Pellucidar | Page 7

crust. just a trifle less than seventy-two hours after our departure into the sands of the Sahara, we broke through the surface of Pellucidar.
Fortune once again favored me by the slightest of margins, for when I opened the door in the prospector's outer jacket I saw that we had missed coming up through the bottom of an ocean by but a few hundred yards.
The aspect of the surrounding country was entirely unfamiliar to me--I had no conception of precisely where I was upon the one hundred and twenty-four million square miles of Pellucidar's vast land surface.
The perpetual midday sun poured down its torrid rays from zenith, as it had done since the beginning of Pellucidarian time--as it would continue to do to the end of it. Before me, across the wide sea, the weird, horizonless seascape folded gently upward to meet the sky until it lost itself to view in the azure depths of distance far above the level of my eyes.
How strange it looked! How vastly different from the flat and puny area of the circumscribed vision of the dweller upon the outer crust!
I was lost. Though I wandered ceaselessly throughout a lifetime, I might never discover the whereabouts of my former friends of this strange and savage world. Never again might I see dear old Perry, nor Ghak the Hairy One, nor Dacor the Strong One, nor that other infinitely precious one--my sweet and noble mate, Dian the Beautiful!
But even so I was glad to tread once more the surface of Pellucidar. Mysterious and terrible, grotesque and savage though she is in many of her aspects, I can not but love her. Her very savagery appealed to me, for it is the savagery of unspoiled Nature.
The magnificence of her tropic beauties enthralled me. Her mighty land areas breathed unfettered free-dom.
Her untracked oceans, whispering of virgin wonders unsullied by the eye of man, beckoned me out upon their restless bosoms.
Not for an instant did I regret the world of my nativity. I was in Pellucidar. I was home. And I was content.
As I stood dreaming beside the giant thing that had brought me safely through the earth's crust, my travel-ing companion, the hideous Mahar, emerged from the interior of the prospector and stood beside me. For a long time she remained motionless.
What thoughts were passing through the convolutions of her reptilian brain?
I do not know.
She was a member of the dominant race of Pel-lucidar. By a strange freak of evolution her kind had first developed the power of reason in that world of anomalies.
To her, creatures such as I were of a lower order. As Perry had discovered among the writings of her kind in the buried city of Phutra, it was still an open question among the Mahars as to whether man pos-sessed means of intelligent communication or the power of reason.
Her kind believed that in the center of all-pervading solidity there was a single, vast, spherical cavity, which was Pellucidar. This cavity had been left there for the sole purpose of providing a place for the creation and propagation of the Mahar race. Everything within it had been put there for the uses of the Mahar.
I wondered what this particular Mahar might think now. I found pleasure in speculating upon just what the effect had been upon her of passing through the earth's crust, and coming out into a world that one of even less intelligence than the great Mahars could easily see was a different world from her own Pel-lucidar.
What had she thought of the outer world's tiny sun?
What had been the effect upon her of the moon and myriad stars of the clear African nights?
How had she explained them?
With what sensations of awe must she first have watched the sun moving slowly across the heavens to disappear at last beneath the western horizon, leaving in his wake that which the Mahar had never before witnessed--the darkness of night? For upon Pellucidar there is no night. The stationary sun hangs forever in the center of the Pellucidarian sky--directly overhead.
Then, too, she must have been impressed by the wondrous mechanism of the prospector which had bored its way from world to world and back again. And that it had been driven by a rational being must also have occurred to her.
Too, she bad seen me conversing with other men upon the earth's surface. She had seen the arrival of the caravan of books and arms, and ammunition, and the balance of the heterogeneous collection which I had crammed into the cabin of the iron mole for trans-portation to Pellucidar.
She had seen all these evidences of a civilization and brain-power transcending in scientific achieve-ment anything that her race had produced; nor once had she seen a creature of her own kind.
There could have been but a single deduction