It was he. My search was ended. Around me were all my company and the
man we had searched a new world to find. They cut saplings from the
forest and laid a road into the swamp before they could get us all out,
and then we marched back to the city of Jor the Galu chief, and there
was great rejoicing when Ajor came home again mounted upon the glossy
back of the stallion Ace.
Tyler and Hollis and Short and all the rest of us Americans nearly
worked our jaws loose on the march back to the village, and for days
afterward we kept it up. They told me how they had crossed the barrier
cliffs in five days, working twenty-four hours a day in three
eight-hour shifts with two reliefs to each shift alternating
half-hourly. Two men with electric drills driven from the dynamos
aboard the _Toreador_ drilled two holes four feet apart in the face of
the cliff and in the same horizontal planes. The holes slanted
slightly downward. Into these holes the iron rods brought as a part of
our equipment and for just this purpose were inserted, extending about
a foot beyond the face of the rock, across these two rods a plank was
laid, and then the next shift, mounting to the new level, bored two
more holes five feet above the new platform, and so on.
During the nights the searchlights from the _Toreador_ were kept playing
upon the cliff at the point where the drills were working, and at the
rate of ten feet an hour the summit was reached upon the fifth day.
Ropes were lowered, blocks lashed to trees at the top, and crude
elevators rigged, so that by the night of the fifth day the entire
party, with the exception of the few men needed to man the _Toreador_,
were within Caspak with an abundance of arms, ammunition and equipment.
From then on, they fought their way north in search of me, after a vain
and perilous effort to enter the hideous reptile-infested country to
the south. Owing to the number of guns among them, they had not lost a
man; but their path was strewn with the dead creatures they had been
forced to slay to win their way to the north end of the island, where
they had found Bowen and his bride among the Galus of Jor.
The reunion between Bowen and Nobs was marked by a frantic display upon
Nobs' part, which almost stripped Bowen of the scanty attire that the
Galu custom had vouchsafed him. When we arrived at the Galu city, Lys
La Rue was waiting to welcome us. She was Mrs. Tyler now, as the
master of the _Toreador_ had married them the very day that the
search-party had found them, though neither Lys nor Bowen would admit
that any civil or religious ceremony could have rendered more sacred
the bonds with which God had united them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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