The girl must have sensed that he was warning her. His eyes were rolling in terror. She stood up and turned and looked up just as the first shadow fell. She screamed and jumped back, bumping into him and toppling him over backward. His head struck something. He awoke to feel the earth, as always, trembling beneath him and rising and falling as if there were a tiny tide sweeping through it. That might not be so farfetched, he mused. Actually, on the earth he had known, the ground did rise and fall, pulled by the moon and the sun. But it was such a small phenomenon that man never noticed it.
Here, where the moon and the sun were so enormous, earthtides were detected even by the most insensitive.
He felt sick at his stomach. Either the sucking of his blood had been accompanied by an injection of some poison or he would have to reaccustom himself to the quivering of the land.
He tried to sit up and found that his hands and feet were tied.
The girl was gone.
Apparently she was not as friendly as she had first appeared. She had not seemed anxious about him then because she knew he was unable to hurt her.
He did not blame her, since he was a stranger and she would have been a fool to have approached him without caution. Perhaps she would not have been a fool, though, if she lived in a world where human beings were friends and murder and war were unknown.
That she had bound him showed that she did not live in such a utopia.
He sighed. It was too much to expect of any world that human beings should all love and trust each other. As on Earth, so here. So every place, probably. Fortunately, Ishmael did not have to be in a Utopia or seeking one to be at ease.
He was not at ease now, of course. But he felt relieved and even optimistic. He was not the only human being in this world, and once he learned the girl's language, he would get answers to some of his questions.
Ishmael smiled at her as she expertly butchered a double-nosed monkey-bear beast. While she worked, he inspected her closely. She wore a large white comb of some ivory-like substance in her hair, which was as long and free and black as any maiden's of Typee. Her ears were pierced to hold thin rings of some jet-black stony material in each of which was set a large dark green stone. This stone bore in its interior a bright red object that looked like a spider.
Around her neck was a ruff of short feathers of many colors, and around her waist was a thin, semitransparent belt of tanned leather. On the lower end of the belt were bone hooks which supported a kilt that ended just above the knees and was of the same material as the belt. Her sandals, of a thick dark brown leather, encased feet with four toes, the little toe having been exiled by edict of Evolution.
Her figure was slim. Her face was definitely triangular. The forehead was high and wide. The enormous luminous green eyes were shadowed by eyebrows excessively thick and black but arched by nature. The lashes were tiny spears. The cheekbones were high and broad but still less wide than the forehead. The lower jaw angled inward, ending in a chin which he would have expected to be pointed but which was rounded. It was the chin that saved her from ugliness and carried her off to beauty. The mouth was full and pleasant, even when she began to bite off pieces of the animal's fat.
Ishmael, having seen many savages who ate raw meat, and having himself indulged, was not repulsed. And when she offered him a large piece of meat, he accepted with thanks and a smile.
Both ate until their stomachs were packed rightly. The girl found a stone and cracked open the animal's skull and dug out the brains and ate this. Ishmael might have accepted her offer to this, if he had been starving. But he shook his head and said, "No, thanks." The girl tore off six pods and punched two and drained one into Ishmael's mouth. During this procedure, the creepers ignored them. He supposed that this was because they had been given meat and blood and so had spared the giver. Nevertheless, the water numbed both him and the girl for about fifteen minutes. During this time, if any predator had appeared, it could have had them with no more effort than it took to leisurely gnaw away upon them.
When he was free of his paralysis, Ishmael tried with rolling his eyes and squirming his body to indicate that she should untie him. She frowned, very prettily, he thought, and sat for a while considering his desires. Then she arose and, smiling, cut the intertwined grasses with which she had bound him. He arose slowly, rubbing his hands and then bending over to rub his feet. She backed away, the knife in her hand, but after a minute decided that she must go all the way or not at all. She put the knife into a scabbard of leather on her belt and turned her back to him.
He climbed upon a plant leaning at forty-five degrees to the ground and looked out over the jungle. As far as he could see, there was vegetation except on the top of some seemingly very high buttes in the distance. The whole forest shook as if afflicted with fear. He himself was tired of the eternal quivering and the faint, but definite, anxiety and slight nausea resulting therefrom. Apparently it did not bother the girl; she must have been born to this form of quaking.
Everywhere except to his right was jungle. On that side was the dead sea, expanding and contracting with the semblance of life.
The air sharks were gone. Far to the west was a broad reddish tinge which he supposed was another of the drifting clouds of tiny objects. With them would come more of the monstrous creatures of the air and perhaps more of the sharks.
The great red sun had rolled some distance down the sky, but it still had a quarter of the heavens to go. The heat had increased, and he felt thirsty again. He dreaded drinking when it meant helplessness for a quarter of an hour. Moreover, what would the cumulative effects of the narcotic be? So far, he had not noticed any headache or particular sluggishness or other results.
He looked down toward the girl. She had climbed into a giant leaf which, hammock-like, was suspended between two thick-boled plants. She was lying down, obviously preparing to go to sleep. He wondered if he was expected to stand guard while she rested or if she just took it for granted that he would crawl into one of the leaves near hers and also sleep. If she had not bothered to inform him of what was expected, then she was not worried. But he could not understand such unconcern. This place held enough known terrors. What of the ones he did not know?
Before lying down to face the question of to dream or not to dream, he looked around again. The utter alienness of the too-dark blue sky, the Brobdingnagian and blood-red sun, the salt-thick sea, the shaking land, the bloodsucking palsied vegetation and the air aswarm with floating animals and plants gripped his heart and squeezed it. He wanted to weep, and he did so.
Afterward, he thought about where he could be. The Rachel had been sailing on the nocturnal surface of the South Seas in 1842, and events indicative of unnatural forces had manifested themselves. And then, as if the sea had been instantly removed, the ship had fallen.
As if the sea had been removed. What if the sea had been taken away, not by magic but by evaporation? By Time's evaporation?
Ishmael had been a lowly member of the crew of a whaling ship. But that did not mean that he was only a sailor. Between voyages, he was a school teacher and, wherever he was, he read much and deeply. Thus he was acquainted with the theory that the sun would, some day, millions or even billions of years from now --from then, rather -- cool from white-hot to red-lukewarm and then become a cold Was he indeed on the Earth of the far far future? Had the Rachel sailed through a momentarily weakened spot in the fabric of Time or through some conduit of the cosmos, which, operating shutter-like, had opened to take in the Rachel?