Atta (1953) by Francis Rufus Bellamy

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by Atta (pdf)


  Finally Nature herself came to my assistance. The

  night voices slowly ceased, stillness settled over desert

  and jungle, and for a long time nothing happened. And

  during this armistice my watchfulness gradually relaxed.

  Presently my head was nodding in spite of my efforts;

  and at last, I suppose, I must have fallen asleep in my

  lonely shelter. For I remember nothing more .

  Chapter 3

  I w a s awakened by the warm rays of the morning sun

  striking into my shelter and shining brightly on my face.

  How long I had slept I had no means of knowing, but

  I was still stiff and sore in every joint as I rose and

  stretched, made sure there were no hostile creatures in

  sight outside, and then went out into the open, trading

  my invaluable pole after me. A moment later I had

  reached the summit of my stone hillock and could look

  in every direction; and never shall I forget the picture

  that lay spread out before me.

  I stood overlooking the immediate scene of my ghastly

  adventures; a harmless-enough-appearing rock mesa that

  extended some three or four hundred feet from jungle

  to precipice. But it was not the precipice that held my

  fascinated gaze. It was the valley.

  This was some three hundred feet below me; I could

  see it from above to its fullest extent, and for at least a

  A T T A

  21

  mile it was one vast rectangle of huge colored plants.

  They were purple, yellow, russet, violet, pink and blue

  and reddish gold; the whole interspersed like a Persian

  rug with great light-veined greenish jungle trees whose

  branches sometimes offered huge leaves bigger than

  beach umbrellas. All this was directly below me. At the

  far end of the valley, where the ground began to rise,

  great splotches of dark red and brown stood out, and

  here it appeared that I was gazing at fields of gorse on

  rising hills. Behind these splashes of color still other

  green meadows rose, such as one sees in mountain uplands, and at the distant top, dim on the horizon like the great towers of a city many miles away, was the line

  of unbelievable cuplike trees that I had seen in the

  lightning’s glare. In the daylight they could not be mistaken. They looked like gargantuan apple trees a good thousand feet high.

  With a gasp of unbelief I turned to view the country

  behind the stone hillocks, the country whence the squat

  monster had come; and here I had another surprise. It

  was as level as a green Dakota prairie, without any sign

  of last night’s rain beneath its heavy green jungle trees.

  As far as the eye could reach it stretched, an undulating

  plain of grotesque green woods covering coarse yellow

  boulders. These woods covered everything, growing

  thicker and more tangled in places until they resembled

  a kind of tropical jungle, yet never rising over thirty feet

  high.

  Standing on a hillock as I was, I could see for miles, and

  the only break in the monotony was an occasional graceful palmlike tree that rose above the forest, bent its, smooth green trunk toward the sun, and held out a circlet

  of bright yellow.

  For a moment the whole character of the landscape reminded me irresistibly of pictures of central Africa as depicted in my schoolbooks. Even the occasional high graceful trees with yellow blooms bore a startling resemblance to some kind of gigantic African dandelion palm. They

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  A T T A

  , held no kinship whatever with the natural trees of our

  own West.

  Then my eye fell on the shining hogshead in which I

  had spent the night, and my thoughts jumped rapidly to

  the inhabitants of this country. Surely that cone of

  polished metal, remarkably like a huge thimble, spoke

  of human civilization, as did the sharp well-made lance

  at my side. No squat monster with vague eyes had ever

  cast such things. There must be people in this land,

  though whether hostile or friendly no one could predict.

  At the thought I realized for the first time that I was

  hungry, almost ravenous. I had not eaten for an unknown length of time, more than twenty-four hours possibly, and regular meals have always been a necessary consideration with me. Now, before deciding on any

  course of action, I obviously needed food. Even so, the

  sight of the jungle intimidated me, and I hesitated to

  shoulder my lance and plunge into it again. Without

  much doubt the darkness of the night before had aided as

  much as hindered me in my escape from my enemy. Another time I might not be so fortunate.

  The jungle valley was the only other possibility. I

  turned and gazed down into the beautiful country below

  me. Should I not be likely to find fruit or possibly an

  outlying farmhouse down in its trees?

  With this hope in mind I scanned the landscape for

  some time for traces of orchards or smoke; but in vain.

  The valley appeared as forsaken as the desert above. Indeed, not only did I not find any evidence of life, but the strange conviction that I was suffering from a hallucination took possession of me again as I gazed. Had I not seen such a valley somewhere before, like this one and

  yet not like it, clear in its every detail and yet surely as

  unfamiliar as another world could be?

  I finally shook myself and turned away. Lack of food

  must be addling my wits, I concluded.

  As I came to this dismal conclusion my foot caught

  against some substance lying half hidden in a long gully;

  A T T A

  23

  and here I saw to my surprise that a long, thick black

  rope some four inches in diameter lay stretched in a

  crevice perhaps forty feet long. With strangely mixed

  emotions I walked down to where it ended, stooped to

  pick up its frazzled end, and examined it. It had been

  snapped asunder by some terrific force, and the strands

  of which it was composed were torn into unequal lengths.

  I pulled out several and examined them: they were like

  the remnants of some old ship’s mooring line along the

  docks, still wound around the snubbing pile after the

  cable itself had parted. This resemblance, combined with

  blackness and the odd texture, suddenly struck me as

  very peculiar. What engine or circumstance, here in a

  desolate valley, could have snapped this thick rope off

  short like a piece of thread?

  The whole piece was nearly fifty feet in length, I

  judged as I dragged it out of its crevice. It was of a remarkable lightness for its thickness. Indeed, when one unraveled its ends and untwisted the strands that composed it one had something approaching a good resilient twine. It suddenly struck me as valuable, and for some

  moments, like any good farmer, I devoted myself to unraveling the snapped end of the big cable and putting the best lengths thus obtained into my pocket against

  future emergency.

  But I could not eat them, and I was beginning now to

  be aware of actual pangs—a further reminder that the

  problem of mere sustenance bade fair to overshadow all

  else in my present predicament.

  Resolutely, I turned my back on my latest discovery

  and, lance on my should
er, plunged into the desert jungle, first taking good care to observe the position of sun and shadows so that if necessary I could find my way

  back without retracing my outward trail.

  For some time, then, I journeyed thus, going forward

  slowly over the boulders and among the green trees, my

  eyes on the alert for signs of hostile beasts and all my

  senses on watch against possible dangers. It grew very

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  A T T A

  hot after a while, and the going itself bothered me excessively, For the ground was much rougher than I had imagined, the wild confusion of rocks and great hard

  clods of sandstone alternating with thickets of brown

  dead trees to produce an extremely treacherous footing

  in which an ankle could be turned or wrenched very

  easily.

  In addition, my lance impeded me by catching in the

  thickets, and its great weight soon became an almost unbearable burden, I dared not put it aside, however, for I should then be completely unarmed and helpless. I

  made my way slowly onward as best I could.

  I had gone some quarter mile, I think, when ahead of

  me through the jungle I saw a sort of sandstone clearing

  and with renewed hope and energy made for it. I had

  been dimly conscious from the beginning of a tremendous life force inhabiting these rustling green woods through which I had been forcing my way. In fact, without having caught sight of a single creature of any kind or description, I had several times imagined that something more than the breeze had set the tough green branches to quivering as I approached them; and once

  or twice I could have sworn to the swift disappearance

  of some beast or other along the ground or in the air

  above, its only trace a sound of scuttling legs or whirring

  wings—a sound lost or caught up in the continual rustle

  of the jungle trees.

  So far, however, I had not laid eyes on any creature.

  And there seemed to be an entire lack of fruit or nuts of

  all kinds; in fact, of anything edible. It was therefore

  with a decided rise of spirits that I now descried the

  open space ahead of me. If not human habitation, here

  at least was a change in the character of the country.

  As I came to the edge of the jungle and looked out, I

  saw that I was doomed again to disappointment. A small

  clearing, perhaps two acres in extent, lay baking in the

  sunlight, with no sign of life or habitation on it and only

  the same large sandstone pebbles glittering in the heat. I

  A T T A

  25

  was turning away in bitter disappointment when my eye

  was caught by something that moved on the far side of

  the open space beside a large boulder. With a quickening

  of the breath I crouched down behind a green thicket and

  peered through the branches. Something brownish had

  raised itself from the pebbles for a moment and then

  fallen back. It was more than half behind the boulder

  but something in the pose, the gesture, sent a sudden

  thrill through my heart. It indefinably suggested a person’s last hopeless attempt to free himself from a trap of some sort. Without stopping to think of the possible

  foolhardiness of my action I rose from behind the

  thicket and hurried across the clearing. As I rounded

  the boulder I stopped short with a cry of dismay and

  alarm, and then I fell back a step, grasping my steel

  lance tightly.

  One of the most grotesque creatures I expect ever to

  encounter in my life lay stretched on the ground, almost

  beneath a rock that had evidently fallen upon him, pinioning one of his legs. He lay nearly on his back, his other legs, of which there seemed to be three, lying

  limply outstretched beside him, mute evidence of his exhaustion. He had apparently given up the struggle to free himself at the exact moment when I caught sight of

  him. Now both his arms lay lifeless at his side, and his

  head had fallen back upon the pebbles, his two large,

  extremely wide-set eyes staring faintly at the sky. He was

  clad in a sort of dull brownish leather-like material, burnished in places until it looked like natural armor. And two delicate feelers projected from his enormous head,

  weakly tapping the boulder beside him from time to

  time as if he considered some despairing plan of moving

  it from his imprisoned leg.

  For a moment I was too taken aback to stir. Was I in

  the presence of some gigantic ant or of one of the inhabitants of this weird country—the forger of my shelter, perhaps, the maker of that piece of rope that I had so

  lately appropriated? Or was this some new bestial enemy

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  A T T A

  who, if freed, would vengefully seek my life as the

  Pleiocene monster had done?

  While I stood thus transfixed with doubt, the creature

  turned his head and caught sight of me. A faint shudder

  ran through him as he made a new convulsive effort to

  free himself, and then he fell back again, his eyes fixed

  upon me in dumb despair. For the life of me I could not

  associate the look he fastened upon me with that of a

  wild beast. Strange as his appearance might be, the light

  of intelligence shone in those eyes. The certainty took

  possession of me and would not be thrown off.

  He, on his part, evidently took it for granted that

  his last hour had come; and this pitiful resignation was, I

  suppose, what decided me. Almost before I knew it I

  was working feverishly to free him from the weight of

  the boulder, air fear of him forgotten.

  At first I could not even budge the heavy stone; much

  to his disappointment and even surprise, I thought, as

  he pulled himself up on his arms and tried vainly to

  withdraw his imprisoned leg. Then I bethought myself

  of using my lance as a lever; and after a while, by dint

  of making a fulcrum with several stones and digging out

  a small hole under the boulder with the end of my lance,

  I succeeded at last in getting a sufficiently good purchase

  to pry the huge rock slowly up and off the unfortunate

  creature’s leg, which he withdrew in a badly crushed

  condition and gazed at hopelessly.

  This done, I sank down, panting from my exertions,

  and eyed the strange creature whom I had rescued.

  From his acquiescence in my endeavors to help him

  and from his eloquent attitude of despair I had already

  concluded that I was in no danger of being attacked.

  Now it occurred to me that he was kindly disposed toward me and even grateful for what I had done; and when he rose painfully and came limping toward me,

  holding up the injured leg for my inspection, I did not

  draw back.

  A T T A

  27

  “Hold it out here,” I said, “and hold it still, and we will

  see what can be done.”

  He seemed to understand, for he remained motionless,

  watching my every move with his enormous eyes, while

  I cautiously felt the broken bone, straightened it, made

  a rough splint from the fiber of a dead tree, and bound it

  to the broken limb with a strand of the rope that I had

  put in my pocket.

  “There,” I said, “that will keep it in place.”

  Again the creature seemed to unders
tand, for he passed

  one of his feelers slowly over the splint, then raised it

  and tapped me lightly on the shoulder several times. I

  had lost all fear of him by this time, and there was something so comical about the gratitude of this grotesque being-something so human in spite of the preposterous absence of all human features—that I remember smiling as I rose and went to extricate my lance.

  My companion watched me in silence for a few moments as I cleaned the dirt from it; then suddenly he sat up and began gesticulating rapidly with forearms and

  feelers, and from his throat came high-pitched sounds.

  That he was trying to tell me something was quite evident; it was quite certain, too, that I hadn’t the faintest idea what it was. I merely shook my head at him slowly.

  “I f s no use,” said I, though of course my words conveyed no meaning to him; “I can’t understand you. The best thing for you to do is to come back with me to my

  shelter. You’ll have to be careful for several weeks.” To

  amplify this speech I pointed and made the usual absurd gestures that one makes to foreigners and idiots, and I still flatter myself that, in part at least, he understood what I meant. For after a while he ceased his twitterings and began making similar gestures himself, pointing in a direction in which he wished to go and bowing and holding up his injured leg. So ridiculous was the

  performance, we resembled so closely those cartoon characters of my boyhood, Alphonse and Gaston, that I had much ado not to laugh. Nevertheless his persistence

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  A T T A

  brought its reward. For it suddenly occurred to me that

  an injured lodger in my shelter would be no better off

  than I was, whereas it was possible that he was offering

  me food as well as some better refuge of his own.

  “All right,” I said aloud. “I’ll go with you. Maybe you

  can find us something to eat.”

  And a few minutes later, lance on shoulder and considerable uncertainty in my heart, I was following my new companion as he limped to the north end of the

  sandstone clearing and there without ceremony plunged

  into the jungle.

  I don’t mind confessing that, once in it, injured though

  he was, he set me such a swift pace that I had all I could

 

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