Pellucidar | Page 7

was completed, and I was ready for departure.
For some time I hesitated to take the Mahar back with me. She had been docile and quiet
ever since she had discovered herself virtually a prisoner aboard the "iron mole." It had
been, of course, impossible for me to communicate with her since she had no auditory
organs and I no knowledge of her fourth-dimension, sixth-sense method of
communication.
Naturally I am kind-hearted, and so I found it beyond me to leave even this hateful and
repulsive thing alone in a strange and hostile world. The result was that when I entered
the iron mole I took her with me.
That she knew that we were about to return to Pellucidar was evident, for immediately
her manner changed from that of habitual gloom that had pervaded her, to an almost
human expression of contentment and delight.
Our trip through the earth's crust was but a repetition of my two former journeys between
the inner and the outer worlds. This time, however, I imagine that we must have
maintained a more nearly perpendicular course, for we accomplished the journey in a few
min-utes' less time than upon the occasion of my first journey through the
five-hundred-mile 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