Adventure stories; Fantasy fiction; Tarzan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
Night had fallen upon unchartered Pal-ul-don. A slender moon, low in
the west, bathed the white faces of the chalk cliffs presented to her,
in a mellow, unearthly glow. Black were the shadows in Kor-ul-JA,
Gorge-of-lions, where dwelt the tribe of the same name under Es-sat,
their chief. From an aperture near the summit of the lofty escarpment a
hairy figure emerged--the head and shoulders first--and fierce eyes
scanned the cliff side in every direction.
It was Es-sat, the chief. To right and left and below he looked as
though to assure himself that he was unobserved, but no other figure
moved upon the cliff face, nor did another hairy body protrude from any
of the numerous cave mouths from the high-flung abode of the chief to
the habitations of the more lowly members of the tribe nearer the
cliff's base. Then he moved outward upon the sheer face of the white
chalk wall. In the half-light of the baby moon it appeared that the
heavy, shaggy black figure moved across the face of the perpendicular
wall in some miraculous manner, but closer examination would have
revealed stout pegs, as large around as a man's wrist protruding from
holes in the cliff into which they were driven. Es-sat's four handlike
members and his long, sinuous tail permitted him to move with
consummate ease whither he chose--a gigantic rat upon a mighty wall. As
he progressed upon his way he avoided the cave mouths, passing either
above or below those that lay in his path.
The outward appearance of these caves was similar. An opening from
eight to as much as twenty feet long by eight high and four to six feet
deep was cut into the chalklike rock of the cliff, in the back of this
large opening, which formed what might be described as the front
veranda of the home, was an opening about three feet wide and six feet
high, evidently forming the doorway to the interior apartment or
apartments. On either side of this doorway were smaller openings which
it were easy to assume were windows through which light and air might
find their way to the inhabitants. Similar windows were also dotted
over the cliff face between the entrance porches, suggesting that the
entire face of the cliff was honeycombed with apartments. From many of
these smaller apertures small streams of water trickled down the
escarpment, and the walls above others was blackened as by smoke.
Where the water ran the wall was eroded to a depth of from a few inches
to as much as a foot, suggesting that some of the tiny streams had been
trickling downward to the green carpet of vegetation below for ages.
In this primeval setting the great pithecanthropus aroused no jarring
discord for he was as much a part of it as the trees that grew upon the
summit of the cliff or those that hid their feet among the dank ferns
in the bottom of the gorge.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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