Edgar Rice Burroughs - Pellucidar

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PELLUCIDAR

by Edgar Rice Burroughs

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

PROLOGUE

I LOST ON PELLUCIDAR

II TRAVELING WITH TERROR

III SHOOTING THE CHUTES--AND AFTER

IV FRIENDSHIP AND TREACHERY

V SURPRISES

VI A PENDENT WORLD

VII FROM PLIGHT TO PLIGHT

VIII CAPTIVE

IX HOOJA'S CUTTHROATS APPEAR

X THE RAID ON THE CAVE-PRISON

XI ESCAPE

XII KIDNAPED!

XIII RACING FOR LIFE

XIV GORE AND DREAMS

XV CONQUEST AND PEACE

PROLOGUE

SEVERAL YEARS had elapsed since I had found the op-

portunity to do any big-game hunting; for at last I

had my plans almost perfected for a return to my old

stamping-grounds in northern Africa, where in other

days I had had excellent sport in pursuit of the king

of beasts.

The date of my departure had been set; I was to

leave in two weeks. No schoolboy counting the lagging

hours that must pass before the beginning of "long

vacation" released him to the delirious joys of the sum-

mer camp could have been filled with greater im-

patience or keener anticipation.

And then came a letter that started me for Africa

twelve days ahead of my schedule.

Often am I in receipt of letters from strangers who

have found something in a story of mine to commend

or to condemn. My interest in this department of my

correspondence is ever fresh. I opened this particular

letter with all the zest of pleasurable anticipation with

which I had opened so many others. The post-mark

(Algiers) had aroused my interest and curiosity, es-

pecially at this time, since it was Algiers that was

presently to witness the termination of my coming sea

voyage in search of sport and adventure.

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Before the reading of that letter was completed lions

and lion-hunting had fled my thoughts, and I was in

a state of excitement bordering upon frenzy.

It--well, read it yourself, and see if you, too, do not

find food for frantic conjecture, for tantalizing doubts,

and for a great hope.

Here it is:

DEAR SIR: I think that I have run across one of the

most remarkable coincidences in modern literature. But

let me start at the beginning:

I am, by profession, a wanderer upon the face of

the earth. I have no trade--nor any other occupation.

My father bequeathed me a competency; some remoter

ancestors lust to roam. I have combined the two

and invested them carefully and without extravagance.

I became interested in your story, At the Earth's

Core, not so much because of the probability of the

tale as of a great and abiding wonder that people

should be paid real money for writing such impossible

trash. You will pardon my candor, but it is necessary

that you understand my mental attitude toward this

particular story--that you may credit that which fol-

lows.

Shortly thereafter I started for the Sahara in search

of a rather rare species of antelope that is to be found

only occasionally within a limited area at a certain

season of the year. My chase led me far from the haunts

of man.

It was a fruitless search, however, in so far as antelope

is concerned; but one night as I lay courting sleep at

the edge of a little cluster of date-palms that surround

an ancient well in the midst of the arid, shifting sands,

I suddenly became conscious of a strange sound coming

apparently from the earth beneath my head.

It was an intermittent ticking!

No reptile or insect with which I am familiar re-

produces any such notes. I lay for an hour--listening

intently.

At last my curiosity got the better of me. I arose,

lighted my lamp and commenced to investigate.

My bedding lay upon a rug stretched directly upon

the warm sand. The noise appeared to be coming from

beneath the rug. I raised it, but found nothing--yet,

at intervals, the sound continued.

I dug into the sand with the point of my hunting-

knife. A few inches below the surface of the sand

I encountered a solid substance that had the feel of

wood beneath the sharp steel.

Excavating about it, I unearthed a small wooden box.

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From this receptacle issued the strange sound that I

had heard.

How had it come here?

What did it contain?

In attempting to lift it from its burying place I dis-

covered that it seemed to be held fast by means of a

very small insulated cable running farther into the sand

beneath it.

My first impulse was to drag the thing loose by main

strength; but fortunately I thought better of this and

fell to examining the box. I soon saw that it was covered

by a hinged lid, which was held closed by a simple

screwhook and eye.

It took but a moment to loosen this and raise the

cover, when, to my utter astonishment, I discovered

an ordinary telegraph instrument clicking away within.

"What in the world," thought I, "is this thing doing here?"

That it was a French military instrument was my

first guess; but really there didn't seem much likelihood

that this was the correct explanation, when one took

into account the loneliness and remoteness of the spot.

As I sat gazing at my remarkable find, which was tick-

ing and clicking away there in the silence of the desert

night, trying to convey some message which I was

unable to interpret, my eyes fell upon a bit of paper

lying in the bottom of the box beside the instrument.

I picked it up and examined it. Upon it were written

but two letters:

D. I.

They meant nothing to me then. I was baffled.

Once, in an interval of silence upon the part of the

receiving instrument, I moved the sending-key up and

down a few times. Instantly the receiving mechanism

commenced to work frantically.

I tried to recall something of the Morse Code, with

which I had played as a little boy--but time had

obliterated it from my memory. I became almost frantic

as I let my imagination run riot among the possibilities

for which this clicking instrument might stand.

Some poor devil at the unknown other end might be

in dire need of succor. The very franticness of the

instrument's wild clashing betokened something of the

kind.

And there sat I, powerless to interpret, and so power-

less to help!

It was then that the inspiration came to me. In a flash

there leaped to my mind the closing paragraphs of the

story I had read in the club at Algiers:

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Does the answer lie somewhere upon the bosom of

the broad Sahara, at the ends of two tiny wires, hidden

beneath a lost cairn?

The idea seemed preposterous. Experience and in-

telligence combined to assure me that there could be

no slightest grain of truth or possibility in your wild

tale--it was fiction pure and simple.

And yet where WERE the other ends of those wires?

What was this instrument--ticking away here in

the great Sahara--but a travesty upon the possible!

Would I have believed in it had I not seen it with

my own eyes?

And the initials--D. I.--upon the slip of paper!

David's initials were these--David Innes.

I smiled at my imaginings. I ridiculed the assumption

that there was an inner world and that these wires

led downward through the earth's crust to the surface

of Pellucidar. And yet--

Well, I sat there all night, listening to that tantalizing

clicking, now and then moving the sending-key just to

let the other end know that the instrument had been

discovered. In the morning, after carefully returning the

box to its hole and covering it over with sand, I called

my servants about me, snatched a hurried breakfast,

mounted my horse, and started upon a forced march

for Algiers.

I arrived here today. In writing you this letter I feel

that I am making a fool of myself.

There is no David Innes.

There is no Dian the Beautiful.

There is no world within a world.

Pellucidar is but a realm of your imagination--noth-

ing more.

BUT--

The incident of the finding of that buried telegraph

instrument upon the lonely Sahara is little short of

uncanny, in view of your story of the adventures of

David Innes.

I have called it one of the most remarkable coinci-

dences in modern fiction. I called it literature before,

but--again pardon my candor--your story is not.

And now--why am I writing you?

Heaven knows, unless it is that the persistent clicking

of that unfathomable enigma out there in the vast

silences of the Sahara has so wrought upon my nerves

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that reason refuses longer to function sanely.

I cannot hear it now, yet I know that far away to the

south, all alone beneath the sands, it is still pounding

out its vain, frantic appeal.

It is maddening

It is your fault--I want you to release me from it.

Cable me at once, at my expense, that there was no

basis of fact for your story, At the Earth's Core.

Very respectfully yours,

COGDON NESTOR,

--and--Club,

Algiers.

June 1st,--.

Ten minutes after reading this letter I had cabled

Mr. Nestor as follows:

Story true. Await me Algiers.

As fast as train and boat would carry me, I sped

toward my destination. For all those dragging days my

mind was a whirl of mad conjecture, of frantic hope,

of numbing fear.

The finding of the telegraph-instrument practically

assured me that David Innes had driven Perry's iron

mole back through the earth's crust to the buried world

of Pellucidar; but what adventures had befallen him

since his return?

Had he found Dian the Beautiful, his half-savage

mate, safe among his friends, or had Hooja the Sly One

succeeded in his nefarious schemes to abduct her?

Did Abner Perry, the lovable old inventor and pale-

ontologist, still live?

Had the federated tribes of Pellucidar succeeded in

overthrowing the mighty Mahars, the dominant race

of reptilian monsters, and their fierce, gorilla-like sol-

diery, the savage Sagoths?

I must admit that I was in a state bordering upon

nervous prostration when I entered the -and-Club,

in Algiers, and inquired for Mr. Nestor. A moment later

I was ushered into his presence, to find myself clasping

hands with the sort of chap that the world holds only

too few of.

He was a tall, smooth-faced man of about thirty,

clean-cut, straight, and strong, and weather-tanned to

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the hue of a desert Arab. I liked him immensely from

the first, and I hope that after our three months together

in the desert country--three months not entirely lack-

ing in adventure--he found that a man may be a

writer of "impossible trash" and yet have some redeem-

ing qualities.

The day following my arrival at Algiers we left for

the south, Nestor having made all arrangements in

advance, guessing, as he naturally did, that I could be

coming to Africa for but a single purpose--to hasten

at once to the buried telegraph-instrument and wrest

its secret from it.

In addition to our native servants, we took along

an English telegraph-operator named Frank Downes.

Nothing of interest enlivened our journey by rail and

caravan till we came to the cluster of date-palms about

the ancient well upon the rim of the Sahara.

It was the very spot at which I first had seen David

Innes. If he had ever raised a cairn above the telegraph

instrument no sign of it remained now. Had it not been

for the chance that caused Cogdon Nestor to throw

down his sleeping rug directly over the hidden instru-

ment, it might still be clicking there unheard--and

this story still unwritten.

When we reached the spot and unearthed the little

box the instrument was quiet, nor did repeated attempts

upon the part of our telegrapher succeed in winning

a response from the other end of the line. After several

days of futile endeavor to raise Pellucidar, we had be-

gun to despair. I was as positive that the other end

of that little cable protruded through the surface of the

inner world as I am that I sit here today in my study--

when about midnight of the fourth day I was awakened

by the sound of the instrument.

Leaping to my feet I grasped Downes roughly by the

neck and dragged him out of his blankets. He didn't

need to be told what caused my excitement, for the

instant he was awake he, too, heard the long-hoped

for click, and with a whoop of delight pounced upon

the instrument.

Nestor was on his feet almost as soon as I. The three

of us huddled about that little box as if our lives

depended upon the message it had for us.

Downes interrupted the clicking with his sending-

key. The noise of the receiver stopped instantly.

"Ask who it is, Downes," I directed.

He did so, and while we awaited the Englishman's

translation of the reply, I doubt if either Nestor or I

breathed.

"He says he's David Innes," said Downes. "He wants

to know who we are."

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"Tell him," said I; "and that we want to know how

he is--and all that has befallen him since I last saw

him."

For two months I talked with David Innes almost

every day, and as Downes translated, either Nestor or

I took notes. From these, arranged in chronological

order, I have set down the following account of the

further adventures of David Innes at the earth's core,

practically in his own words.

CHAPTER I

LOST ON PELLUCIDAR

The Arabs, of whom I wrote you at the end of my last

letter (Innes began), and whom I thought to be enemies

intent only upon murdering me, proved to be exceed-

ingly friendly--they were searching for the very band

of marauders that had threatened my existence. The

huge rhamphorhynchus-like reptile that I had brought

back with me from the inner world--the ugly Mahar

that Hooja the Sly One had substituted for my dear

Dian at the moment of my departure--filled them

with wonder and with awe.

Nor less so did the mighty subterranean prospector

which had carried me to Pellucidar and back again,

and which lay out in the desert about two miles from

my camp.

With their help I managed to get the unwieldy tons

of its great bulk into a vertical position--the nose deep

in a hole we had dug in the sand and the rest of it

supported by the trunks of date-palms cut for the

purpose.

It was a mighty engineering job with only wild Arabs

and their wilder mounts to do the work of an electric

crane--but finally it was completed, and I was ready

for departure.

For some time I hesitated to take the Mahar back

with me. She had been docile and quiet ever since she

had discovered herself virtually a prisoner aboard the

"iron mole." It had been, of course, impossible for me

to communicate with her since she had no auditory

organs and I no knowledge of her fourth-dimension,

sixth-sense method of communication.

Naturally I am kind-hearted, and so I found it beyond

me to leave even this hateful and repulsive thing alone

in a strange and hostile world. The result was that

when I entered the iron mole I took her with me.

That she knew that we were about to return to

Pellucidar was evident, for immediately her manner

changed from that of habitual gloom that had pervaded

her, to an almost human expression of contentment

and delight.

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Our trip through the earth's crust was but a repetition

of my two former journeys between the inner and the

outer worlds. This time, however, I imagine that we

must have maintained a more nearly perpendicular

course, for we accomplished the journey in a few min-

utes' less time than upon the occasion of my first

journey through the five-hundred-mile crust. just a

trifle less than seventy-two hours after our departure

into the sands of the Sahara, we broke through the

surface of Pellucidar.

Fortune once again favored me by the slightest of

margins, for when I opened the door in the prospector's

outer jacket I saw that we had missed coming up

through the bottom of an ocean by but a few hundred

yards.

The aspect of the surrounding country was entirely

unfamiliar to me--I had no conception of precisely

where I was upon the one hundred and twenty-four

million square miles of Pellucidar's vast land surface.

The perpetual midday sun poured down its torrid

rays from zenith, as it had done since the beginning of

Pellucidarian time--as it would continue to do to the

end of it. Before me, across the wide sea, the weird,

horizonless seascape folded gently upward to meet the

sky until it lost itself to view in the azure depths of

distance far above the level of my eyes.

How strange it looked! How vastly different from

the flat and puny area of the circumscribed vision of

the dweller upon the outer crust!

I was lost. Though I wandered ceaselessly throughout

a lifetime, I might never discover the whereabouts of

my former friends of this strange and savage world.

Never again might I see dear old Perry, nor Ghak the

Hairy One, nor Dacor the Strong One, nor that other

infinitely precious one--my sweet and noble mate,

Dian the Beautiful!

But even so I was glad to tread once more the surface

of Pellucidar. Mysterious and terrible, grotesque and

savage though she is in many of her aspects, I can not

but love her. Her very savagery appealed to me, for

it is the savagery of unspoiled Nature.

The magnificence of her tropic beauties enthralled

me. Her mighty land areas breathed unfettered free-

dom.

Her untracked oceans, whispering of virgin wonders

unsullied by the eye of man, beckoned me out upon

their restless bosoms.

Not for an instant did I regret the world of my

nativity. I was in Pellucidar. I was home. And I was

content.

As I stood dreaming beside the giant thing that had

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brought me safely through the earth's crust, my travel-

ing companion, the hideous Mahar, emerged from the

interior of the prospector and stood beside me. For

a long time she remained motionless.

What thoughts were passing through the convolutions

of her reptilian brain?

I do not know.

She was a member of the dominant race of Pel-

lucidar. By a strange freak of evolution her kind had

first developed the power of reason in that world of

anomalies.

To her, creatures such as I were of a lower order.

As Perry had discovered among the writings of her

kind in the buried city of Phutra, it was still an open

question among the Mahars as to whether man pos-

sessed means of intelligent communication or the power

of reason.

Her kind believed that in the center of all-pervading

solidity there was a single, vast, spherical cavity, which

was Pellucidar. This cavity had been left there for the

sole purpose of providing a place for the creation and

propagation of the Mahar race. Everything within it

had been put there for the uses of the Mahar.

I wondered what this particular Mahar might think

now. I found pleasure in speculating upon just what

the effect had been upon her of passing through the

earth's crust, and coming out into a world that one of

even less intelligence than the great Mahars could

easily see was a different world from her own Pel-

lucidar.

What had she thought of the outer world's tiny sun?

What had been the effect upon her of the moon and

myriad stars of the clear African nights?

How had she explained them?

With what sensations of awe must she first have

watched the sun moving slowly across the heavens to

disappear at last beneath the western horizon, leaving

in his wake that which the Mahar had never before

witnessed--the darkness of night? For upon Pellucidar

there is no night. The stationary sun hangs forever in

the center of the Pellucidarian sky--directly overhead.

Then, too, she must have been impressed by the

wondrous mechanism of the prospector which had bored

its way from world to world and back again. And that

it had been driven by a rational being must also have

occurred to her.

Too, she bad seen me conversing with other men

upon the earth's surface. She had seen the arrival of

the caravan of books and arms, and ammunition, and

the balance of the heterogeneous collection which I

had crammed into the cabin of the iron mole for trans-

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portation to Pellucidar.

She had seen all these evidences of a civilization

and brain-power transcending in scientific achieve-

ment anything that her race had produced; nor once

had she seen a creature of her own kind.

There could have been but a single deduction in the

mind of the Mahar--there were other worlds than

Pellucidar, and the gilak was a rational being.

Now the creature at my side was creeping slowly

toward the near-by sea. At my hip hung a long-barreled

six-shooter--somehow I had been unable to find the

same sensation of security in the newfangled auto-

matics that had been perfected since my first departure

from the outer world--and in my hand was a heavy

express rifle.

I could have shot the Mahar with ease, for I knew

intuitively that she was escaping--but I did not.

I felt that if she could return to her own kind with

the story of her adventures, the position of the human

race within Pellucidar would be advanced immensely

at a single stride, for at once man would take his proper

place in the considerations of the reptilia.

At the edge of the sea the creature paused and

looked back at me. Then she slid sinuously into the surf.

For several minutes I saw no more of her as she

luxuriated in the cool depths.

Then a hundred yards from shore she rose and there

for another short while she floated upon the surface.

Finally she spread her giant wings, flapped them

vigorously a score of times and rose above the blue

sea. A single time she circled far aloft--and then

straight as an arrow she sped away.

I watched her until the distant haze enveloped her

and she had disappeared. I was alone.

My first concern was to discover where within Pel-

lucidar I might be--and in what direction lay the land

of the Sarians where Ghak the Hairy One ruled.

But how was I to guess in which direction lay Sari?

And if I set out to search--what then?

Could I find my way back to the prospector with its

priceless freight of books, firearms, ammunition, scien-

tific instruments, and still more books--its great library

of reference works upon every conceivable branch of ap-

plied sciences?

And if I could not, of what value was all this vast

storehouse of potential civilization and progress to be

to the world of my adoption?

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file:///F|/rah/Edgar%20Rice%20Burroughs/Burroughs,%20Edgar%20Rice%20-%20\Pellucidar.txtPELLUCIDARbyEdgarRiceBurroughsCONTENTSCHAPTERPROLOGUEILOSTONPELLUCIDARIITRAVELINGWITHTERRORIIISHOOTINGTHECHUTES--ANDAFTERIVFRIENDSHIPANDTREACHERYVSURPRISESVIAPENDENTWORLDVIIFROMPLIGHTTOPLIGHTVIIICAPTIVEIXHOOJA'SCU...

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