Tarzan: Return to Pal-Ul-Don by Will Murray

Author:Will Murray [Murray, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Adventure, action and adventure
ISBN: 9781618272096
Google: r8HhsgEACAAJ
Amazon: B010EJB26M
Goodreads: 25803233
Publisher: Altus Press
Published: 2015-05-30T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-Three

Gunshots

THE SHARP report of a gunshot split the night.

The British Military Intelligence officer code-named Ilex jerked to her feet at the unexpected man-made thunder. She did not know which—or if any—of her crew had survived the downing of the British transport airplane, but it was reasonable to assume that at least one had.

That gunshot would unquestionably be one of them discharging his service revolver.

Ilex waited for a second gunshot, which if properly spaced from the first, would signify that the timed reports constituted a signal. After a few minutes, it came. This enabled her to fix in a general way the location from which the noise originated.

She started in that direction. Unavoidably, Ilex could not walk in a straight line for very far, for the arrangement of trees in this part of the forest was not conducive to walking in straight lines. She had to wend her way around stands of cane and bamboo, and foliage-choked groves where trees had been growing wild for untold years, with no one to chop them down or otherwise clear them.

Accordingly, when a tree grew old and rotted, it became like the great red barns of the American Middle West, which are allowed to sag until their roofs and rafters begin caving in upon themselves. So it was that this portion of the forest was blocked here and there by lifeless trees, both greater and lesser, which had succumbed to death in one way or another, the rotting deadwood falling over and blocking the way, or becoming lodged amid the branches of other, hardier survivors.

It was necessary to duck under some of these half-toppled giants, crawl over others, or simply, where no other recourse presented itself, to walk around these natural obstacles of the unchecked primeval wilderness.

In this inefficient fashion did Ilex pick her way through the forest, feeling at times that she was on a dead reckoning toward the sound of the gunshots. In other, less certain, moments she became half-convinced that she had wandered severely off course.

Such was the weird terrain of primordial Pal-ul-don by night.

After a time, Ilex produced her own service revolver and was reminded that she was disappointingly low on shells. Nevertheless, this was an urgent emergency, so she expended one by firing it upward and at an angle, so the round, achieving its maximum height, did not fall back to earth and land on her head with possibly destructive results.

A few moments later, there came three evenly-spaced answering shots.

Ilex redirected her course toward that ugly noise, welcome as it was. She plodded along for approximately a kilometer, encountering no one or nothing of import when, while circling yet another fallen giant, she walked along grassy ground that felt unusually spongy.

This caused the barefoot woman to slow down in an excess of caution but, since it was the only path before her, she doggedly pressed on.

When the ground caved in under her feet, Ilex was caught entirely by surprise.

She landed in a heap, at the bottom of a sizable pit, and in the deeper dark, ghostly white forms moved with an insect-like nervousness.

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