All Story Magazine, December 1913 — page 144: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

854 They had eaten of this marvelous fruit which nature concentrates within the hard shell of the sorapus nut, and having eaten had cast the husk over- board. It could have come from no others than the party I sought. Quickly I abandoned all thought of the left-hand passage, and a moment later had turned into the right. The stream soon widened, and recurring areas of phosphorescent rock lighted my way. I made good time, but was con- vinced that I was nearly a day behind those I was tracking. Neither Woola nor I had eaten since the previous day, but in so far as he was concerned it mattered but little, since practically all the animals of the dead sea bottoms of Mars are able to go for incredible periods without either food or water. Nor did I suffer. The water of the river was sweet and cold, for it was unpolluted by decaying bodies—unlike the Iss—and as for food, why the mere thought that I was nearing my beloved princess raised me above every material want. As I proceeded the river became narrower and the current swift and turbulent—so swift in fact that it was with difficulty that I forced my craft upward at all. I could not have been making to exceed a hundred yards an hour when, at a bend, I was confront- ed by a series of rapids through which the river foamed and boiled at a ter- rific rate. My heart sank within me. ‘The so- rapus-nut shell had proved a_ false prophet, and, after all, my intuition had been correct—it was the left-hand channel that I should have followed. Had I been a woman ‘I should have wept. At my right was a great, slow- moving eddy that circled far beneath the cliff's overhanging side, and to rest my tired muscles before turning back I let my boat drift into its em- brace. I was almost prostrated by disap- pointment. It would mean another half-day’s loss of time to retrace my THE ALL-STORY MAGAZINE. way and take the only passage that yet remained unexplored. What fate had led me to select from three possible avenues the two that were wrong? As the lazy current of the eddy car- ried me slowly about the periphery of the watery circle my boat twice touched the rocky side of the river in the dark recess beneath the cliff. <A’ third time it struck, gently as it had before, but the contact resulted in a different sound — the sound of wood scraping upon wood. In an instant I was on the alert, for there could be no wood within that buried river that had not been man brought. Almost coincidently with my first apprehension of the noise my hand shot out across the boat’s side, and a second later I felt my fingers gripping the gunwale of another craft. As though turned to stone I sat in tense and rigid silence, straining my eyes into the utter darkness before me in an effort to discover if the boat were occupied. It was entirely possible that there might be men on board it who were still ignorant of my presence, for the boat was scraping gently against the rocks upon one side, so that the gentle touch of my boat upon the other easily could have gone unnoticed. Peer as I would I could not pene- trate the darkness, and then I listened intently for the sound of breathing near me; but except for the noise of the rapids, the soft scraping of the boats, and the lapping of the water at their sides I could distinguish no sound. A rope lay coiled in the bottom of my own craft. Very softly I gathered it up, and making one end fast to the bronze ring in the prow I stepped gin- gerly into the boat beside me. In one hand I grasped the rope, in the other my keen long-sword. For a full minute, perhaps, I stood motionless after entering the strange craft. It had rocked a trifle beneath my weight, but it had been the scra- ping of its side against the side of m comicloooks.com