Atta (1953) by Francis Rufus Bellamy

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  do merely to keep up with him. I had no time for more

  speculations on the wisdom of my choice. Lame as he

  was, his strength, agility, and quickness were far superior

  to mine, and I had much ado not to be reduced to merely

  scrabbling after him.

  We traveled due north, and I kept careful check of the

  few landmarks we passed so that at the proper moment

  I could return to my metal shelter and recover my long

  black rope. In some dim way these two things seemed to

  represent to me all that remained of my actual entrance

  into this country, and I had the curious feeling that if I

  should lose them or be unable to find them again my

  road out would also be lost. For I had got to the rocky

  plateau by some route, and if this jungle lay at one end

  of it, then my own farm lay at the other.

  In the meantime I was growing very hungry indeed—

  almost faint, to tell the truth; and this condition was responsible for the only untoward incident that marked our journey—a happening that took place after we had been

  traveling for about an hour.

  During this time my new companion had waited for

  me to catch up with him every now and then, whereupon

  I had examined the splint to see how it was holding and

  both of us had rested ourselves. Usually such breathing

  spells had been productive of little more than the mutual

  A T T A

  29

  silence while I wiped my moist brow and my companion

  felt of his leg. This time, however, my eye was caught by

  what I took at first to be a mirror suspended from one of

  the limbs of a jungle tree and flashing in the noonday sun. It was a large eggshaped globule, I soon perceived, made of what looked to be polished glass, and it gathered and reflected the rays of the sun in an almost

  kaleidoscopic splendor of prismatic gleams. Resting in

  the lowest crotch of the tree where the first thick limb

  joined the trunk, it was not suspended, but it had clearly

  been put in its place by someone.

  Fascinated by its appearance, I rose and went to it—

  it was not more than thirty feet away—and reached up

  my hand to touch it, wondering who had made it and

  placed it there. Instantly, as if by magic, my simple

  touch wrought an incredible change. The moment my

  fingers came in contact with its cool surface it changed

  from a glass globule to a huge mass of water that broke

  its shape with a splash and flowed down and over me,

  soaking me to the skin.

  For an instant I stood utterly bewildered, soaking wet

  and stunned.

  Plain water! Was it nothing but plain water? If so,

  how in defiance of gravity could it have remained suspended in the crotch of this tree, a glistening wet sphere over two feet in diameter? Where in the world was I,

  that the very laws of gravity could be defied?

  At the unbidden question my overwrought nerves suddenly gave way and water rose to my own eyes. Standing alone in the heat of the jungle, I wept until the tears coursed down my cheeks.

  Was I, indeed, on the earth at all? Or had I, in the

  darkness, somehow been transported to the moon or an

  even more distant celestial body?

  These were my wild thoughts as I stood with my back

  to my companion. And you may laugh as you read this,

  seated in your comfortable chair, but I assure you that

  to me at that moment it was no laughing matter. Indeed,

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  A T T A

  put yourself in my place; consider the succession of unbelievable experiences that had come to me; and tell me then that you would have felt differently. Where on this

  broad earth do drops of water five times as big as a man’s

  head hang suspended in the trees? Where does one find

  grotesque valleys such as I had seen, or huge ant-like

  creatures with men’s brains but with feelers projecting

  from their heads?

  Consider all this, I say; and then tell me if it is any

  wonder that I broke down and wept.

  I was recalled to myself by a touch on my arm. My

  companion had evidently seen that something was wrong

  and had approached me and was stroking my arm gently

  with his feelers. His kindness, his evident sympathy, went

  to my heart. I could have embraced him, outlandish and

  grotesque as he was. Obviously I had found one friend

  at least in this nightmare country, and the thought gave

  me fresh courage.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It will pass.”

  To this he replied with more gesticulations and such a

  succession of strange high-pitched words that finally even

  I had to smile at my weakness. With half a sigh I -put

  my hand on his shoulder and walked back to where my

  lance lay, shouldered it, and thus signified that I was

  ready once more to go on.

  For some two hours we pushed on again, over the same

  rugged, desert country, between the same clumps of

  queer trees, which grew now more thickly, now more

  sparsely, as far as the eye could reach.

  Several times, down the long colonnades, I caught

  glimpses in the distance of moving figures like that of my

  guide, but smaller and clad in black armor; and these always hastened away at our approach as if fearing attack.

  Once, too, a deep humming filled the air, far louder than

  the incessant hum and rattle of the swaying trees. It came

  near and then nearer and finally passed over our heads

  with the roar of a bomber, while its huge black shadow

  swept the boulder-strewn ground. My companion, how­

  A T T A

  31

  ever, paid no attention to these appearances, but kept

  steadily on until finally, in the center of an unusually

  dense grove of trees, he stopped and signified that we

  had reached our journey’s end.

  Before us, hidden from view on all sides by the crowding green trunks of the bamboolike woods, was a roughly spherical light brown wooden structure; at least, it had

  the grain and appearance of brown seasoned wood,

  though nowhere could I see any sign of joints or planks.

  Some twelve feet high, with an irregular surface marked

  by cracks like those in a dried mud marsh, it looked for

  all the world like a huge English walnut shell.

  I was in no mood for curiosity, however. Indeed, I

  was now far gone with hunger, and my weariness of both

  body and spirit was so great that I bestowed only a perfunctory glance even upon this new prodigy. Halfway up one side was a circular entrance, and up through this my

  companion now pulled himself, while I laid my lance

  against the irregular wall and with its aid climbed up

  after him.

  The inside, I saw, had been cleared out and was divided into two chambers: an upper one in which I now found myself under a low domelike roof, and a lower one

  apparently reached by a round hole in the floor. Down

  this hole my host had already disappeared. I leaned out

  the doorway, pulled up my lance and laid it on the

  floor, and sank down to await his return.

  To tell the truth, I no longer had much interest in my

  surroundings, or in life itself. I merely wished to eat and

  drive away the faintness that was assai
ling me. And the

  fact that my host had already so casually disappeared

  slightly irritated me.

  Consider my surprise, then, when presently he reappeared from the room beneath, carrying several whitish objects like huge mushrooms, which he gave to me, indicating by his gestures that they were good to eat. Without hesitation I bit into one, found it indeed of the consistency of a dried mushroom though with little taste,

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  A T T A

  and soon had finished it to the last crumb. It had a peculiarly satisfying after-flavor, I found. I tried another and another until my hunger was satisfied and I could

  eat no more. In the end I had eaten five.

  Then I lay back with a sigh of exhaustion and closed

  my eyes. Within five minutes, I think, I was asleep.

  Chapter 4

  How long I slept I cannot say, or if it were the next

  morning or the day after that my new companion waked

  me with another meal of his odd mushrooms. For of

  the two weeks that followed I have little remembrance

  now, except that my host’s leg healed rapidly, and that

  I myself achieved a measure of acceptance of a situation

  whose reality I could not deny, yet whose explanation

  was beyond me.

  Indeed, I think you will agree that the original mystery

  of my surroundings was now so doubly enhanced by the

  outlandish appearance of my new host that it was almost

  painful to consider. He lay nearly always at my elbow

  during those first nights, and, strive as I might to shut

  him out, there were few evenings when the nightmare

  implications of his presence did not rush at me and pin

  me down. For several, nights I could scarcely sleep at all,

  but sat at the doorway staring out at the moonlight,

  hoping that I might wake the next second and find myself back in the sunlight of the sunken garden.

  In these dark moments I arrived at only one conclusion: the sun still rose and set, the length of night and day seemed unchanged, the stars appeared precisely as

  A T T A

  33

  before, and, despite the character of the country and its

  storms, summer still continued. Therefore the presumption was that I was still on earth and in a latitude closely resembling the one in which I had been so incontinently

  struck down.

  Right or wrong, this simple deduction temporarily

  satisfied my desperate need for at least one basic, familiar

  fact; and for many days it was tire one rock to which I

  clung.

  Meanwhile neither my new host nor I ever ventured

  far from our house; so that most of my time was spent

  in the little grove at our doorway, where I practised with

  my lance. It was too heavy to throw, I found, but I soon

  attained to a certain proficiency in using it as an old-

  fashioned pike, and this ability stood me in good stead

  later on.

  My companion took little interest in this, but devoted

  most of his time to our larder. The food supply seemed

  to be, and in fact was, practically inexhaustible; for I

  found that the strange mushrooms that served as both

  meat and drink were nothing less than a kind of edible

  plant that my host cultivated in the lower room of our

  home. Every morning, in spite of his strapped leg, he

  would make a dozen or more trips into the grove, climbing the trees with surprising agility and cutting off certain long leaves with his beak. These he would bring back to the house, and when, with my help, he had laid

  them out and shredded them into small pieces, he would

  take them into the cellar and spread them over the mushroom plants, where they acted as a sort of fertilizer; for in a surprisingly short time a fresh crop would appear.

  Tasks such as these took up much of our day; but we

  both sat long over meals, he never worked at midday,

  and if it rained he did not go out at all. Thus we spent

  much time together. As a result we gradually learned

  to communicate roughly with each other, and after a

  number of ridiculous attempts we managed to identify

  and name, to our mutual satisfaction, most of the im­

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  A T T A

  mediate objects around us. This achievement we followed with a similar identification of our common movements and actions—“eat” and “good,” I remember, were among our first successes— and here, somewhat to my

  surprise, I found my new friend remarkably intelligent

  Atta—for that, I found, was his name—even got to understand much of my language before I understood his; more, I think, from the inflection of my voice than the

  actual words, for he could never learn actually to speak

  English. Yet I had by far the greater curiosity and initiative, and the end result was that our conversation, such as it was, came gradually to be carried on in his language, which consisted of a combination of complicated gestures with a high-pitched use of words—I am at a loss

  to describe it—that I found very difficult to reproduce.

  Indeed, during all our months together I never learned

  to speak it without conscious effort. And Atta himself

  had a great deal of difficulty with certain English words

  —my own name, Brokell, among them.

  Nevertheless both he and I made a sincere attempt to

  understand each other, and even during those first few

  weeks our ability to communicate with each other progressed remarkably; so much so that eventually I learned from him a number of things that both surprised and

  confounded me.

  The jungle country about us was strange to him too, it

  appeared, though his ignorance of it was not on the

  same plane as mine. It belonged to no one in particular,

  he said, though it was infested at the moment by wandering bands of savages who were like him in general appearance and spoke a rude variation of the same language, but were of a rather lower type of civilization. He had never seen anyone like me before, and my clothing,

  white skin, and yellow hair were a constant source of

  wonder to him. Yellow, in particular, was a color he

  liked.

  In his own country, he said, he was one of the leaders

  of a populous city long established, which in the far dis­

  A T T A

  35

  tant past his ancestors had conquered. He himself was of

  the present ruling class, a circumstance that had allowed

  him to go out on a scouting expedition. Unfortunately he’

  had not suspected the presence of hostile invaders. His

  five companions had been killed in an ambush, and he

  alone had escaped, preserving his life by the discovery

  of this odd house.

  His first experience in solitary living he had found unexpectedly pleasant—“disturbingly pleasant” were his exact words—except for the continued presence of the

  unexpected roving bands of savages who had killed his

  companions and who still appeared continually and prevented him from making any attempt to get home. Nevertheless he had managed to explore some of the surrounding country. His one error, he admitted, had been a failure to recognize how the sandstone boulders on the hills had been undermined by the recent storm. This failure

  had led him into the plight in which I had discovered

  him. Without my help, he said, he should inevitably have

  perished of hunger or fallen victim to some wild beast

  or to a passing party of one of the invading tribes; some

>   of which last, he warned me, were not to be underestim ated, being both ferocious and skilful fighters, particularly when they were on a foray to capture slaves, which was their main object in waging war. Such was the substance of what Atta told me in snatches during our first weeks—facts both stunning in kind and highly unsatisfactory in content.

  For my new friend seemed to find sustained conversation or any continued intercourse a heavy burden, which he laid down as soon as he could. His disinclination afterward wore off; as was subsequently proved in different and tragic circumstances. But it would be idle to deny

  that in the beginning he was highly averse to telling me

  any connected story at all about himself.

  Indeed, until I had known him at least a month he

  never asked me a personal question or displayed the

  slightest interest in the fact that I was obviously of a dif­

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  A T T A

  ferent race and from a different world. He appeared to

  have almost no curiosity and to view the ordinary give-

  and-take of a personal relationship with coldness and a

  touch of suspicion. Only on subjects like enemies, and

  fighting did he seem to have no inhibitions, and in such

  contexts he could be eloquent.

  In the beginning, for instance, my obviously soft and

  unprotected skin elicited many shakings of the head from

  him, and he had no hesitation in expressing the lowest

  possible opinion of my clothes, which he looked on solely

  as a very inferior kind of armor. Even his own tough

  hide, he said, with its undeniably armorlike quality, was

  not always proof against enemy attacks. Many savages

  had discovered the value of poison, and sometimes a very

  slight wound could result in death. In the circumstances

  he did not see how I had survived so far or could continue to do so except by great good luck.

  He said all this in an impersonal, almost professional

  manner, as if it were none of his business, yet was a subject he understood. But it had more than the ring of truth in it; and it warned me that mere practical survival

  was still my first necessity in my new world. Thus his interest in my personal welfare had a practical result.

  Indeed, now that I look back upon it, this first faint

 

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