'He says he is from another world,' said Zor. 'At first, I did not believe him; but now that I have come to know him, I do not doubt his word.'
'What other world is there?' demanded Kleeto.
'He says that Pellucidar is round like the eggs of one of the great turtles, and hollow, too. Pellucidar, he says, is on the inside, and his world is on the outside.'
'Can't anyone in your world, then, find his way home, if he gets lost?' asked the girl.
'Yes,' I explained; 'but not in the way that you do. Some time I shall explain it to you; but right now we have other things to think about, and the most important, at the moment, is to get as far away from the Valley of the Jukans as we can.'
We started on again, then, on the long trail toward Sari; and I should have been very happy and contented, had it not been for my anxiety concerning the fate of Dian. If I only knew in what direction she had been taken. Even to know who had taken her, would have been some satisfaction; but I knew neither, and I could not even guess; and prayed that time would unravel the mystery.
We had passed out of the valley and followed the river down to the shore of the inland sea, of which Dian had told me, when we passed the skeleton of a large deer from which all the flesh had been stripped by the carnivorous creatures of all sizes and descriptions which infest Pellucidar.
So often does one come across these bleaching evidences of tragedy in Pellucidar that they occasion no comment or even a single glance; but as I passed close to this one I saw an arrow lying among the bones. Naturally, I picked it up to put it in my quiver; and, as I did so, I must have exclaimed aloud in astonishment, for both Zor and Kleeto turned questioningly toward me.
'What is the matter?' asked the former.
'I made this arrow,' I said. 'I made it for Dian. I always mark our arrows for identification. This one bears her mark.'
'Then she has been this way,' said Kleeto.
'Yes, she is on the way back to Sari,' I said; then I got to thinking. It was odd that it had never occurred to me before, that I had found my weapons in the cave but not Dian's. Why should her abductor have taken her weapons and not mine? I put the question to Zor and Kleeto.
'Perhaps she came alone,' suggested Kleeto.
'She would never have deserted me,' I said.
Zor shook his head. 'I do not understand it,' he said. 'Very few of the men of Pellucidar know how to use this strange weapon which you make. The Jukans certainly possess none. Who else could have shot this but Dian the Beautiful, herself?'
'She must have shot it,' I said.
'But if she were stolen, her captor would never permit her to carry weapons,' argued Zor.
'You are right,' I said.
'Then she must be alone,' said Zor, 'or-or she came away with someone of her own free will.'
I couldn't believe that; but no matter how much I racked my brain, it was impossible for me to arrive at any explanation.
Chapter XVI
IT is remarkable how life adapts itself to its environment, and, I may say, especially man, who is entirely hairless and unprotected from the elements and comparatively slow and weak. Here was I, a man of the Twentieth Century, with perhaps a thousand years of civilization as my background, trekking through the wildernesses of a savage world with a man and a girl of the Old Stone Age, and quite as self-reliant and as much at home as they. I, who would not have ventured upon the streets of my native city in my shirt-sleeves, was perfectly comfortable, and not at all self-conscious, in a G-string and a pair of sandals. It has often made me smile to contemplate what my strait-laced New England friends would have thought, could they have seen me; and I know that they would have considered Kleeto an abandoned wench, yet, like practically every girl I have ever known here in Pellucidar, she was fine and clean; and virtuous almost to prudery; but she did have a failing; a failing that is not uncommon to all girls on the outer crust-she talked too much. Yet her naive and usually happy prattle often distracted my mind from the sorrow which weighed it down.
Having found that I was from another world, Kleeto must know all about it; and she asked a million questions. She was a very different Kleeto from the Kleeto I had known in the palace of Meeza, the king, for then she was suppressed by the seeming hopelessness of her position and her fear of the maniacs among whom she lived; but now that she was free and safe, the natural buoyancy of her spirits reasserted itself and the real Kleeto bloomed again.
It was quite evident to me that Zor had fallen in love with Kleeto, and there is no doubt but what the little rascal led him on-there are coquettes wherever there are women. It was impossible to tell if she were in love with him; but I think she was because she treated him so badly. Anyway, I know it was she who suggested that he go to Suvi.
'Why did you leave Suvi, Kleeto?' I once asked her.
'I ran away,' she said, with a shrug. 'I wanted to go to Kali; but I got lost; and so I wandered around until I was finally captured by the Jukans.'
'If you were lost,' said Zor, 'why didn't you go back to Suvi?'
'I was afraid,' replied Kleeto.
'Afraid of what?' I asked.
'There was a man there that wished to take me as his mate, but I did not want him; but he was a big strong man, and his uncle was King of Suvi. It was because of him that I ran away, and because of him that I dared not go back.'
'But now you are not afraid to return?' I asked.
'I shall have you and Zor with me,' she said; 'and so I shall not be afraid.'
'Is this man, by any chance, named Do-gad?' I asked.
'Yes,' she said. 'Do you know him?'
'No,' I said; 'but some day I am going to meet him.'
It was a strange coincidence that both Dian and Kleeto had been captured by the Jukans while they were trying to escape from Do-gad. The fellow would have plenty to account for to Zor and me.
Once again it was, to me, new country that we were passing through. In fact, so enormous is the land area of Pellucidar, so sparsely peopled is it, and so little explored, that almost all of it is new country practically untouched by man. It is, however, a vast melting pot of life where animals of nearly all the geological periods of the outer crust exist contemporaneously. I have been told that there are considerable areas entirely destitute of animal life; and I know that there are others where the reptilia of the Triassic and Jurassic Ages of the outer crust reign in undisputed possession because no other creature dare enter their domain. Other areas are peopled solely by the birds and mammals that flourished on the outer crust from the Cretaceous to the Pliocene; but by far the larger part of the Pellucidar known to me from my own exploration and from heresay is inhabited by all these forms of life, with here and there an isolated community of men living mostly in caves. Only since the founding of the Empire had there been anything approaching a city built in Pellucidar, unless one might call the underground caverns of the Mahars cities, or apply the same name to the crazy conglomeration of huts occupied by the Jukans.
One city only must always be excepted from this very general statement. That is the City of Korsar , near the north polar opening, which I believe to have been originally founded by the crew of a pirate ship which, by some miracle, found its way through the polar opening from the Arctic Ocean into Pellucidar.
The civilization of these people, however, has never spread toward the South. They are, by nature, a maritime people; but having no sun, or moon, or stars to guide them, they do not dare venture out of sight of land on the great ocean that lies at their very door, the Korsar Az.
We had slept many times, and were still moving along the shore of the sea, when we came suddenly upon a group of enormous mastodons in a little, flat-floored valley through which a river ran. There were three mastodons in the group, a bull, a cow, and a calf; and we could see by the actions of the adults that something was amiss, for
