Tanar of Pellucidar p-3 Read online

  Tanar of Pellucidar

  ( Pellucidar - 3 )

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Tanar of Pellucidar

  by

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  PROLOGUE

  JASON GRIDLEY is a radio bug. Had he not been, this story never would have been written. Jason is twenty-three and scandalously good-looking—too good-looking to be a bug of any sort. As a matter of fact, he does not seem buggish at all—just a normal, sane, young American, who knows a great deal about many things in addition to radio; aeronautics, for example, and golf, and tennis, and polo.

  But this is not Jason's story—he is only an incident—an important incident in my life that made this story possible, and so, with a few more words of explanation, we shall leave Jason to his tubes and waves and amplifiers, concerning which he knows everything and I nothing.

  Jason is an orphan with an income, and after he graduated from Stanford, he came down and bought a couple of acres at Tarzana, and that is how and when I met him.

  While he was building he made my office his headquarters and was often in my study and afterward I returned the compliment by visiting him in his new "lab," as he calls it—a quite large room at the rear of his home, a quiet, restful room in a quiet, restful house of the Spanish-American farm type—or we rode together in the Santa Monica Mountains in the cool air of early morning.

  Jason is experimenting with some new principle of radio concerning which the less I say the better it will be for my reputation, since I know nothing whatsoever about it and am likely never to.

  Perhaps I am too old, perhaps I am too dumb, perhaps I am just not interested—I prefer to ascribe my abysmal and persistent ignorance of all things pertaining to radio to the last state; that of disinterestedness; it salves my pride.

  I do know this, however, because Jason has told me, that the idea he is playing with suggests an entirely new and unsuspected—well, let us call it wave.

  He says the idea was suggested to him by the vagaries of static and in groping around in search of some device to eliminate this he discovered in the ether an undercurrent that operated according to no previously known scientific laws.

  At his Tarzana home he has erected a station and a few miles away, at the back of my ranch, another. Between these stations we talk to one another through some strange, ethereal medium that seems to pass through all other waves and all other stations, unsuspected and entirely harmless—so harmless is it that it has not the slightest effect upon Jason's regular set, standing in the same room and receiving over the same aerial.

  But this, which is not very interesting to any one except Jason, is all by the way of getting to the beginning of the amazing narrative of the adventures of Tanar of Pellucidar.

  Jason and I were sitting in his "lab" one evening discussing, as we often did, innumerable subjects, from "cabbages to kings," and coming back, as Jason usually did, to the Gridley Wave, which is what we have named it.

  Much of the time Jason kept on his earphones, than which there is no greater discourager of conversation. But this does not irk me as much as most of the conversations one has to listen to through life. I like long silences and my own thoughts.

  Presently, Jason removed the headpiece. "It is enough to drive a fellow to drink!" he exclaimed.

  "What?" I asked.

  "I am getting that same stuff again," he said. "I can hear voices, very faintly, but, unmistakably, human voices. They are speaking a language unknown to man. It is maddening."

  "Mars, perhaps," I suggested, "or Venus."

  He knitted his brows and then suddenly smiled one of his quick smiles. "Or Pellucidar."

  I shrugged.

  "Do you know, Admiral," he said (he calls me Admiral because of a yachting cap I wear at the beach), "that when I was a kid I used to believe every word of those crazy stories of yours about Mars and Pellucidar. The inner world at the earth's core was as real to me as the High Sierras, the San Joaquin Valley , or the Golden Gate, and I felt that I knew the twin cities of Helium better than I did Los Angeles .

  "I saw nothing improbable at all in that trip of David Innes and old man Perry through the earth's crust to Pellucidar. Yes, sir, that was all gospel to me when I was a kid."

  "And now you are twenty-three and know that it can't be true," I said, with a smile.

  "You are trying to tell me it is true, are you?" he demanded, laughing.

  "I never have told any one that it is true," I replied; "I let people think what they think, but I reserve the right to do likewise."

  "Why, you know perfectly well that it would be impossible for that iron mole of Perry's to have penetrated five hundred miles of the earth's crust, you know there is no inner world peopled by strange reptiles and men of the stone age, you know there is no Emperor of Pellucidar." Jason was becoming excited, but his sense of humor came to our rescue and he laughed.

  "I like to believe that there is a Dian the Beautiful," I said.

  "Yes," he agreed, "but I am sorry you killed off Hooja the Sly One. He was a corking villain."

  "There are always plenty of villains," I reminded him.

  "They help the girls to keep their 'figgers' and their school girl complexions," he said.

  "How?" I asked.

  "The exercise they get from being pursued."

  "You are making fun of me," I reproached him, "but remember, please, that I am but a simple historian. If damsels flee and villains pursue I must truthfully record the fact."

  "Baloney!" he exclaimed in the pure university English of America.

  Jason replaced his headpiece and I returned to the perusal of the narrative of an ancient liar, who should have made a fortune out of the credulity of book readers, but seems not to have. Thus we sat for some time.

  Presently Jason removed his earphones and turned toward me. "I was getting music," he said; "strange, weird music, and then suddenly there came loud shouts and it seemed that I could hear blows struck and there were screams and the sound of shots."

  "Perry, you know, was experimenting with gunpowder down there below, in Pellucidar," I reminded Jason, with…a grin; but he was inclined to be serious and did not respond in kind.

  "You know, of course," he said, "that there really has been a theory of an inner world for many years."

  "Yes," I replied, "I have read works expounding and defending such a theory."

  "It supposes polar openings leading into the interior of the earth," said Jason.

  "And it is substantiated by many seemingly irrefutable scientific facts," I reminded him—"open polar sea, warmer water farthest north, tropical vegetation floating southward from the polar regions, the northern lights, the magnetic pole, the persistent stories of the Eskimos that they are descended from a race that came from a warm country far to the north."

  "I'd like to make a try for one of the polar openings," mused Jason as he replaced the earphones.

  Again there was a long silence, broken at last by "a sharp exclamation from Jason. He pushed an extra headpiece toward me.

  "Listen!" he exclaimed.

  As I adjusted the earphones I heard that which we had never before received on the Gridley Wave—code! No wonder that Jason Gridley was excited, since there was no station on earth, other than his own, attuned to the Gridley Wave.

  Code! What could it mean? I was torn by conflicting emotions—to tear off the earphones and discuss this amazing thing with Jason, and to keep them on and listen.

  I am not what one might call an expert in the intricacies of code, but I had no difficulty in understanding the simple signal of two letters, repeated in groups of three, with a pause after each group: "D.I., D.I., D.I.," pause; "D.I., D.I., D.I.," pause.

&nbs
p; I glanced up at Jason. His eyes, filled with puzzled questioning, met mine, as though to ask, what does it mean?

  The signals ceased and Jason touched his own key, sending his initials, "J.G., J.G., J.G." in the same grouping that we had received the D.I. signal. Almost instantly he was interrupted—you could feel the excitement of the sender.

  "D.I., D.I., D.I., Pellucidar," rattled against our eardrums like machine gun fire. Jason and I sat in dumb amazement, staring at one another.

  "It is a hoax!" I exclaimed, and Jason, reading my lips, shook his head.

  "How can it be a hoax?" he asked. "There is no other station on earth equipped to send or to receive over the Gridley Wave, so there can be no means of perpetrating such a hoax."

  Our mysterious station was on the air again: "If you get this, repeat my signal," and he signed off with "D.I., D.I., D.I."

  "That would be David Innes," mused Jason.

  "Emperor of Pellucidar," I added.

  Jason sent the message, "D.I., D.I., D.I.," followed by, "what station is this," and "who is sending?"

  "This is the Imperial Observatory at Greenwich , Pellucidar; Abner Perry sending. Who are you?"

  "This is the private experimental laboratory of Jason Gridley, Tarzana , California ; Gridley sending," replied Jason.

  "I want to get into communication with Edgar Rice Burroughs; do you know him?"

  "He is sitting here, listening in with me," replied Jason.

  "Thank God, if that is true, but how am I to know that it is true?" demanded Perry.

  I hastily scribbled a note to Jason: "Ask him if he recalls the fire in, his first gunpowder factory and that the building would have been destroyed had they not extinguished the fire by shoveling his gunpowder onto it?"

  Jason grinned as he read the note, and sent it.

  "It was unkind of David to tell of that," came back the reply, "but now I know that Burroughs is indeed there, as only he could have known of that incident. I have a long message for him. Are you ready?"

  "Yes," replied Jason. "Then stand by."

  And this is the message that Abner Perry sent from the bowels of the earth; from The Empire of Pellucidar.

  INTRODUCTION

  IT MUST be some fifteen years since David Innes and I broke through the inner surface of the earth's crust and emerged into savage Pellucidar, but when a stationary sun hangs eternally at high noon and there is no restless moon and there are no stars, time is measureless and so it may have been a hundred years ago or one. Who knows? Of course, since David returned to earth and brought back many of the blessings of civilization we have had the means to measure time, but the people did not like it. They found that it put restrictions and limitations upon them that they never had felt before and they came to hate it and ignore it until David, in the goodness of his heart, issued an edict abolishing time in Pellucidar.

  It seemed a backward step to me, but I am resigned now, and, perhaps, happier, for when all is said and done, time is a hard master, as you of the outer world, who are slaves of the sun, would be forced to admit were you to give the matter thought.

  Here, in Pellucidar, we eat when we are hungry, we sleep when we are tired, we set out upon journeys when we leave and we arrive at our destinations when we get there; nor are we old because the earth has circled the sun seventy times since our birth, for we do not know that this has occurred.

  Perhaps I have been here fifteen years, but what matter. When I came I knew nothing of radio—my researches and studies were along other lines—but when David came back from the outer world he brought many scientific works and from these I learned all that I know of radio, which has been enough to permit me to erect two successful stations; one here at Greenwich and one at the capital of The Empire of Pellucidar.

  But, try as I would, I never could get anything from the outer world, and after a while I gave up trying, convinced that the earth's crust was impervious to radio.

  In fact we used our stations but seldom, for, after all, Pellucidar is only commencing to emerge from the stone age, and in the economy of the stone age there seems to be no crying need for radio.

  But sometimes I played with it and upon several occasions I thought that I heard voices and other sounds that were not of Pellucidar. They were too faint to be more than vague suggestions of intriguing possibilities, but yet they did suggest something most alluring, and so I set myself to making changes and adjustments until this wonderful thing that has happened but now was made possible.

  And my delight in being able to talk with you is second only to my relief in being able to appeal to you for help. David is in trouble. He is a captive in the north, or what he and I call north, for there are no points of compass known to Pellucidarians.

  I have heard from him, however. He has sent me a message and in it he suggests a startling theory that would make aid from the outer crust possible if—but first let me tell you the whole story; the story of the disaster that befell David Innes and what led up to it and then you will be in a better position to judge as to the practicability of sending succor to David from the outer crust.

  The whole thing dates from our victories over the Mahars, the once dominant race of Pellucidar. When, with our well-organized armies, equipped with firearms and other weapons unknown to the Mahars or their gorilla-like mercenaries, the Sagoths, we defeated the reptilian monsters and drove their slimy hordes from the confines of The Empire, the human race of the inner world for the first time in its history took its rightful place among the orders of creation.

  But our victories laid the foundation for the disaster that has overwhelmed us.

  For a while there was no Mahar within the boundaries of any of the kingdoms that constitute The Empire of Pellucidar; but presently we had word of them here and there—small parties living upon the shores of sea or lake far from the haunts of man.

  They gave us no trouble—their old power had crumbled beyond recall; their Sagoths were now numbered among the regiments of The Empire; the Mahars had no longer the means to harm us; yet we did not want them among us. They are eaters of human flesh and we had no assurance that lone hunters would be safe from their voracious appetites.

  We wanted them to be gone and so David sent a force against them, but with orders to treat with them first and attempt to persuade them to leave The Empire peacefully rather than embroil themselves in another war that might mean total extermination.

  Sagoths accompanied the expedition, for they alone of all the creatures of Pellucidar can converse in the sixth sense, fourth-dimension language of the Mahars.

  The story that the expedition brought back was rather pitiful and aroused David's sympathies, as stories of persecution and unhappiness always do.

  After the Mahars had been driven from The Empire they had sought a haven where they might live in peace. They assured us that they had accepted the inevitable in a spirit of philosophy and entertained no thoughts of renewing their warfare against the human race or in any way attempting to win back their lost ascendancy.

  Far away upon the shores of a mighty ocean, where there were no signs of man, they settled in peace, but their peace was not for long.

  A great ship came, reminding the Mahars of the first ships they had seen—the ships that David and I had built—the first ships, as far as we knew, that ever had sailed the silent seas of Pellucidar.

  Naturally it was a surprise to us to learn that there was a race within the inner world sufficiently far advanced to be able to build ships, but there was another surprise in store for us. The Mahars assured us that these people possessed firearms and that because of their ships and their firearms they were fully as formidable as we and they were much more ferocious; killing for the pure sport of slaughter.

  After the first ship had sailed away the Mahars thought they might be allowed to live in peace, but this dream was short lived, as presently the first ship returned and with it were many others manned by thousands of bloodthirsty enemies against whose weapons the great reptil
es had little or no defense.

  Seeking only escape from man, the Mahars left their new home and moved back a short distance toward The Empire, but now their enemies seemed bent only upon persecution; they hunted them, and when they found them the Mahars were again forced to fall back before the ferocity of their continued attacks.

  Eventually they took refuge within the boundaries of The Empire, and scarcely had David's expedition to them returned with its report when we had definite proof of the veracity of their tale through messages from our northernmost frontier bearing stories of invasion by a strange, savage race of white men. Frantic was the message from Goork, King of Thuria, whose far-flung frontier stretches beyond the Land of Awful Shadow .

  Some of his hunters had been surprised and all but a few killed or captured by the invaders.

  He had sent warriors, then, against them, but these, too, had met a like fate, being greatly outnumbered, and so he sent a runner to David begging the Emperor to rush troops to his aid.

  Scarcely had the first runner arrived when another came, bearing tidings of the capture and sack of the principal town of the Kingdom of Thuria; and then a third arrived from the commander of the invaders demanding that David come with tribute or they would destroy his country and slay the prisoners they held as hostages.

  In reply David dispatched Tanar, son of Ghak, to demand the release of all prisoners and the departure of the invaders.

  Immediately runners were sent to the nearest kingdoms of The Empire and ere Tanar had reached the Land of Awful Shadow , ten thousand warriors were marching along the same trail to enforce the demands of the Emperor and drive the savage foe from Pellucidar.

  As David approached the Land of Awful Shadow that lies beneath Pellucidar's mysterious satellite, a great column of smoke was observable in the horizonless distance ahead.

  It was not necessary to urge the tireless warriors to greater speed, for all who saw guessed that the invaders had taken another village and put it to the torch.