As I lay resting after my exertions, I suddenly became aware of a
strange, moaning sound from without, and then the hut shook, and I
realized that another storm had come. Soon after I heard the beat of
rain drops on the roof, and then a staggering, deafening peal of
lunar thunder. As the storm waxed in violence, I could imagine the
terror of the No-vans, nor even in my plight could I resist the
desire to smile at their discomfiture. I knew that they must all be
hiding in their huts, and again I renewed my efforts to break the
bonds at my wrists, but all to no avail; and then suddenly, above the
moaning of the wind and the beating of the rain, there came
distinctly to my ears in a clear, full voice, a single word:
“Julian!”
“Nah-ee-lah,” I thought. “She needs me. What are they doing to her?”
There flashed quickly before my mental vision a dozen scenes, in each
of which I saw the divine figure of the Moon Maid, the victim of some
fiendish brutality. Now she was being devoured by Ga-va-go; now some
of the females were tearing her to pieces, and again the warriors
were piercing that beautiful skin with their cruel spears; or it was
Orthis, come to claim Ga-va-go’s gift. It was this last thought, I
think, which turned me almost mad, giving to my muscles the strength
of a dozen men. I have always been accounted a powerful man, but in
the instant that that sweet voice came across the storm to find me,
and my imagination pictured her in the clutches of Orthis, something
within moved me to Herculean efforts far transcending aught that I
had previously achieved. As though they had been cotton twine now,
the leather bonds at my wrists snapped asunder, and an instant later
those at my ankles were torn away, and I was upon my feet. I sprang
to the door and into the open, where I found myself in a maelstrom of
wind and rain. In two bounds I had cleared the space between the hut
in which I had been confined and that occupied by Nah-ee-lah, had
torn the hanging aside, and had sprung into the interior; and there I
beheld the materialization of my last vision—there was Orthis, one
arm about the slender body of the girl pinning her arms close to her
side, while his other hand was at her throat, choking her and
pressing her slowly backward across his knees toward the ground.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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