There was no change, except, perhaps, for a freshening of the breeze. How could he test the device?
His watch, of course.
Luckily the watch was waterproof. He stared at the dial, noticing that the second hand was moving very slowly. He turned the crystal on the amulet again and the pointer moved faster. Another turn, and it raced.
Which meant that his metabolism was correspondingly slower.
Would the amulet also increase the rate of life? If so, that would solve many problems. He could get to Kharn, perhaps, even before Parror arrived there. But he was doomed to disappointment on that score. The amulet could retard metabolism, but it could not increase it beyond the rate prevalent in Paititi.
That meant the spark, undoubtedly, was attuned to the Flame itself, radiating at the same energy-rate and moving in the same cycle. Well, Raft didn't want to be handicapped by moving more slowly than the rest of his temporary world, and he adjusted the device till it was as he had found it.
He now put it in the pocket that held the revolver, and went on. He was estimating, as well as he could remember, the velocity of a bullet, and wondering if, under the current conditions, any target he fired at might be able to dodge lead.
He must remember to use the gun at close range, the closer the better!
The use of artillery would be handicapped in Paititi. If a bomb were dropped on Doirada Castle, the cat people would almost have time to dismantle the structure and move it elsewhere before the egg landed. No wonder the species fought with steel, instead of propellents. Only an energy-ray could be truly efficient here.
Which explained, Raft decided, why mental powers were so highly developed—Janissa's mirror, Yrann's hypnotic sphere. Timelag would be minimized with such devices.
The whole inanimate part of the valley was indeed under a spell, such a one as had protected the Norse god Baldur. There could be few fatalities through accident. Not when stones floated, rivers ran like treacle, and a man fell as slowly as Alice descending the rabbit-hole!
As he went on, he paid more attention to the life around him, the curious creatures that used the gigantic trees as hiding places. In the cool, clear light he could make out new details.
The flower-bright vines, with their dangerous tentacles, slithered swiftly across the bark. There were many of the three-foot alligators, lurking hi the pools they themselves seemed to have constructed on the trunks, shells that resembled the cups rubber-workers fasten to the hevea bark as they drain their milky latex.
The 'gators had surprisingly flexible claws. Raft noticed a couple of them constructing their pools, scraping resinous wood from the tree and making it into a kind of cement with a fluid they secreted from salivary glands.
Only the sloths were truly familiar, and they were all the stranger because of the rapidity with which they moved. The true sloth hangs motionless by its claws, as its tongue flashes out to reap a nutritious harvest of insects. Its metabolism is abnormally slow.
But it was not slow here.
As for the inch-long parasites that crept through the sloths' hair, Raft found those creatures too unpleasantly familiar to be truly interesting. Only their ape-like tails kept them from resembling too closely the species that was not dominant in Paititi, though it might be elsewhere.
Most intriguing were the brown furry mammals in the apartment-house nests. They had sucking-disks on their paws, which were none too efficient, but their elongated snouts ended in tabs of flesh like the extremity of an elephant's trunk, a finger and thumb, which they used as man might use his hands. Its prehensile delicacy was amazing.
Raft wondered what the interior of the nests was like. He felt that what lay inside might be surprising.
Underfoot was only the moss. There was no underbrush. Those incredible trees seemed to have sucked all the nutriment out of the ground, leaving so little that only moss could flourish. That gave a logical explanation for the tree-parasites.
Where else could they live, except in a closely integrated society, where hunger made an automatic check- and-balance? Even the trees were part of that inexorable system, for they had drained the earth of life. And in return, they were hosts to other species.
Species had reached dead end in this land. They would never evolve to dominance, as the cat people had evolved, Raft surmised. They had found their balance.
And, meanwhile, he had to find Craddock.
Keeping a wary eye out for possible pursuit, he followed the river. Never at any time could he see more than a half-mile ahead. The trees made a maze. But the river itself was a guide. Raft plunged on doggedly, until at last exhaustion forced him to rest.
There might be shelter on one of the encrusted tree-trunks, but life was too teeming there. None of the things seemed to venture to the ground, however, and Raft finally lay down on the river bank, in lieu of better shelter. He might be attacked while he slept, but there was no way of guarding against that. He laid the revolver ready and slept, hoping for the best.
When he awoke, he went on again. Nor had he far to travel now. An hour's walk, as he estimated time, brought him to a wall which blocked further progress. It was only twenty feet high, dwarfed by the trees, but it was of some age-resistant plastic or alloy, and had eroded scarcely at all.
To left and to right it stretched away and was lost amid the trees. But it was broken at one spot by an archway, through which the river poured. Sediment had built up a narrow ledge bordering the water, a precarious path that led beneath the arch.
Unhesitatingly Raft stepped out on that muddy trail. He could see faint outlines that might have been footprints, and, further along, his suspicion was confirmed when he observed a track that was unmistakably that of Craddock's heavy boots. He was very nearly at the end of the trail.
Ahead he could make out irregular vegetation darkening that hemispherical opening, blocking his vision. He went on, more carefully now. There were bushes, he noted with surprise.
He began to push through their tangled mass, and abruptly drew back, contact with the things startling him. Their texture had been unlike the rough, bristly texture of plants. They were warm.
They were not plants.
Lacy filigrees, arabesque nets of interwoven mesh, made a curtain on each side of the river. They were grayish-pink, reminding Raft unmistakably of the neutral structure of a living body, networks of nerves, raw and unpleasant. Nor were they rooted like plants.
They quivered, vibrated. They drew back to let him pass.
As he stepped forward, they drew into themselves like contracting anemones touched by an intrusive finger. A dozen grayish, irregular little balls hugged the ground, blending with it in protective camouflage.
Beyond them lay the Garden of Kharn, a sickly, yellowish tangle of vegetation blocking Raft's view. He could see the guarding wall marching to left and right, curving in to form what must be an enclosure. There were none of the giant trees within the wall, though their columns loomed above and beyond it.
Raft moved on, keeping to the river bank. The bushes were strange to him, though he was no botanist. They seemed a rather impossible hybrid of fungus and true plant. They were fern and mushroom in one.
Oddly he thought of them as vampires, draining life from the very ground.
That forest was not normal—no. The cyclopean trees outside were friendly by comparison. They, at least, were as immense and aloof as gods.
But these plants, these sickly hybrids, grew with a rank luxuriance that was in itself unhealthy. Movement crawled through the yellow jungle, not the wave-motion of wind, but secretive, stealthy movements which made Raft's scalp prickle.
Very faintly, scarcely noticeable, he felt a presence in the Garden. And he knew, then, why Janissa had not wanted to speak of Kharn.
For that intangibly sensed presence was not malignant. It was worse. It was cold and distant and alien.
And, intrinsically, it was very evil.
Raft moved even more cautiously now. There was menace here, the more ominous because he could not define it. It was a brooding, enigmatic presence which was sensed by the cat-people as well as by himself. This added up to significance.
Felines and simians react in different ways to the same stimulus. Cats are notorious for their acceptance of the supernatural, which meant simply the supernormal, vibrations and radiations too subtle to be sensed fully by
