Pellucidar - Edgar Rice Burroughs (best beach reads TXT) 📗

has told us that they never go beyond the sight of land.”

We had lowered the sail after the blow while we were discussing the best course to pursue. Our little craft had been drifting idly, rising and falling with the great waves that were now diminishing. Sometimes we were upon the crest⁠—again in the hollow. As Dian ceased speaking she let her eyes range across the limitless expanse of billowing waters. We rose to a great height upon the crest of a mighty wave. As we topped it Dian gave an exclamation and pointed astern.

“Boats!” she cried. “Boats! Many, many boats!”

Juag and I leaped to our feet; but our little craft had now dropped to the trough, and we could see nothing but walls of water close upon either hand. We waited for the next wave to lift us, and when it did we strained our eyes in the direction that Dian had indicated. Sure enough, scarce half a mile away were several boats, and scattered far and wide behind us as far as we could see were many others! We could not make them out in the distance or in the brief glimpse that we caught of them before we were plunged again into the next wave canyon; but they were boats.

And in them must be human beings like ourselves.

XIII Racing for Life

At last the sea subsided, and we were able to get a better view of the armada of small boats in our wake. There must have been two hundred of them. Juag said that he had never seen so many boats before in all his life. Where had they come from? Juag was first to hazard a guess.

“Hooja,” he said, “was building many boats to carry his warriors to the great river and up it toward Sari. He was building them with almost all his warriors and many slaves upon the Island of Trees. No one else in all the history of Pellucidar has ever built so many boats as they told me Hooja was building. These must be Hooja’s boats.”

“And they were blown out to sea by the great storm just as we were,” suggested Dian.

“There can be no better explanation of them,” I agreed.

“What shall we do?” asked Juag.

“Suppose we make sure that they are really Hooja’s people,” suggested Dian. “It may be that they are not, and that if we run away from them before we learn definitely who they are, we shall be running away from a chance to live and find the mainland. They may be a people of whom we have never even heard, and if so we can ask them to help us⁠—if they know the way to the mainland.”

“Which they will not,” interposed Juag.

“Well,” I said, “it can’t make our predicament any more trying to wait until we find out who they are. They are heading for us now. Evidently they have spied our sail, and guess that we do not belong to their fleet.”

“They probably want to ask the way to the mainland themselves,” said Juag, who was nothing if not a pessimist.

“If they want to catch us, they can do it if they can paddle faster than we can sail,” I said. “If we let them come close enough to discover their identity, and can then sail faster than they can paddle, we can get away from them anyway, so we might as well wait.”

And wait we did.

The sea calmed rapidly, so that by the time the foremost canoe had come within five hundred yards of us we could see them all plainly. Every one was headed for us. The dugouts, which were of unusual length, were manned by twenty paddlers, ten to a side. Besides the paddlers there were twenty-five or more warriors in each boat.

When the leader was a hundred yards from us Dian called our attention to the fact that several of her crew were Sagoths. That convinced us that the flotilla was indeed Hooja’s. I told Juag to hail them and get what information he could, while I remained in the bottom of our canoe as much out of sight as possible. Dian lay down at full length in the bottom; I did not want them to see and recognize her if they were in truth Hooja’s people.

“Who are you?” shouted Juag, standing up in the boat and making a megaphone of his palms.

A figure arose in the bow of the leading canoe⁠—a figure that I was sure I recognized even before he spoke.

“I am Hooja!” cried the man, in answer to Juag.

For some reason he did not recognize his former prisoner and slave⁠—possibly because he had so many of them.

“I come from the Island of Trees,” he continued. “A hundred of my boats were lost in the great storm and all their crews drowned. Where is the land? What are you, and what strange thing is that which flutters from the little tree in the front of your canoe?”

He referred to our sail, flapping idly in the wind.

“We, too, are lost,” replied Juag. “We know not where the land is. We are going back to look for it now.”

So saying he commenced to scull the canoe’s nose before the wind, while I made fast the primitive sheets that held our crude sail. We thought it time to be going.

There wasn’t much wind at the time, and the heavy, lumbering dugout was slow in getting under way. I thought it never would gain any momentum. And all the while Hooja’s canoe was drawing rapidly nearer, propelled by the strong arms of his twenty paddlers. Of course, their dugout was much larger than ours, and, consequently, infinitely heavier and more cumbersome; nevertheless, it was coming along at quite a clip, and ours was yet but barely moving. Dian and I remained out of sight as much as possible, for the two craft were now well within bow-shot of one another, and I knew that Hooja had archers.

Hooja called