water varied from one inch to many feet, enough to drown a man. Out of this water, and out of the mud, many strange, foul-smelling, pale and blotched plants grew.
The twilight showed them nightmare forms. Great pieces of bark, many of them bungalow-sized, had fallen off the sides of The Tree and hurtled downward, striking branches and trunks and knocking off other large and decaying crags of bark. The Tree, like the World-Snake of Norse mythology, shed its skin. Bark was always rotting and then breaking off and either falling onto the tops of the mighty branches, there to decay more, or else coming down like cold black falling stars to splash into the water and the mud of the swamp. There, half-sunk, they decayed, and the insects and vermin that infested this dusky world bored into the great masses and made their houses therein.
These were long thin corpse-coloured worms with hairy heads; beetles coloured a hard blue and armed with huge mandibles; long-nosed shrew-like beasts with saberteeth; pale yellow scorpions; bright scarlet-and-midnight- black snakes with tiny horns on top of their triangular heads; many-legged soft-bodied dozen-antennaed long-bodied centipedish creatures which emitted a stinking gas with a loud explosion when startled; and a host of other repulsive animals. The great broken chunks of bark, lying everywhere in the dimness like boulders left behind by the retreat of a glacier, were crowded with the venomous verminous life.
Around the jagged slabs grew tall, slender, branchless plants which produced a heart-shaped greenish-yellow berry that sprouted from cracks in the horny shells of the plants. There was also a thick slimy weed that projected a foot or two above the muddy water or the watery mud underfoot. Above this there sometimes flapped a broad- winged insect with body and wings the colour of the skin of a man just dead, and its head was white with two round black markings and a down-curving black mark below the two markings, so that its face was that of a skull. It flew by silently, sometimes just touching a member of the party with the tips of its wings and causing that person to jump. But all motion and noise were subdued. The people talked very quietly, often whispering, and they did not laugh. Their feet sank into the water and the mud beneath and were pulled out slowly, almost apologetically, so that sucking sounds were slow and soft. The people huddled together, and no one wanted to step aside into the bushes or behind the tall pale grey-blue stalks to attend to their needs.
Ulysses had thought, at first, that he would keep to the swamp. Though the going was slow and rough, this place seemed more desirable than the area above, where there were too many sentient enemies. But one day and one night among the Feet of Wurutana were enough for him and more than enough for his people. The next morning, when he almost jumped a foot as a blood-coloured frog leaped off a slab of bark onto his shoulder and then into the ankle-deep water, he decided that he could not take much more. They had tried to sleep on a piece of bark as big as a small chateau. But all night long they had been disturbed by the creatures which crawled out of the holes in the bark and by the weird sounds of the swamp animals.
He decided that he would lead them back up the nearest inviting branch. They had to skirt a broad area which seemed to be filled with quicksand pools, so it was not until noon that they reached a rough-surfaced column that dived from the heights into the swamp. Thankfully, they began clambering up it, and by dusk they had reached a promising horizontal portion of a branch. This contained a riverlet which, however, looked poisonous. Its water was carmine,
Ulysses examined it and found that the colour came from millions of tiny creatures, each of which was so small it was almost invisible when isolated. Ghlikh, who had decided to talk by then, said that these animals spawned once a year. He did not know where they came from or where they went. The waters of the riverlets and the pools would remain red for about a week and then would become clear. In the meantime, they served as food for the fish, birds and beasts in the jungle. He recommended making a soup of them.
Ulysses took his recommendation, but he made Ghlikh drink the soup first. After several hours went by with no bad results to the bat-man, Ulysses gave the go ahead. He drank a gourdful and found the soup very rich and tasty. For the next few days, as they poled their rafts, they ate merely by scooping up the carmine animals from the water. Not having to stop to hunt made their progress far swifter. They traversed approximately fifty miles, climbing down three cataracts, before they reached the lowest level of the riverlet. By then the carmine animals had disappeared.
When they climbed up again, Ulysses, acting partly on a whim and partly on curiosity, led them as high as they could go. The climb took three days up the gnarled and fissured side of the vertical trunk. At night, they slept on a projection of bark big enough to form a ledge to hold the entire party. The third day, they climbed through the clouds and only broke free of them toward evening. But in the morning the clouds were gone, and they could see into the abyss. They were at least ten thousand feet up. The trunk continued to rise for another two or three thousand feet, but there was no sense in their climbing any higher. This was as high as the branches grew. This branch was a bonanza; it seemed to go on forever, and its downward slope was very gentle.
A spring welled out at the junction of branch and trunk, and more springs added to the bulk of the riverlet so that, a mile away, it became navigable.
Every mile or so, the branch extended a vertical part which went all the way to the bottom — as far as they could determine — or else joined with another branch below.
To prevent the bat-men from trying to fly away, Ulysses had punched holes in the membranes of their wings and tied them together with thin strings of gut. He had forced them to climb up the trunk by themselves, since their weight was too much for anyone to bear on that extended climb. They had been in the middle of the line that crawled up the craggy barky cliff so that they could not try to climb off. They were so light, they could climb much faster than even the agile Wufea.
Ulysses ordered camp made. They would rest for several days, hunt and scout around. He hoped that he could find another hole in a trunk and so get a chance to experiment with the communication-membrane inside. Ever since his experience with the Wuggruds, he had looked for other holes. He was sure that these must exist by the many thousands, but he had seen none. They were everywhere, according to the bat-men. It was frustrating to know this and yet be unable to find them. However, he was also sure that each hole would be guarded by the bear- like Wuggrud or leopard-like Khrauszmiddum. He could not really afford another encounter with them if they outnumbered his people. But he chafed. If only he could get to a communication-membrane. By now he knew the code. The language was the trade language, and the code was similar to Morse in that it used a combination of long and short pulses.
He had gotten that out of Ghlikh during the nights when everybody should have been resting from the day's labours. Khyuks had steadfastly refused to tell him the code. In fact, Khyuks refused even to admit that there was such a thing as a code. But Ghlikh was another person. His threshold of pain was lower, or his strength of character was less. Or he was more intelligent than Khyuks and realised that he would have to break sometime. So why not tell now and save himself much pain for nothing?
Khyuks cursed Ghlikh for a traitor and a spineless gutless coward, and Ghlikh said that if he did not shut his mouth he would kill him at the first chance. Khyuks replied that he would kill Ghlikh the first chancehe got.
Though Ghlikh did reveal the code, he did not — or could not — reveal the location of the central base of his people. He swore that he had to be high enough above The Tree to see certain navigational checkmarks that would eventually guide him to the base. These marks were high trunks which grew leaves in a pattern that could be determined only by someone about two thousand feet above them. They might even be under one at this moment, but he could not tell from below.
Ulysses shrugged this disappointment off. He had no plans for attacking the base even if he knew its location. He lacked the force for an attack. But he would have liked to know where it was so that when he did have enough force, he could attack it. He would find out, one way or another.
He was sitting with his back against a comparatively smooth slab of loosened bark, a big fire about ten feet in front of him. It was almost night. Below, itwas night. The sky was still blue, and faraway clouds were touched with pink, light green and a darkening grey. The cries and screams of hunting animals and the hunted wafted up like almost forgotten nightmares, they were so faint. The two bat-men were near him, sitting side by side but not speaking or even looking at each other. The Wufea, Wagarondit and Alkunquib were around six large fires. Guards were posted out on the branch and also out of sight on bark ledges on the sides of the branch. The mouth-watering odour of roasting meat and fish was everywhere. A hunting party had gone out onto the branch earlier and returned with three four-horned, auburn-haired goats, ten large fish (taken from a black-and-grey-spotted cougar-sized cat which had caught them), bags full of ten different types of berries, and three large heavily furred monkeys.
The hunters had reported that the vegetation on top of the branch consisted mainly of short but thick-bodied fir trees, berry bushes, a knee-high grass which grew out of dirt caught in the fissures, and an ankle-deep moss.
