CHAPTER III

Pellicudar

by Edgar R. Burroughs

CHAPTER III, PELLICUDAR by Edgar R. Burroughs
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SHOOTING THE CHUTES--AND AFTER

Through the fog I felt my way along by means of my
compass. I no longer heard the bears, nor did I encoun-
ter one within the fog.

Experience has since taught me that these great
beasts are as terror-stricken by this phenomenon as a
landsman by a fog at sea, and that no sooner does a fog
envelop them than they make the best of their way to
lower levels and a clear atmosphere. It was well for me
that this was true.

I felt very sad and lonely as I crawled along the diffi-
cult footing. My own predicament weighed less heavily
upon me than the loss of Perry, for I loved the old
fellow.

That I should ever win the opposite slopes of the
range I began to doubt, for though I am naturally
sanguine, I imagine that the bereavement which had
befallen me had cast such a gloom over my spirits that I
could see no slightest ray of hope for the future.

Then, too, the blighting, gray oblivion of the cold,
damp clouds through which I wandered was distress-
ing. Hope thrives best in sunlight, and I am sure that it
does not thrive at all in a fog.

But the instinct of self-preservation is stronger than
hope. It thrives, fortunately, upon nothing. It takes root
upon the brink of the grave, and blossoms in the jaws of
death. Now it flourished bravely upon the breast of dead
hope, and urged me onward and upward in a stern
endeavor to justify its existence.

As I advanced the fog became denser. I could see
nothing beyond my nose. Even the snow and ice I trod
were invisible.

I could not see below the breast of my bearskin coat.
I seemed to be floating in a sea of vapor.

To go forward over a dangerous glacier under such
conditions was little short of madness; but I could not
have stopped going had I known positively that death
lay two paces before my nose. In the first place, it was
too cold to stop, and in the second, I should have gone
mad but for the excitement of the perils that beset each
forward step.

For some time the ground had been rougher and
steeper, until I had been forced to scale a considerable
height that had carried me from the glacier entirely. I
was sure from my compass that I was following the right
general direction, and so I kept on.

Once more the ground was level. From the wind that
blew about me I guessed that I must be upon some ex-
posed peak of ridge.

And then quite suddenly I stepped out into space.
Wildly I turned and clutched at the ground that had
slipped from beneath my feet.

Only a smooth, icy surface was there. I found nothing
to clutch or stay my fall, and a moment later so great
was my speed that nothing could have stayed me.

As suddenly as I had pitched into space, with equal
suddenness did I emerge from the fog, out of which I
shot like a projectile from a cannon into clear daylight.
My speed was so great that I could see nothing about
me but a blurred and indistinct sheet of smooth and
frozen snow, that rushed past me with express-train
velocity.

I must have slid downward thousands of feet before
the steep incline curved gently on to a broad, smooth,
snow-covered plateau. Across this I hurtled with slowly
diminishing velocity, until at last objects about me began
to take definite shape.

Far ahead, miles and miles away, I saw a great valley
and mighty woods, and beyond these a broad expanse
of water. In the nearer foreground I discerned a small,
dark blob of color upon the shimmering whiteness of the
snow.

"A bear," thought I, and thanked the instinct that had
impelled me to cling tenaciously to my rifle during the
moments of my awful tumble.

At the rate I was going it would be but a moment
before I should be quite abreast the thing; nor was it
long before I came to a sudden stop in soft snow, upon
which the sun was shining, not twenty paces from the
object of my most immediate apprehension.

It was standing upon its hind legs waiting for me. As
I scrambled to my feet to meet it, I dropped my gun
in the snow and doubled up with laughter.

It was Perry.

The expression upon his face, combined with the relief
I felt at seeing him again safe and sound, was too much
for my overwrought nerves.

"David!" be cried. "David, my boy! God has been
good to an old man. He has answered my prayer."

It seems that Perry in his mad flight had plunged over
the brink at about the same point as that at which I had
stepped over it a short time later. Chance had done for
us what long periods of rational labor had failed to
accomplish.

We had crossed the divide. We were upon the side of
the Mountains of the Clouds that we had for so long
been attempting to reach.

We looked about. Below us were green trees and
warm jungles. In the distance was a great sea.

"The Lural Az," I said, pointing toward its blue-green
surface.

Somehow--the gods alone can explain it--Perry, too,
had clung to his rifle during his mad descent of the icy
slope. For that there was cause for great rejoicing.

Neither of us was worse for his experience, so after
shaking the snow from our clothing, we set off at a great
rate down toward the warmth and comfort of the forest
and the jungle.

The going was easy by comparison with the awful
obstacles we had had to encounter upon the opposite
side of the divide. There were beasts, of course, but we
came through safely.

Before we halted to eat or rest, we stood beside a
little mountain brook beneath the wondrous trees of the
primeval forest in an atmosphere of warmth and com-
fort. It reminded me of an early June day in the Maine
Woods.

We fell to work with our short axes and cut enough
small trees to build a rude protection from the fiercer
beasts. Then we lay down to sleep.

How long we slept I do not know. Perry says that
inasmuch as there is no means of measuring time within
Pellucidar, there can be no such thing as time here, and
that we may have slept an outer earthly year, or we
may have slept but a second.

But this I know. We had stuck the ends of some of the
saplings into the ground in the building of our shelter,
first stripping the leaves and branches from them, and
when we awoke we found that many of them had thrust
forth sprouts.

Personally, I think that we slept at least a month; but
who may say? The sun marked midday when we closed
our eyes; it was still in the same position when we
opened them; nor had it varied a hair's breadth in the
interim.

It is most baffling, this question of elapsed time within
Pellucidar.

Anyhow, I was famished when we awoke. I think that
it was the pangs of hunger that awoke me. Ptarmigan
and wild boar fell before my revolver within a dozen
moments of my awakening. Perry soon had a roaring fire
blazing by the brink of the little stream.

It was a good and delicious meal we made. Though
we did not eat the entire boar, we made a very large
hole in him, while the ptarmigan was but a mouthful.

Having satisfied our hunger, we determined to set forth
at once in search of Anoroc and my old friend, Ja the
Mezop. We each thought that by following the little
stream downward, we should come upon the large river
which Ja had told me emptied into the Lural Az op-
posite his island.

We did so; nor were we disappointed, for at last after
a pleasant journey--and what journey would not be
pleasant after the hardships we had endured among the
peaks of the Mountains of the Clouds--we came upon a
broad flood that rushed majestically onward in the di-
rection of the great sea we had seen from the snowy
slopes of the mountains.

For three long marches we followed the left bank of
the growing river, until at last we saw it roll its mighty
volume into the vast waters of the sea. Far out across the
rippling ocean we described three islands. The one to
the left must be Anoroc.

At last we had come close to a solution of our problem
--the road to Sari.

But how to reach the islands was now the foremost
question in our minds. We must build a canoe.

Perry is a most resourceful man. He has an axiom
which carries the thought-kernel that what man has
done, man can do, and it doesn't cut any figure with
Perry whether a fellow knows how to do it or not.

He set out to make gunpowder once, shortly after our
escape from Phutra and at the beginning of the con-
federation of the wild tribes of Pellucidar. He said that
some one, without any knowledge of the fact that such a
thing might be concocted, had once stumbled upon it by
accident, and so he couldn't see why a fellow who knew
all about powder except how to make it couldn't do as
well.

He worked mighty hard mixing all sorts of things
together, until finally he evolved a substance that looked
like powder. He had been very proud of the stuff, and
had gone about the village of the Sarians exhibiting it to
every one who would listen to him, and explaining what
its purpose was and what terrific havoc it would work,
until finally the natives became so terrified at the stuff
that they wouldn't come within a rod of Perry and his
invention.

Finally, I suggested that we experiment with it and
see what it would do, so Perry built a fire, after placing
the powder at a safe distance, and then touched a glow-
ing ember to a minute particle of the deadly explosive.
It extinguished the ember.

Repeated experiments with it determined me that in
searching for a high explosive, Perry had stumbled upon
a fire-extinguisher that would have made his fortune
for him back in our own world.

So now he set himself to work to build a scientific
canoe. I had suggested that we construct a dugout, but
Perry convinced me that we must build something
more in keeping with our positions of supermen in this
world of the Stone Age.

"We must impress these natives with our superiority,"
he explained. "You must not forget, David, that you are
emperor of Pellucidar. As such you may not with dignity
approach the shores of a foreign power in so crude a
vessel as a dugout."

I pointed out to Perry that it wasn't much more in-
congruous for the emperor to cruise in a canoe, than it
was for the prime minister to attempt to build one with
his own hands.

He had to smile at that; but in extenuation of his act
he assured me that it was quite customary for prime
ministers to give their personal attention to the building
of imperial navies; "and this," he said, "is the imperial
navy of his Serene Highness, David I, Emperor of the
Federated Kingdoms of Pellucidar."

I grinned; but Perry was quite serious about it. It had
always seemed rather more or less of a joke to me that I
should be addressed as majesty and all the rest of it.
Yet my imperial power and dignity had been a very real
thing during my brief reign.

Twenty tribes had joined the federation, and their
chiefs had sworn eternal fealty to one another and to me.
Among them were many powerful though savage na-
tions. Their chiefs we had made kings; their tribal lands
kingdoms.

We had armed them with bows and arrows and
swords, in addition to their own more primitive weapons.
I had trained them in military discipline and in so much
of the art of war as I had gleaned from extensive read-
ing of the campaigns of Napoleon, Von Moltke, Grant,
and the ancients.

We had marked out as best we could natural bounda-
ries dividing the various kingdoms. We had warned
tribes beyond these boundaries that they must not
trespass, and we had marched against and severely
punished those who had.

We had met and defeated the Mahars and the
Sagoths. In short, we had demonstrated our rights to
empire, and very rapidly were we being recognized and
heralded abroad when my departure for the outer world
and Hooja's treachery had set us back.

But now I had returned. The work that fate had
undone must be done again, and though I must need
smile at my imperial honors, I none the less felt the
weight of duty and obligation that rested upon my
shoulders.

Slowly the imperial navy progressed toward com-
pletion. She was a wondrous craft, but I had my doubts
about her. When I voiced them to Perry, he reminded
me gently that my people for many generations had
been mine-owners, not ship-builders, and consequently I
couldn't be expected to know much about the matter.

I was minded to inquire into his hereditary fitness to
design battleships; but inasmuch as I already knew that
his father had been a minister in a back-woods village far
from the coast, I hesitated lest I offend the dear old
fellow.

He was immensely serious about his work, and I must
admit that in so far as appearances went he did ex-
tremely well with the meager tools and assistance at his
command. We had only two short axes and our hunting-
knives; yet with these we hewed trees, split them into
planks, surfaced and fitted them.

The "navy" was some forty feet in length by ten feet
beam. Her sides were quite straight and fully ten feet
high--"for the purpose," explained Perry, "of adding
dignity to her appearance and rendering it less easy for
an enemy to board her."

As a matter of fact, I knew that he had had in mind
the safety of her crew under javelin-fire--the lofty sides
made an admirable shelter. Inside she reminded me of
nothing so much as a floating trench. There was also
some slight analogy to a huge coffin.

Her prow sloped sharply backward from the water-
line--quite like a line of battleship. Perry had designed
her more for moral effect upon an enemy, I think, than
for any real harm she might inflict, and so those parts
which were to show were the most imposing.

Below the water-line she was practically non-existent.
She should have had considerable draft; but, as the
enemy couldn't have seen it, Perry decided to do away
with it, and so made her flat-bottomed. It was this that
caused my doubts about her.

There was another little idiosyncrasy of design that
escaped us both until she was about ready to launch--
there was no method of propulsion. Her sides were far
too high to permit the use of sweeps, and when Perry
suggested that we pole her, I remonstrated on the
grounds that it would be a most undignified and awk-
ward manner of sweeping down upon the foe, even if
we could find or wield poles that would reach to the
bottom of the ocean.

Finally I suggested that we convert her into a sailing
vessel. When once the idea took hold Perry was most
enthusiastic about it, and nothing would do but a four-
masted, full-rigged ship.

Again I tried to dissuade him, but he was simply
crazy over the psychological effect which the appearance
of this strange and mighty craft would have upon the
natives of Pellucidar. So we rigged her with thin hides
for sails and dried gut for rope.

Neither of us knew much about sailing a full-rigged
ship; but that didn't worry me a great deal, for I was
confident that we should never be called upon to do so,
and as the day of launching approached I was positive of
it.

We had built her upon a low bank of the river close
to where it emptied into the sea, and just above high
tide. Her keel we had laid upon several rollers cut from
small trees, the ends of the rollers in turn resting upon
parallel tracks of long saplings. Her stern was toward the
water.

A few hours before we were ready to launch her she
made quite an imposing picture, for Perry had insisted
upon setting every shred of "canvas." I told him that I
didn't know much about it, but I was sure that at launch-
ing the hull only should have been completed, every-
thing else being completed after she had floated safely.

At the last minute there was some delay while we
sought a name for her. I wanted her christened the
Perry in honor both of her designer and that other great
naval genius of another world, Captain Oliver Hazard
Perry, of the United States Navy. But Perry was too
modest; he wouldn't hear of it.

We finally decided to establish a system in the naming
of the fleet. Battle-ships of the first-class should bear the
names of kingdoms of the federation; armored cruisers
the names of kings; cruisers the names of cities, and so
on down the line. Therefore, we decided to name the
first battle-ship Sari, after the first of the federated
kingdoms.

The launching of the Sari proved easier than I con-
templated. Perry wanted me to get in and break some-
thing over the bow as she floated out upon the bosom of
the river, but I told him that I should feel safer on dry
land until I saw which side up the Sari would float.

I could see by the expression of the old man's face
that my words had hurt him; but I noticed that he didn't
offer to get in himself, and so I felt less contrition than
I might otherwise.

When we cut the ropes and removed the blocks that
held the Sari in place she started for the water with a
lunge. Before she hit it she was going at a reckless
speed, for we had laid our tracks quite down to the
water, greased them, and at intervals placed rollers all
ready to receive the ship as she moved forward with
stately dignity. But there was no dignity in the Sari.

When she touched the surface of the river she must
have been going twenty or thirty miles an hour. Her
momentum carried her well out into the stream, until
she came to a sudden halt at the end of the long line
which we had had the foresight to attach to her bow and
fasten to a large tree upon the bank.

The moment her progress was checked she promptly
capsized. Perry was overwhelmed. I didn't upbraid him,
nor remind him that I had "told him so."

His grief was so genuine and so apparent that I didn't
have the heart to reproach him, even were I inclined to
that particular sort of meanness.

"Come, come, old man!" I cried. "It's not as bad as it
looks. Give me a hand with this rope, and we'll drag her
up as far as we can; and then when the tide goes out
we'll try another scheme. I think we can make a go of
her yet."

Well, we managed to get her up into shallow water.
When the tide receded she lay there on her side in the
mud, quite a pitiable object for the premier battle-ship
of a world--"the terror of the seas" was the way Perry
had occasionally described her.

We had to work fast; but before the tide came in
again we had stripped her of her sails and masts, righted
her, and filled her about a quarter full of rock ballast. If
she didn't stick too fast in the mud I was sure that she
would float this time right side up.

I can tell you that it was with palpitating hearts that
we sat upon the river-bank and watched that tide come
slowly in. The tides of Pellucidar don't amount to much
by comparison with our higher tides of the outer world,
but I knew that it ought to prove ample to float the Sari.

Nor was I mistaken. Finally we had the satisfaction
of seeing the vessel rise out of the mud and float slowly
upstream with the tide. As the water rose we pulled her
in quite close to the bank and clambered aboard.

She rested safely now upon an even keel; nor did she
leak, for she was well calked with fiber and tarry pitch.
We rigged up a single short mast and light sail, fastened
planking down over the ballast to form a deck, worked
her out into midstream with a couple of sweeps, and
dropped our primitive stone anchor to await the turn
of the tide that would bear us out to sea.

While we waited we devoted the time to the con-
struction of an upper deck, since the one immediately
above the ballast was some seven feet from the gunwale.
The second deck was four feet above this. In it was a
large, commodious hatch, leading to the lower deck. The
sides of the ship rose three feet above the upper deck,
forming an excellent breastwork, which we loopholed at
intervals that we might lie prone and fire upon an
enemy.

Though we were sailing out upon a peaceful mission
in search of my friend Ja, we knew that we might meet
with people of some other island who would prove
unfriendly.

At last the tide turned. We weighed anchor. Slowly
we drifted down the great river toward the sea.

About us swarmed the mighty denizens of the prim-
eval deep--plesiosauri and ichthyosauria with all their
horrid, slimy cousins whose names were as the names of
aunts and uncles to Perry, but which I have never been
able to recall an hour after having heard them.

At last we were safely launched upon the journey to
which we had looked forward for so long, and the results
of which meant so much to me.