powerful should require the help of mortals to defend them.
After many sleeps David had spoken with many of the citizens; and he had scratched upon the walls of the little room the names of those that he thought could be depended upon to be loyal to him and to O-aa. Nor was Furp idle during this time, for he had determined to rid himself of these two who were constantly increasing their hold upon the people; and depriving him of the pieces of bronze which he had been accustomed to collect from the temple and from the people.
Both Furp and Ope were quite concerned about this new confessional which permitted Pu to speak secretly with the people; but they would have been more concerned had they known that Pu, who now controlled the finances of the temple, was giving pieces of bronze to those who were loyal to him, in the privacy of the confessional, with which to purchase swords, and bows and arrows.
AH-GILAK, THE LITTLE old man from Cape Cod, was much concerned over the fate of David Innes, whom he greatly admired, not only because of his ability and courage, but because David was from Hartford , Connecticut ; and he felt that in this outlandish world at the center of the earth New Englanders were bound together by a common tie.
'Dod-burn it,' he said to Abner Perry, shortly after David had departed, 'how is this ding-busted idiot goin' to get back if that contraption carries him across the nameless strait that everyone says is at the end of the world?'
'I don't know,' said Abner Perry sadly; 'and to think that it is all my fault, all my fault. Because I am a careless absentminded old fool, I have sent the two I loved best to death.'
'Well, settin' around cryin' over split milk ain't goin' to butter no parsnips, as the feller said,' rejoined Ah- gilak. 'What we ought to do is do sump'n about it.'
'What can we do?' asked Abner Perry. 'There is nothing that I would not do. I have been seriously considering building another balloon with which to follow them.'
'Humph!' ejaculated Ah-gilak. 'You sure are the dod-burndest old fool I've ever heard tell of. What good could you do if you did float over the nameless strait in one of them contraptions? We'd only have three of you to look for, instead of two. But I got a idea that I've been thinking about ever since David left.'
'What is it?' asked Perry.
'Well, you see,' explained the little old man, 'afore the Dolly Dorcas was wrecked in the Arctic Ocean in 1845, I'd been a-plannin' that when I got back to Cape Cod I'd build me a clipper ship, the finest, fastest clipper ship that ever cut salt water. But then, of course the Dolly Dorcas she did get wrecked, and I drifted down here into this dod-burned hole in the ground; and I ain't never had no chance to build no clipper ship; but now, if I had the men and the tools, I could build one; and we could go down and cross this here nameless strait, and maybe we could find David and this here Dian the Beautiful.'
Abner Perry brightened immediately at the suggestion. 'Do you think you could do it, Ah-gilak?' he asked. 'For if you can, I can furnish you the men and the tools. We haven't got a ship left seaworthy enough to navigate the nameless strait in safety; and if you can build one and sail it, I can furnish the men to build it, and the men to man it.'
'Let's start, then,' said Ah-gilak. 'Procrastination is the mother of invention, as the feller said.'
With this hope held out to him, Abner Perry was a new man. He sent for Ghak the Hairy One, who was king of Sari; and who theoretically ruled the loose federation of the Empire of Pellucidar while David was absent. Perry explained to Ghak what Ah-gilak had proposed, and Ghak was as enthusiastic as either of them. Thus it was that the entire tribe of Sarians, men, women, and children, trekked to Amoz, which is on the Darel Az, a shallow sea that is really only a bay on the coast of the Lural Az.
They took with them arms and ammunition and tools—axes with hammers and chisels and mattocks, all the tools that Perry had taught them to make, after he himself had achieved steel following his discovery and smelting of iron ore, and the happy presence of carbon in the foothills near Sari.
Ghak sent runners to Thuria, Suvi, and Kali; and eventually a thousand men were gathered at Amoz, felling trees and shaping the timbers; and hunters went forth and killed dinosaurs for the peritonea which were to form the sails.
Ah-gilak did not design the huge clipper ship he had planned to build at Cape Cod , but a smaller one that might be equally fast, and just as seaworthy.
Ja, the Mezop, came from the Anoroc Islands with a hundred men who were to help with the building of the ship and man it after it was launched; for the Mezops are the seafaring men of the Empire of Pellucidar.
The women fabricated the shrouds and the rigging from the fibers of an abacalike plant; and even the children worked, fetching and carrying.
No man may know how long it took to build that clipper ship, in a world where it is always noon and there are no moving celestial bodies to mark the passage of time; a fact which always annoyed Ah-gilak.
'Dod-burn that dod-blasted sun!' he exclaimed. 'Why don't it rise and set like a sun oughta? How's a feller goin' to know when to quit work? Gad and Gabriel! It ain't decent.'
But the Pellucidarians knew when to quit work. When they were hungry they stopped and ate; when they were sleepy they crawled into the darkest place they could find and went to sleep. Then the little old man from Cape Cod would dance around in a frenzy of rage and profanity, if their sleeping or their eating interfered with the building of the clipper. However, the work progressed, and eventually the clipper was ready to launch. The ways were greased, and every preparation had been made. A hundred men stood by the blocks, ready to pull them away.
'Dod-burn it!' exclaimed Ah-gilak. 'We got to christen 'er, and we plumb forgot to find a name for her.'
'You designed her and you built her,' said Abner Perry; 'and so I think that you are the one who should have the privilege of naming her.'
'That's fair enough,' said Ah-gilak, 'and I'm going to call her the John Tyler, because I voted for him for president at the last election; that is, I voted for him and William Henry Harrison; but when Harrison died.'
'Why, that was a hundred and eighteen years ago, man!' exclaimed Abner Perry.
'I don't give a dod-blasted whoop if it was a thousand and eighteen years ago,' said Ah-gilak. 'I voted for Harrison and Tyler at the last election.'
'Do you know what year it is now?' asked Abner Perry.
'David Innes tried to tell me that I was a hundred and fifty-three years old,' said Ah-gilak; 'but he has lived down here in this dod-burned hole in the ground so long he's crazy. They don't none of you know what year this is. They ain't no years here; they ain't no months! they ain't no weeks; they ain't no days; they ain't nothin' but noon. How you going to count time when it's always noon? Anyhow I'm going to name her the John Tyler.'
'I think that's an excellent name,' said Abner Perry.
'Now we ought to have a bottle of something to bust on her bow while I christen her,' said Ah-gilak. 'If a thing's worth doin' at all, don't put it off till tomorrow, as the feller said.'
The best substitute for a bottle of champagne which they could find was a clay jug filled with water. Ah-gilak held it in his hand and stood by the bow of the clipper. Suddenly he turned to Abner Perry. 'This ain't right,' he said. 'Who ever heard of a man christening a ship?'
'Stellara, the mate of Tartar, the son of Ghak is here,' said Abner Perry. 'Let her christen the John Tyler;' and so Stellara came, and Ah-gilak told her what to do; and at his signal the men pulled the blocks away immediately after Stellara had broken the jug of water on the bow of the clipper and said, 'I christen thee the John Tyler.'
The ship slipped down the ways into the Darel Az; and the people of Thuria and Sari and Amoz and Suvi and Kali, screamed with delight.
The cannon had been put aboard her before they launched her; and now they set about rigging her, and this work Ah-gilak insisted must be done by the Mezops, who were to be the sailors that manned the ship; so that they would know every rope and spar. It was all a tremendous undertaking for people of the Stone Age, for they had so much to learn and when the ship was rigged the Mezops had to be drilled in making sail and taking it in quickly. Fortunately they were not only seafaring men, but semi-arboreal, as they lived in trees on their native islands. They ran up the shrouds like monkeys, and out upon the yardarms as though they had been born upon them.
'They may be red Injuns,' said Ah-gilak to Perry, 'but they're goin' to make fine sailormen.'
Vast quantities of water in bamboo containers was stored aboard, as was the salt meat, vegetables, nuts, and quantities of the rough flour that Abner Perry had taught the Pellucidarians to make.
