Dragon's Egg by S R Langley

Author:S R Langley [Langley, S R]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of SoRoL Publishing
Published: 2020-03-13T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11:

THE RISE AND FALL OF RATTUS MAGNUS.

Roger made his way down, once again sitting on his haunches, and again doing what could best be described as an undignified ‘bum-shuffle.’ But as there was no one there to see him, his slow and ungainly progress into the cavernous underground realms went by unremarked.

Every now and again there would be another cry of help from Mary, as well as further acrid billows of pungent smoke, blowing up from the depths below. Roger was by now extremely dirty, being black with soot from head to toe. And as he shuffled on further down the slope, he gave occasional cries of encouragement for Mary’s imminent rescue, shouting out, “I’m coming, Mary, hold on. It’ll be O.K. I’m coming!” as he shuffled, inch by cautious inch, down the slanting floor of rock, moving ever deeper beneath the tangled roots of the Smoking Tree.

“I just pray to Potty Pythagoras, this slope goes all the way to where Mary actually is,” he muttered wryly to himself.

As he continued though, the smoke was again getting thicker and billowing all about him. It came on in gusts and was getting in his clothes and seeping into his skin. But what was worse, even with the hanky over his face, it was getting into his eyes too and making them sting and stream constantly. This made it very difficult for him to see anything clearly at all. His throat felt like a soot-caked chimney-flue in need of a good sweep. He started coughing and spluttering once again as another belch of smoke hit him full in the face.

“Just where was all this smoke coming from?” he wondered.

He rested awhile and let the coughing subside. Then he pulled out another spotted hankie, discarding the old one, and tied it around his mouth and nose again. He wiped the mix of soot and sweat from his eyes with another hanky and carried on his bum-shuffling way down the rocky slope, praying to all the great Brains of Science that he would make it to Mary.

He now noticed there was an area just to his left that had several old roots poking up through the sloping floor there. And some of those roots contained several strange, ball-shaped objects. They clustered together amongst the root-ends, like leathery, black footballs.

Now what on Erf can they be? he thought.

He sidled his way over to them and played the flickering beam of his torch over the roots. He saw how each ball was segmented, like a rolled-up Armadillo, and they were in fact at least three times the size of ordinary footballs. But also, they weren’t really balls at all. As he looked, one started to uncurl itself, unrolling and showing what its true nature was.

Seemingly the light had disturbed it and Roger now saw a huge Woodlouse-like creature. Its small, stubby legs were wriggling madly and its two curving antennae were twitching and turning towards him. It now fully unrolled itself, found its footing and started scuttling away.

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