, sometimes upon its very verge,
but unshaken by the frightful abyss below her. Constantly she sought
for a means of descent, since she knew that if she could cross it
she might circle back toward Zoram, but the walls rose sheer for two
thousand feet offering scarce a handhold in a hundred feet.
As she rounded the shoulder of the peak she saw a vast country
stretching away below her--a country that she had never seen
before--and she knew that she had crossed the mighty range and was
looking on the land that lay beyond. The fissure that she had been
following she could see widening below her into a great canyon that led
out through foothills to a mighty plain. The slopes of the lower hills
were wooded and beyond the plain were forests.
This was a new world to Jana of Zoram, but it held no lure for her; it
did not beckon to her for she knew that savage beasts and savage men of
the low countries roamed its plains and forests.
To her right rose the mountains she had rounded; to her left was the
deep chasm, and behind her were Skruk and his three companions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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