The Adventure Novella by Robert Moore Williams & Johnston McCulley & Murray Leinster & Manly Wade Wellman

Author:Robert Moore Williams & Johnston McCulley & Murray Leinster & Manly Wade Wellman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: adventure, prehistory, fantasy, war, action
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2016-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

THE GREAT CIRCLE, by Henry S. Whitehead

Originally appeared in Strange Tales of Mystery and Terror, June 1932.

The transition from those hours-on-end of looking down on the dark-green jungle of virgin forest was startling in its abruptness. We had observed this one break in the monotonous terrain, of course, well before we were directly over it. Then Wilkes, the pilot, slowed and began to circle. I think he felt it, the element I have referred to as startling; for, even from the first—before we landed, I mean—there was something—an atmosphere—of strangeness about this vast circular space entirely bare of trees with the exception of the giant which crowned the very slight elevation at its exact center.

I know at any rate that I felt it; and Dr. Pelletier told me afterward that it had seemed to lay hold on him like a quite definite physical sensation. Wilkes did not circle very long. There was no need for it and I think he continued the process, as though looking for a landing place, as long as he did, on account of that eeriness rather than because of any necessity for prolonged observation.

At last, almost, I thought, as though reluctantly, he shut off his engine—“cut his gun” as airmen express it—and brought the plane down to an easy landing on the level greensward within a hundred yards of the great tree standing there in its majestic, lonely grandeur. The great circular space about it was like a billiard table, like an English deer park. The great tree looked, too, for all the world like an ash, itself an anomaly here in the unchartered wilderness of Quintana Roo.

We sat there in the plane and looked about us. On every side, for a radius of more than half a mile from the center where we were, the level grassy plain stretched away in every direction and down an almost imperceptible gradual slope to the horizon of dense forest which encircled it.

There was not a breath of air stirring. No blade of the fine short grass moved. The tree, dominating everything, its foliage equally motionless, drew our gaze. We all looked at it at the same time. It was Wilkes the pilot who spoke first, his outstretched arm indicating the tree.

“Might be a thousand years old!” said Wilkes, in a hushed voice. There was something about this place which made all of us, I think, lower our voices.

“Or even two thousand,” remarked Pelletier.

We had taken off, that morning in 192—, at ten o’clock, from Belize. It was now one o’clock in the afternoon. We had flown due north for the first eighty miles or so, first over the blue waters of landlocked Chetumal Bay, leaving Ambergris Cay on our right, and then Xkalok, the southeastern point of Quintana Roo; then over dry land, leaving the constricted northern point of the bay behind where parallel 19, north latitude, crosses the 88th meridian of longitude. Thence still due north until we had turned west at Santa Cruz de Bravo,

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