“I’m certainly glad to have located you,” he announced, without waiting for Roverton or Deming to return his salutation. “I’ve been flying around this damn planet all day, hoping there was one chance in a trillion of finding you again. I didn’t take any bearings when I put you off in the night, so of course I had no idea where to look. I was about to give it up, when I saw the fire and decided to investigate.
“If you’ll come back with me,” he continued, “we’ll let bygones be bygones. I’m short-handed now, and am going to give up the trip and start back for the solar system. We began to develop engine-trouble not long after we put you off; and two of the men were electrocuted by a short-circuit before the trouble was remedied. Their bodies are floating somewhere in mid-ether now—I gave them a space-burial. Then Jasper fell ill, and I’ve been running the flier single-handed for the past twenty-four hours. I’m sorry I was so hasty with you—I certainly put you off on an impossible sort of world. I’ve been all over it today, and there’s nothing anywhere but seas, deserts, marshes, mud-flats, jungles of crazy-looking vegetation, a lot of equally desolate ruins, and no life except overgrown insects, birds, reptiles, and a few cliff-dwelling pygmies in the sub-polar regions. It’s a wonder that even two of you have managed to survive. Come on—you can tell me your story when we’re aboard the flier.”
Roverton and Deming followed him as he turned and re-ascended the ladder. The man-hole closed behind them with a clang that was more grateful to their ears than music. A minute more, and the flier was climbing the heavens along the crepuscular curve of the planet, till it soared into the daylight of Delta Andromedae. Then it rushed on through the sidereal gulfs, till the great sun became a star and began to resume its wonted place in an ever-receding constellation.
THE ROOT OF AMPOI
A circus had arrived in Auburn. The siding at the station was crowded with long lines of cars from which issued a medley of exotic howls, growls, snarls and trumpetings. Elephants and zebras and dromedaries were led along the main streets; and many of the freaks and performers wandered about the town.
Two bearded ladies passed with the graceful air and walk of women of fashion. Then came a whole troupe of midgets, trudging along with the look of mournful, sophisticated children. And then I saw the giant, who was slightly more than eight feet tall and magnificently built, with no sign of the disproportion which often attends giantism. He was merely a fine physical specimen of the ordinary man, somewhat more than life-size. And even at first glance, there was something about his features and his gait which suggested a seaman.
I am a doctor; and the man provoked my medical curiosity. His abnormal bulk and height, without trace of acromalegy, was something I had never happened to meet before.
He must have felt my interest, for he returned my gaze with a speculative eye; and then, lurching in sailor-like fashion, he came over to me.
“I say, sir, could a chap buy a drink in this ’ere town?” He queried cautiously.
I made a quick decision.
“Come with me,” I replied. “I’m an allopath; and I can tell without asking that you’re a sick man.”
We were only a block from my office. I steered the giant up the stairs and into my private sanctum. He almost filled the place, even when he sat down at my urging. I brought out a bottle of rye and poured a liberal glassful for him. He downed it with manifest appreciation. He had worn an air of mild depression when I first met him; now he began to brighten.
“You wouldn’t think, to look at me, that I wasn’t always a bloomin’ giant,” he soliloquized.
“Have another drink,” I suggested.
After the second glass, he resumed a little mournfully: “No, sir, Jim Knox wasn’t always a damn circus freak.”
Then, with little urging on my part, he told me his story.
* * *
Knox, an adventurous Cockney, had followed half the seas of the world as a common sailor and boatswain in his younger years. He had visited many strange places, had known many bizarre experiences. Before he had reached the age of thirty, his restless and daring disposition led him to undertake an incredibly fantastic quest.
The events preceding this quest were somewhat unusual in themselves. Shipwrecked by a wild typhoon in the Banda Sea, and apparently the one survivor, Knox had drifted for two days on a hatch torn from the battered and sinking vessel. Then, rescued by a native fishing-proa, he had been carried to Salawatti.
The Rajah of Salawatti, an old and monkey-like Malay, was very nice to Knox. The Rajah was a teller of voluminous tales; and the boatswain was a patient listener. On this basis of congeniality, Knox became an honored guest for a month or more in the Rajah’s palace. Here, among other wonders retailed by his host, he heard for the first time the rumor of a most remarkable Papuan tribe.
This unique tribe dwelt on a well-nigh inaccessible plateau of the Arfak Mountains. The women were nine feet tall and white as milk; but the men, strangely, were of normal stature and darker hue. They were friendly to the rare travelers who reached their domains; and they would trade for glass beads and mirrors the pigeons’ blood rubies in which their mountain slopes abounded. As proof of the latter statement, the Rajah showed Knox a large, flawless, uncut ruby, which he claimed had come from this region.
Knox was hardly inclined to credit the item about the giant women; but the rubies sounded far less improbable. It was characteristic of him that, with little thought of danger, difficulty, or the sheer absurdity of such a venture, he made up his mind at once to visit the Arfak Mountains.
Bidding farewell to his host, who mourned the loss of a good listener, he continued his odyssey. By means that he failed to specify in his history, Knox procured two sackfuls of mirrors and glass beads, and managed to reach the coast of northwestern New Guinea. At Andai, in Arrak, he hired a guide who purported to know the whereabouts of the giant Amazons, and struck boldly inland toward the mountains.
The guide, who was half Malay and half Papuan, bore one of the sacks of baubles on his shoulders; and Knox carried the other. He fondly hoped to return with the two sacks full of smouldering dark-red rubies.
It was a little known land. Some of the peoples were reputed to be headhunters and cannibals; but Knox found them friendly enough. But somehow, as they went on, the guide began to exhibit a growing haziness in his geography. When they reached the middle slopes of the Arfak range, Knox realized that the guide knew little more than he himself regarding the location of the fabulous ruby-strewn plateau.
They went on through the steepening forest. Before them, above trees that were still tall and semi-tropical, arose the granite scarps and crags of a high mountain-wall, behind which the afternoon sun had disappeared. In the early twilight, they camped at the foot of a seemingly insuperable cliff.
Knox awoke in a blazing yellow dawn, to discover that his guide had departed, taking one of the sacks of trinkets —which, from a savage viewpoint, would constitute enough capital to set the fellow up in business for life. Knox shrugged his shoulders and swore a little. The guide wasn’t much of a loss; but he didn’t like having his jewel-purchasing power diminished by half.
He looked at the cliffs above. Tier on tier they towered in the glow of dawn, with tops scarce distinguishable from the clouds about them. Somehow, the more he looked, the surer he became that they were the cliffs which guarded the hidden plateau. With their silence and inaccessible solitude, their air of eternal reserve and remoteness, they couldn’t be anything else but the ramparts of a realm of titan women and pigeons’ blood rubies.