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Updated: June 18, 2025
The space man moaned softly and hunched his shoulders as if he struggled vainly to tear loose from bonds. "He thinks that he is still prisoner," observed Lur. "For him life begins at the very point it ended even as it did for the turbi flowers. See now he awakens." The eyelids rose slowly, as if the man hated to see what he must look upon. Then, as he sighted Varta and Lur, his eyes went wide.
She nodded in answer to that unvoiced question Lur had sent into her brain, and turned toward the dark cavern which was the mouth of Asti's last dwelling place. Once, more than a thousand years before when the walls of Memphir were young, Asti had lived among men below. But in the richness and softness which was trading Memphir, empire of empires, Asti found no place.
Gaston was more impressed than ever as he stood too, béret in hand, looking around the little saloon, so oddly, yet so comfortably fitted out with rugs and skins. Presently the Lur reappeared through the reed portière, which aroused the Brazilian from his abstraction. He filled the two glasses himself, waving his attendant out of the cabin, and handed one to Gaston.
And now the moon, not the sun, cast its paler glitter between the high dark banks of the stream. It was a keen-eared young Lur who first heard afar the pant of the mysterious jinni. Before he or his companions descried the motor-boat, however, Gaston, rounding a sharp curve above the island of Umm-un-Nakhl, caught sight of the sweeps of the barge flashing in the moonlight.
But of those who had once been at home there, there remained no trace. Lur, having given one glance to the furnishings, was prowling about the far end of the cabin uncertainly, and now he voiced his uneasiness. "There is something beyond, something which once had life " Varta crowded up to him.
"At least we may discover what lies within it," Lur had his own share of curiosity. "How? The two of us can not draw that out of the water!" "No, but we can enter into it!" Varta fingered the folds of the hood on her shoulders.
Even Varta could not follow the subtile waves sent forth in the quick examination and reconnoitering, nor could she understand all of the conversation which resulted. For the man from the ancient ship answered in speech aloud, sharp harsh sounds of no meaning. It was only after repeated instruction from Lur that he began to frame his messages in his mind, clumsily and disconnectedly.
Varta threw back her hood and breathed deeply of the air which was not manufactured by the wizardry of the lizard skin and Lur sat panting, his nostril flaps open. It was he who spied the spring on the mountain side above, a spring of water uncontaminated by the strange life of the lake. They both dragged themselves there to drink deeply. Varta returned to the lake shore reluctantly.
Varta seized eagerly upon globes of blood red fruit which she recognized as delicacies which had been cultivated in the Temple gardens, while Lur went hunting into the fringes of the jungle, there dining on prey so easily caught as to be judged devoid of fear.
At the sound of the lur every afternoon the cows turned their grazing heads towards home, and, on their arrival, each was given a pat and a handful of salt. Then they went quietly into their stalls. It was quite late that evening before the milk had been strained into the wooden platters and placed in rows on the shelves in the milk house. Hr.
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