The departure of the big cat left Honath frozen, not so much frightened as simply stunned by so unexpected an end to the vigil. At the first moan from Alaskon, however, Mathild was up and walking softly to the navigator, speaking in a low voice, sentences which made no particular sense and perhaps were not intended to. Honath stirred and followed her.
Halfway back into the cave, his foot struck something and he looked down. It was the thigh-bone of some medium-large animal, imperfectly cleaned and not very recent. It looked like a keepsake the megatherium had hoped to save from the usurpers of its lair. Along a curved inner surface there was a patch of thick grey mold. Honath squatted and peeled it off carefully.
“Mathild, we can put this over the wound,” he said. “Some molds help prevent wounds from festering. . . . How is he?”
“Better, I think,” Mathild murmured. “But he’s still feverish. I don’t think we’ll be able to move on today.”
Honath was unsure whether to be pleased or disturbed. Certainly he was far from anxious to leave the cave, where they seemed at least to be reasonably comfortable. Possibly they would also be reasonably safe, for the low-roofed hole almost surely still smelt of megatherium, and intruders would recognize the smell—as the men from the attic world could not—and keep their distance. They would have no way of knowing that the cat had only been a cub and that it had vacated the premises, though of course the odor would fade before long.
Yet it was important to move on, to cross the Great Range if possible, and in the end to wind their way back to the world where they belonged. And to win vindication, no matter how long it took. Even should it prove relatively easy to survive in Hell—and there were few signs of that, thus far—the only proper course was to fight until the attic world was totally regained. After all, it would have been the easy and the comfortable thing, back there at the very beginning, to have kept one’s incipient heresies to oneself and remained on comfortable terms with one’s neighbors. But Honath had spoken up, and so had the rest of them, in their fashions.
It was the ancient internal battle between what Honath wanted to do, and what he knew he ought to do. He had never heard of Kant and the Categorical Imperative, but he knew well enough which side of his nature would win in the long run. But it had been a cruel joke of heredity which had fastened a sense of duty onto a lazy nature. It made even small decisions egregiously painful.
But for the moment at least, the decision was out of his hands. Alaskon was too sick to be moved. In addition, the strong beams of sunlight which had been glaring in across the floor of the cave were dimming by the instant, and there was a distant, premonitory growl of thunder.
“Then we’ll stay here,” he said. “It’s going to rain again, and hard this time. Once it’s falling in earnest, I can go out and pick us some fruit—it’ll screen me even if anything is prowling around in it. And I won’t have to go as far as the stream for water, as long as the rain keeps up.”
The rain, as it turned out, kept up all day, in a growing downpour which completely curtained the mouth of the cave by early afternoon. The chattering of the nearby stream grew quickly to a roar.
By evening, Alaskon’s fever seemed to have dropped almost to normal, and his strength nearly returned as well. The wound, thanks more to the encrusted matte of mold than to any complications within the flesh itself, was still ugly-looking, but it was now painful only when the navigator moved carelessly, and Mathild was convinced that it was mending. Alaskon himself, having been deprived of activity all day, was unusually talkative.
“Has it occurred to either of you,” he said in the gathering gloom, “that since that stream is water, it can’t possibly be coming from the Great Range? All the peaks over there are just cones of ashes and lava. We’ve seen young volcanoes in the process of building themselves, so we’re sure of that. What’s more, they’re usually hot. I don’t see how there could possibly be any source of water in the Range—not even run-off from the rains.”
“It can’t just come up out of the ground,” Honath said. “It must be fed by rain. By the way it sounds now, it could even be the first part of a flood.”
“As you say, it’s probably rain-water,” Alaskon said cheerfully. “But not off the Great Range, that’s out of the question. Most likely it collects on the cliffs.”
“I hope you’re wrong,” Honath said. “The cliffs may be a little easier to climb from this side, but there’s still the cliff tribe to think about.”
“Maybe, maybe. But the cliffs are big. The tribes on this side may never have heard of the war with our tree-top folk. No, Honath, I think that’s our only course.”
“If it is,” Honath said grimly, “we’re going to wish more than ever that we had some stout, sharp needles among us.”
Alaskon’s judgment was quickly borne out. The three left the cave at dawn the next morning, Alaskon moving somewhat stiffly but not otherwise noticeably incommoded, and resumed following the stream bed upwards—a stream now swollen by the rains to a roaring rapids. After winding its way upwards for about a mile in the general direction of the Great Range, the stream turned on itself and climbed rapidly back toward the basalt cliffs, falling toward the three over successively steeper shelves of jutting rock.
Then it turned again, at right angles, and the three found themselves at the exit of a dark gorge, little more than thirty feet high, but both narrow and long. Here the stream was almost perfectly smooth, and the thin strip of land on each side of it was covered with low shrubs. They paused and looked dubiously into the canyon. It was singularly gloomy.
“There’s plenty of cover, at least,” Honath said in a low voice. “But almost anything could live in a place like that.”
“Nothing very big could hide in it,” Alaskon pointed out. “It should be safe. Anyhow it’s the only way to go.”
“All right. Let’s go ahead, then. But keep your head down, and be ready to jump!”
Honath lost the other two by sight as soon as they crept into the dark shrubbery, but he could hear their cautious movements nearby. Nothing else in the gorge seemed to move at all, not even the water, which flowed without a ripple over an invisible bed. There was not even any wind, for which Honath was grateful, although he had begun to develop an immunity to the motionless ground beneath them.
After a few moments, Honath heard a low whistle. Creeping sidewise toward the source of the sound, he nearly bumped into Alaskon, who was crouched beneath a thickly-spreading magnolia. An instant later, Mathilda’s face peered out of the dim greenery.
“Look,” Alaskon whispered. “What do you make of this?”
‘This’ was a hollow in the sandy soil, about four feet across and rimmed with a low parapet of earth—evidently the same earth that had been scooped out of its center. Occupying most of it were three grey, ellipsoidal objects, smooth and featureless.
“Eggs,” Mathild said wonderingly.
“Obviously. But look at the size of them! Whatever laid them must be gigantic. I think we’re trespassing in something’s private valley.”
Mathild drew in her breath. Honath thought fast, as much to prevent panic in himself as in the girl. A sharp-edged stone lying nearby provided the answer. He seized it and struck.
The outer surface of the egg was leathery rather than brittle; it tore raggedly. Deliberately, Honath bent and put his mouth to the oozing surface.
It was excellent. The flavor was decidedly stronger than that of birds’ eggs, but he was far too hungry to be squeamish. After a moment’s amazement, Alaskon and Mathild attacked the other two ovoids with a will. It was the first really satisfying meal they had had in Hell. When they finally moved away from the devastated nest, Honath felt better than he had since the day he was arrested.
As they moved on down the gorge, they began again to hear the roar of water, though the stream looked as placid as ever. Here, too, they saw the first sign