The old woman let out a shrill cackling. Fand's eyes were like cups of
molten gold.
Winters bent over and caught Jill in his arms. He lifted her to her
feet and stood holding her to him, in a fury of protective possessive
love. He said very softly to Fand,
"You've seen it all now. Can we go?"
She nodded. "Take them to the garden of Shanga," she said, and added,
"It is almost time."
The guards took them, Burk Winters and the woman he had lost and found
again, out through the great echoing halls of the palace and down the
long slope of lawn to the amphitheatre.
A barred gate of heavy metal covered the mouth of a tunnel. The guards
unlocked it and took off Winters' chains and thrust him inside with
Jill. The gate was locked again behind them.
Holding Jill tightly by the hand, Winters went down the tunnel and came
presently into the arena--into the garden of Shanga.
He stopped, blinking in the sudden light. Jill's hand tightened on his.
She quivered with a tense expectancy, and her head was tilted in an
attitude of listening.
He had only a moment before the gong sounded, the mellow sonorous notes
that might have been calling some evil priesthood to its dark prayers.
Only a moment to glimpse the trees and the shambling anthropoid forms
that moved among them, to catch the rank beast taint in the air, to
hear the splashing and the hissing screams from the hidden pool.
Only a moment to be filled with horror and a sick fear, to deny to
himself the reality of this nightmare garden, to wish that he were
blind and deaf, or better than that, dead.
In the seats above the protecting wall, rows of Martian faces looked
down. They were the faces of men and women who watch the antics
of creatures in a zoo--destructive creatures for which they have a
personal hatred.
Then the gong called out, and Jill leaped away, pulling him by the
hand. All over the garden there was a moment of intense silence, and
then there rose a devil's chorus of roaring and screaming in voices
that were horribly human and even more horribly not, and close to him
Jill's voice chimed in, saying over and over,
"Shanga! Shanga!"
It came to Winters in a flash, then, what Fand had meant about Mars. As
Jill pulled him headlong between the trees and across the open grassy
spaces, he realized that this garden of Shanga was in fact a zoo, an
exhibit, where the people of Mars might come to see what manner of
beast their economic conquerors were. A hot and dire shame rose in
him. _Apeling, running naked through the trees, a slave to the fire of
Shanga!_
He yelled at Jill to stop!
She only plunged on the harder, so that he had to fight her, setting
his heels in the earth. And she turned on him snarling, saying,
"Shanga!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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