Adventure stories; Fantasy fiction; Tarzan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
"Is there anything beyond you?" exclaimed Pan-at-lee. "How could you
know that a lion pursued me and that I leaped from the cliff and not
know that it was the pool of deep water below that saved me?"
"I would have known that, too, had not the Kor-ul-lul come then and
prevented me continuing upon your trail. But now I would ask you a
question--by what name do you call the thing with which I just fought?"
"It was a Tor-o-don," she replied. "I have seen but one before. They
are terrible creatures with the cunning of man and the ferocity of a
beast. Great indeed must be the warrior who slays one single-handed."
She gazed at him in open admiration.
"And now," said Tarzan, "you must sleep, for tomorrow we shall return
to Kor-ul-JA and Om-at, and I doubt that you have had much rest these
two nights."
Pan-at-lee, lulled by a feeling of security, slept peacefully into the
morning while Tarzan stretched himself upon the hard floor of the
recess just outside her cave.
The sun was high in the heavens when he awoke; for two hours it had
looked down upon another heroic figure miles away--the figure of a
godlike man fighting his way through the hideous morass that lies like
a filthy moat defending Pal-ul-don from the creatures of the outer
world. Now waist deep in the sucking ooze, now menaced by loathsome
reptiles, the man advanced only by virtue of Herculean efforts gaining
laboriously by inches along the devious way that he was forced to
choose in selecting the least precarious footing. Near the center of
the morass was open water--slimy, green-hued water. He reached it at
last after more than two hours of such effort as would have left an
ordinary man spent and dying in the sticky mud, yet he was less than
halfway across the marsh. Greasy with slime and mud was his smooth,
brown hide, and greasy with slime and mud was his beloved Enfield that
had shone so brightly in the first rays of the rising sun.
He paused a moment upon the edge of the open water and then throwing
himself forward struck out to swim across. He swam with long, easy,
powerful strokes calculated less for speed than for endurance, for his
was, primarily, a test of the latter, since beyond the open water was
another two hours or more of gruelling effort between it and solid
ground. He was, perhaps, halfway across and congratulating himself upon
the ease of the achievement of this portion of his task when there
arose from the depths directly in his path a hideous reptile, which,
with wide-distended jaws, bore down upon him, hissing shrilly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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