do merely to keep up with him. I had no time for more
speculations on the wisdom of my choice. Lame as he
was, his strength, agility, and quickness were far superior
to mine, and I had much ado not to be reduced to merely
scrabbling after him.
We traveled due north, and I kept careful check of the
few landmarks we passed so that at the proper moment
I could return to my metal shelter and recover my long
black rope. In some dim way these two things seemed to
represent to me all that remained of my actual entrance
into this country, and I had the curious feeling that if I
should lose them or be unable to find them again my
road out would also be lost. For I had got to the rocky
plateau by some route, and if this jungle lay at one end
of it, then my own farm lay at the other.
In the meantime I was growing very hungry indeed—
almost faint, to tell the truth; and this condition was responsible for the only untoward incident that marked our journey—a happening that took place after we had been
traveling for about an hour.
During this time my new companion had waited for
me to catch up with him every now and then, whereupon
I had examined the splint to see how it was holding and
both of us had rested ourselves. Usually such breathing
spells had been productive of little more than the mutual
A T T A
29
silence while I wiped my moist brow and my companion
felt of his leg. This time, however, my eye was caught by
what I took at first to be a mirror suspended from one of
the limbs of a jungle tree and flashing in the noonday sun. It was a large eggshaped globule, I soon perceived, made of what looked to be polished glass, and it gathered and reflected the rays of the sun in an almost
kaleidoscopic splendor of prismatic gleams. Resting in
the lowest crotch of the tree where the first thick limb
joined the trunk, it was not suspended, but it had clearly
been put in its place by someone.
Fascinated by its appearance, I rose and went to it—
it was not more than thirty feet away—and reached up
my hand to touch it, wondering who had made it and
placed it there. Instantly, as if by magic, my simple
touch wrought an incredible change. The moment my
fingers came in contact with its cool surface it changed
from a glass globule to a huge mass of water that broke
its shape with a splash and flowed down and over me,
soaking me to the skin.
For an instant I stood utterly bewildered, soaking wet
and stunned.
Plain water! Was it nothing but plain water? If so,
how in defiance of gravity could it have remained suspended in the crotch of this tree, a glistening wet sphere over two feet in diameter? Where in the world was I,
that the very laws of gravity could be defied?
At the unbidden question my overwrought nerves suddenly gave way and water rose to my own eyes. Standing alone in the heat of the jungle, I wept until the tears coursed down my cheeks.
Was I, indeed, on the earth at all? Or had I, in the
darkness, somehow been transported to the moon or an
even more distant celestial body?
These were my wild thoughts as I stood with my back
to my companion. And you may laugh as you read this,
seated in your comfortable chair, but I assure you that
to me at that moment it was no laughing matter. Indeed,
30
A T T A
put yourself in my place; consider the succession of unbelievable experiences that had come to me; and tell me then that you would have felt differently. Where on this
broad earth do drops of water five times as big as a man’s
head hang suspended in the trees? Where does one find
grotesque valleys such as I had seen, or huge ant-like
creatures with men’s brains but with feelers projecting
from their heads?
wonder that I broke down and wept.
I was recalled to myself by a touch on my arm. My
companion had evidently seen that something was wrong
and had approached me and was stroking my arm gently
with his feelers. His kindness, his evident sympathy, went
to my heart. I could have embraced him, outlandish and
grotesque as he was. Obviously I had found one friend
at least in this nightmare country, and the thought gave
me fresh courage.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “It will pass.”
To this he replied with more gesticulations and such a
succession of strange high-pitched words that finally even
I had to smile at my weakness. With half a sigh I -put
my hand on his shoulder and walked back to where my
lance lay, shouldered it, and thus signified that I was
ready once more to go on.
For some two hours we pushed on again, over the same
rugged, desert country, between the same clumps of
queer trees, which grew now more thickly, now more
sparsely, as far as the eye could reach.
Several times, down the long colonnades, I caught
glimpses in the distance of moving figures like that of my
guide, but smaller and clad in black armor; and these always hastened away at our approach as if fearing attack.
Once, too, a deep humming filled the air, far louder than
the incessant hum and rattle of the swaying trees. It came
near and then nearer and finally passed over our heads
with the roar of a bomber, while its huge black shadow
swept the boulder-strewn ground. My companion, how
A T T A
31
ever, paid no attention to these appearances, but kept
steadily on until finally, in the center of an unusually
dense grove of trees, he stopped and signified that we
had reached our journey’s end.
Before us, hidden from view on all sides by the crowding green trunks of the bamboolike woods, was a roughly spherical light brown wooden structure; at least, it had
the grain and appearance of brown seasoned wood,
though nowhere could I see any sign of joints or planks.
Some twelve feet high, with an irregular surface marked
by cracks like those in a dried mud marsh, it looked for
all the world like a huge English walnut shell.
I was in no mood for curiosity, however. Indeed, I
was now far gone with hunger, and my weariness of both
body and spirit was so great that I bestowed only a perfunctory glance even upon this new prodigy. Halfway up one side was a circular entrance, and up through this my
companion now pulled himself, while I laid my lance
against the irregular wall and with its aid climbed up
after him.
The inside, I saw, had been cleared out and was divided into two chambers: an upper one in which I now found myself under a low domelike roof, and a lower one
apparently reached by a round hole in the floor. Down
this hole my host had already disappeared. I leaned out
the doorway, pulled up my lance and laid it on the
floor, and sank down to await his return.
To tell the truth, I no longer had much interest in my
surroundings, or in life itself. I merely wished to eat and
drive away the faintness that was assai
ling me. And the
fact that my host had already so casually disappeared
slightly irritated me.
Consider my surprise, then, when presently he reappeared from the room beneath, carrying several whitish objects like huge mushrooms, which he gave to me, indicating by his gestures that they were good to eat. Without hesitation I bit into one, found it indeed of the consistency of a dried mushroom though with little taste,
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A T T A
and soon had finished it to the last crumb. It had a peculiarly satisfying after-flavor, I found. I tried another and another until my hunger was satisfied and I could
eat no more. In the end I had eaten five.
Then I lay back with a sigh of exhaustion and closed
my eyes. Within five minutes, I think, I was asleep.
Chapter 4
How long I slept I cannot say, or if it were the next
morning or the day after that my new companion waked
me with another meal of his odd mushrooms. For of
the two weeks that followed I have little remembrance
now, except that my host’s leg healed rapidly, and that
I myself achieved a measure of acceptance of a situation
whose reality I could not deny, yet whose explanation
was beyond me.
Indeed, I think you will agree that the original mystery
of my surroundings was now so doubly enhanced by the
outlandish appearance of my new host that it was almost
painful to consider. He lay nearly always at my elbow
during those first nights, and, strive as I might to shut
him out, there were few evenings when the nightmare
implications of his presence did not rush at me and pin
me down. For several, nights I could scarcely sleep at all,
but sat at the doorway staring out at the moonlight,
hoping that I might wake the next second and find myself back in the sunlight of the sunken garden.
In these dark moments I arrived at only one conclusion: the sun still rose and set, the length of night and day seemed unchanged, the stars appeared precisely as
A T T A
33
before, and, despite the character of the country and its
storms, summer still continued. Therefore the presumption was that I was still on earth and in a latitude closely resembling the one in which I had been so incontinently
struck down.
Right or wrong, this simple deduction temporarily
satisfied my desperate need for at least one basic, familiar
fact; and for many days it was tire one rock to which I
clung.
Meanwhile neither my new host nor I ever ventured
far from our house; so that most of my time was spent
in the little grove at our doorway, where I practised with
my lance. It was too heavy to throw, I found, but I soon
attained to a certain proficiency in using it as an old-
fashioned pike, and this ability stood me in good stead
later on.
My companion took little interest in this, but devoted
most of his time to our larder. The food supply seemed
to be, and in fact was, practically inexhaustible; for I
found that the strange mushrooms that served as both
meat and drink were nothing less than a kind of edible
plant that my host cultivated in the lower room of our
home. Every morning, in spite of his strapped leg, he
would make a dozen or more trips into the grove, climbing the trees with surprising agility and cutting off certain long leaves with his beak. These he would bring back to the house, and when, with my help, he had laid
them out and shredded them into small pieces, he would
take them into the cellar and spread them over the mushroom plants, where they acted as a sort of fertilizer; for in a surprisingly short time a fresh crop would appear.
Tasks such as these took up much of our day; but we
both sat long over meals, he never worked at midday,
and if it rained he did not go out at all. Thus we spent
much time together. As a result we gradually learned
to communicate roughly with each other, and after a
number of ridiculous attempts we managed to identify
and name, to our mutual satisfaction, most of the im
34
A T T A
mediate objects around us. This achievement we followed with a similar identification of our common movements and actions—“eat” and “good,” I remember, were among our first successes— and here, somewhat to my
surprise, I found my new friend remarkably intelligent
Atta—for that, I found, was his name—even got to understand much of my language before I understood his; more, I think, from the inflection of my voice than the
actual words, for he could never learn actually to speak
English. Yet I had by far the greater curiosity and initiative, and the end result was that our conversation, such as it was, came gradually to be carried on in his language, which consisted of a combination of complicated gestures with a high-pitched use of words—I am at a loss
to describe it—that I found very difficult to reproduce.
Indeed, during all our months together I never learned
to speak it without conscious effort. And Atta himself
had a great deal of difficulty with certain English words
—my own name, Brokell, among them.
Nevertheless both he and I made a sincere attempt to
understand each other, and even during those first few
weeks our ability to communicate with each other progressed remarkably; so much so that eventually I learned from him a number of things that both surprised and
confounded me.
The jungle country about us was strange to him too, it
appeared, though his ignorance of it was not on the
same plane as mine. It belonged to no one in particular,
he said, though it was infested at the moment by wandering bands of savages who were like him in general appearance and spoke a rude variation of the same language, but were of a rather lower type of civilization. He had never seen anyone like me before, and my clothing,
white skin, and yellow hair were a constant source of
wonder to him. Yellow, in particular, was a color he
liked.
In his own country, he said, he was one of the leaders
of a populous city long established, which in the far dis
A T T A
35
tant past his ancestors had conquered. He himself was of
the present ruling class, a circumstance that had allowed
him to go out on a scouting expedition. Unfortunately he’
had not suspected the presence of hostile invaders. His
five companions had been killed in an ambush, and he
alone had escaped, preserving his life by the discovery
of this odd house.
His first experience in solitary living he had found unexpectedly pleasant—“disturbingly pleasant” were his exact words—except for the continued presence of the
unexpected roving bands of savages who had killed his
companions and who still appeared continually and prevented him from making any attempt to get home. Nevertheless he had managed to explore some of the surrounding country. His one error, he admitted, had been a failure to recognize how the sandstone boulders on the hills had been undermined by the recent storm. This failure
had led him into the plight in which I had discovered
him. Without my help, he said, he should inevitably have
perished of hunger or fallen victim to some wild beast
or to a passing party of one of the invading tribes; some
of which last, he warned me, were not to be underestim ated, being both ferocious and skilful fighters, particularly when they were on a foray to capture slaves, which was their main object in waging war. Such was the substance of what Atta told me in snatches during our first weeks—facts both stunning in kind and highly unsatisfactory in content.
For my new friend seemed to find sustained conversation or any continued intercourse a heavy burden, which he laid down as soon as he could. His disinclination afterward wore off; as was subsequently proved in different and tragic circumstances. But it would be idle to deny
that in the beginning he was highly averse to telling me
any connected story at all about himself.
Indeed, until I had known him at least a month he
never asked me a personal question or displayed the
slightest interest in the fact that I was obviously of a dif
36
A T T A
ferent race and from a different world. He appeared to
have almost no curiosity and to view the ordinary give-
and-take of a personal relationship with coldness and a
touch of suspicion. Only on subjects like enemies, and
fighting did he seem to have no inhibitions, and in such
contexts he could be eloquent.
In the beginning, for instance, my obviously soft and
unprotected skin elicited many shakings of the head from
him, and he had no hesitation in expressing the lowest
possible opinion of my clothes, which he looked on solely
as a very inferior kind of armor. Even his own tough
hide, he said, with its undeniably armorlike quality, was
not always proof against enemy attacks. Many savages
had discovered the value of poison, and sometimes a very
slight wound could result in death. In the circumstances
he did not see how I had survived so far or could continue to do so except by great good luck.
He said all this in an impersonal, almost professional
manner, as if it were none of his business, yet was a subject he understood. But it had more than the ring of truth in it; and it warned me that mere practical survival
was still my first necessity in my new world. Thus his interest in my personal welfare had a practical result.
Indeed, now that I look back upon it, this first faint