one, though the sounds of pursuit were louder.
Then he climbed into the window-frame, two hundred feet above that molten silver cataract—and dived.
CHAPTER X.
NIGHTMARE GARDEN
ONE THING RAFT had forgotten, and the fantastic thing was that he had time to remember it as he fell. The rate of speed of a freely falling body does not vary. Friction of air has some effect, but very little when an object weighing a hundred and sixty pounds, in the form of a man, drops free.
Raft's metabolism had been tremendously accelerated by the radiation that pervaded Paititi. He was living far faster than in his own world. And he had seen immense boulders float down lightly as feathers from the towering cliffs.
To his own mind, he did not fall. He dropped gently as in an elevator, utterly stunned with surprise, so astonished was he that the truth did not strike him immediately. When it did, there was nothing he could do about it.
Gently he revolved as he drifted down. Beside him the wall of the castle slipped past. At any moment someone might come out on a balcony and see him. A thrown spear would be dangerous. It could be thrown sufficiently fast to impale him, since the wielder could easily gauge the rate of Raft's fall.
He had never felt so helpless and naked in his life. It was like hanging free and unsupported in interplanetary space. He had time for a hundred questions and fears to pass through his mind before, finally, with agonizing slowness, his body struck the waters of the torrent.
His mass was the same, and he sank, angling slowly in the direction of the current. But he was breathing perhaps a hundred times faster than normal, so there was a new danger. Under ordinary conditions he could have held his breath until he reached the surface. As it was he might not emerge above the water for five minutes!
Now the accelerated metabolism was helpful. Raft managed to turn and swim up, though it was like moving in glue, against that slow, inexorable thrust of driving waters. He was a fly drowning in syrup. But the fly reached the surface at last.
Under ordinary conditions he would have been swept over the brink into Doirada Gulf, but his stimulated time-sense fought the slow pressure of the water. He fought his way upstream. He dragged himself to a shallow pool and collapsed, gasping.
There was no time to rest yet, though. He was not yet out of range of pursuit. Nor did he think he could cross the clearing to where the forest began without being spotted.
Wildly he stared about him, searching for a hiding place.
Reeds grew thickly about the margin of the pool. The water itself was roiled with thick mud, and opaque. Raft found a hollow reed, tested it, and made use of an old trick. He simply lay down in the water, anchoring himself by gripping embedded rocks, and breathed through the improvised lifeline.
He could not see, but he could not be seen, either. The cat people might discover his hiding-place, of course. Yet the chance was worth taking, Raft thought, remembering the difference between feline and simian psychology.
The pursuers would expect him—as a descendant of simians—to depend on flight, and probably to head for the forest. They would themselves be too fastidious to hide in dirty water if any other way of escape opened, and automatically might expect Raft to think in the same manner. If so, they would be mistaken.
His eyes shut, Raft concentrated on breathing. It was not too easy.
The amulet—could that help him now? It contained a spark from the Flame, from the tremendous energy- source called Curupuri. And it had the property of lowering the metabolic rate, somehow.
If, instead, it accelerated metabolism, Raft would have been more satisfied. It might actually do that, but that seemed improbable.
The sparks, probably, were keyed to the original Flame, kept powered by induction, unless they were each complete in themselves, like a speck of radium. To decelerate would mean that Raft would become the equivalent of a living statue among enemies moving like flashes of lightning.
Anyhow, the amulet was in his sealed pocket, and could not be secured without ruining da Fonseca's revolver. It was something to be investigated later. There was nothing to do now but play possum, and wait.
So Raft waited, while the chill of the river crept stealthily into his flesh, numbing nerves and muscles. He forced himself to wait, unhitching his mind till he seemed to float in a vacuum where neither light nor sound existed, nothing save the slow, jellied motion of the current in the pool. He couldn't afford to wait for nightfall. It might be several weeks, to his time-sense, before the sun dropped out of sight.
There were, Raft thought wryly, certain handicaps to a land where metabolism had gone so fantastically haywire.
Anyway, Darum had not caught Parror. That arrogant individual had taken Craddock to Kharn, which lay at the source of this very river. What lay in the Garden of Kharn, Raft hadn't the slightest idea. Janissa had feared it. And she wasn't easily frightened, Raft surmised. His thoughts drifted toward the girl, with her strange, dark-circled eyes and her tiger-striped hair.
For no apparent reason, he thought of Balzac, and the French writer's story, 'A Passion in the Desert.' Then he had the connection: a man's love for a—had it been a lioness? Or a leopard. Not a jaguar, anyway. There were no jaguars in the Sahara.
Janissa?
Feline she was, but she was human too. Though child of an alien species, she was no beast, no stalking beast of prey.
Raft caught himself.
'Good grief!' he thought. 'Am I imagining I'm in love with the girl? I've seen her just twice, in the flesh. It's novelty. I'm attracted by her exotic strangeness. When I get out of here, in five years or so, maybe, I'll meet a girl from Peoria and marry her.' The very term marriage made him realize the fantasy of the situation. He grinned inwardly.
'Biologically I rather imagine it's impossible. Besides, such things don't happen. I certainly wouldn't want my wife going out at night to sit on the back fence and howl.'
Nevertheless the thought did not entirely leave him. The union of two races, two species, rather, had never occurred in the history of biology. He broke the problem down into basic equations of genes and chromosomes, and that passed time, but finally made him feel foolish. Eventually he was glad to raise his head warily above water and prepare to emerge.
A long time had passed, and the alarm must long since have died down. No one was visible on any of the castle's many balconies, nor could the courtyard be seen from here. But
He could keep to the river—though its slow, powerful current was a danger. So he set off upstream, hugging as closely to the bank as he could, crawling mostly, swimming at times, and keeping the reed always ready. Once, at a suspicious flash of movement, he lay hidden, but he was overly cautious then. By the time he reached the forest, he was freezing cold and bleeding from scraped elbows and wrists.
He hoped the cat people did not trail by scent. It was unlikely. They were a civilized race, and the dulling of certain senses is the price evolution exacts. The lower species, depending on scent and sound, have those faculties highly developed. On the other hand, man's vision is far more powerful and more easily adjustable than the vision of most beasts.
Darum would not know his destination. The closer he got to Kharn, the safer he would be from pursuit.
A cyclopean tree shut out the turrets of the castle. Raft went on cautiously for perhaps half a mile. Then he opened the sealed pocket, made sure his revolver was dry, and put the dagger into his belt. The amulet he took out for a closer inspection.
It told him nothing. A spark of fire glittered in the depths of a cloudy crystal chip that was in turn set in a thick metallic lozenge, square with rounded corners. The flat gem could, he found on experiment, be revolved like the dial of a safe. He turned it cautiously.
