



Produced by Judith Boss









PELLUCIDAR


By

Edgar Rice Burroughs





CONTENTS

CHAPTER

       PROLOGUE
    I  LOST ON PELLUCIDAR
   II  TRAVELING WITH TERROR
  III  SHOOTING THE CHUTES--AND AFTER
   IV  FRIENDSHIP AND TREACHERY
    V  SURPRISES
   VI  A PENDENT WORLD
  VII  FROM PLIGHT TO PLIGHT
 VIII  CAPTIVE
   IX  HOOJA'S CUTTHROATS APPEAR
    X  THE RAID ON THE CAVE-PRISON
   XI  ESCAPE
  XII  KIDNAPED!
 XIII  RACING FOR LIFE
  XIV  GORE AND DREAMS
   XV  CONQUEST AND PEACE




PROLOGUE

Several years had elapsed since I had found the opportunity to do any
big-game hunting; for at last I had my plans almost perfected for a
return to my old stamping-grounds in northern Africa, where in other
days I had had excellent sport in pursuit of the king of beasts.

The date of my departure had been set; I was to leave in two weeks.  No
schoolboy counting the lagging hours that must pass before the
beginning of "long vacation" released him to the delirious joys of the
summer camp could have been filled with greater impatience or keener
anticipation.

And then came a letter that started me for Africa twelve days ahead of
my schedule.

Often am I in receipt of letters from strangers who have found
something in a story of mine to commend or to condemn.  My interest in
this department of my correspondence is ever fresh.  I opened this
particular letter with all the zest of pleasurable anticipation with
which I had opened so many others.  The post-mark (Algiers) had aroused
my interest and curiosity, especially at this time, since it was
Algiers that was presently to witness the termination of my coming sea
voyage in search of sport and adventure.

Before the reading of that letter was completed lions and lion-hunting
had fled my thoughts, and I was in a state of excitement bordering upon
frenzy.

It--well, read it yourself, and see if you, too, do not find food for
frantic conjecture, for tantalizing doubts, and for a great hope.

Here it is:

DEAR SIR: I think that I have run across one of the most remarkable
coincidences in modern literature.  But let me start at the beginning:

I am, by profession, a wanderer upon the face of the earth.  I have no
trade--nor any other occupation.

My father bequeathed me a competency; some remoter ancestors lust to
roam.  I have combined the two and invested them carefully and without
extravagance.

I became interested in your story, At the Earth's Core, not so much
because of the probability of the tale as of a great and abiding wonder
that people should be paid real money for writing such impossible
trash.  You will pardon my candor, but it is necessary that you
understand my mental attitude toward this particular story--that you
may credit that which follows.

Shortly thereafter I started for the Sahara in search of a rather rare
species of antelope that is to be found only occasionally within a
limited area at a certain season of the year.  My chase led me far from
the haunts of man.

It was a fruitless search, however, in so far as antelope is concerned;
but one night as I lay courting sleep at the edge of a little cluster
of date-palms that surround an ancient well in the midst of the arid,
shifting sands, I suddenly became conscious of a strange sound coming
apparently from the earth beneath my head.

It was an intermittent ticking!

No reptile or insect with which I am familiar reproduces any such
notes.  I lay for an hour--listening intently.

At last my curiosity got the better of me.  I arose, lighted my lamp
and commenced to investigate.

My bedding lay upon a rug stretched directly upon the warm sand.  The
noise appeared to be coming from beneath the rug.  I raised it, but
found nothing--yet, at intervals, the sound continued.

I dug into the sand with the point of my hunting-knife.  A few inches
below the surface of the sand I encountered a solid substance that had
the feel of wood beneath the sharp steel.

Excavating about it, I unearthed a small wooden box.  From this
receptacle issued the strange sound that I had heard.

How had it come here?

What did it contain?

In attempting to lift it from its burying place I discovered that it
seemed to be held fast by means of a very small insulated cable running
farther into the sand beneath it.

My first impulse was to drag the thing loose by main strength; but
fortunately I thought better of this and fell to examining the box.  I
soon saw that it was covered by a hinged lid, which was held closed by
a simple screwhook and eye.

It took but a moment to loosen this and raise the cover, when, to my
utter astonishment, I discovered an ordinary telegraph instrument
clicking away within.

"What in the world," thought I, "is this thing doing here?"

That it was a French military instrument was my first guess; but really
there didn't seem much likelihood that this was the correct
explanation, when one took into account the loneliness and remoteness
of the spot.

As I sat gazing at my remarkable find, which was ticking and clicking
away there in the silence of the desert night, trying to convey some
message which I was unable to interpret, my eyes fell upon a bit of
paper lying in the bottom of the box beside the instrument.  I picked
it up and examined it.  Upon it were written but two letters:

D. I.

They meant nothing to me then.  I was baffled.

Once, in an interval of silence upon the part of the receiving
instrument, I moved the sending-key up and down a few times.  Instantly
the receiving mechanism commenced to work frantically.

I tried to recall something of the Morse Code, with which I had played
as a little boy--but time had obliterated it from my memory.  I became
almost frantic as I let my imagination run riot among the possibilities
for which this clicking instrument might stand.

Some poor devil at the unknown other end might be in dire need of
succor.  The very franticness of the instrument's wild clashing
betokened something of the kind.

And there sat I, powerless to interpret, and so powerless to help!

It was then that the inspiration came to me.  In a flash there leaped
to my mind the closing paragraphs of the story I had read in the club
at Algiers:

Does the answer lie somewhere upon the bosom of the broad Sahara, at
the ends of two tiny wires, hidden beneath a lost cairn?

The idea seemed preposterous.  Experience and intelligence combined to
assure me that there could be no slightest grain of truth or
possibility in your wild tale--it was fiction pure and simple.

And yet where WERE the other ends of those wires?

What was this instrument--ticking away here in the great Sahara--but a
travesty upon the possible!

Would I have believed in it had I not seen it with my own eyes?

And the initials--D. I.--upon the slip of paper!

David's initials were these--David Innes.

I smiled at my imaginings.  I ridiculed the assumption that there was
an inner world and that these wires led downward through the earth's
crust to the surface of Pellucidar.  And yet--

Well, I sat there all night, listening to that tantalizing clicking,
now and then moving the sending-key just to let the other end know that
the instrument had been discovered.  In the morning, after carefully
returning the box to its hole and covering it over with sand, I called
my servants about me, snatched a hurried breakfast, mounted my horse,
and started upon a forced march for Algiers.

I arrived here today.  In writing you this letter I feel that I am
making a fool of myself.

There is no David Innes.

There is no Dian the Beautiful.

There is no world within a world.

Pellucidar is but a realm of your imagination--nothing more.

BUT--

The incident of the finding of that buried telegraph instrument upon
the lonely Sahara is little short of uncanny, in view of your story of
the adventures of David Innes.

I have called it one of the most remarkable coincidences in modern
fiction.  I called it literature before, but--again pardon my
candor--your story is not.

And now--why am I writing you?

Heaven knows, unless it is that the persistent clicking of that
unfathomable enigma out there in the vast silences of the Sahara has so
wrought upon my nerves that reason refuses longer to function sanely.

I cannot hear it now, yet I know that far away to the south, all alone
beneath the sands, it is still pounding out its vain, frantic appeal.

It is maddening.

It is your fault--I want you to release me from it.

Cable me at once, at my expense, that there was no basis of fact for
your story, At the Earth's Core.

Very respectfully yours,

COGDON NESTOR,
  ---- and ---- Club,
    Algiers.
      June 1st, --.



Ten minutes after reading this letter I had cabled Mr. Nestor as
follows:


Story true.  Await me Algiers.


As fast as train and boat would carry me, I sped toward my destination.
For all those dragging days my mind was a whirl of mad conjecture, of
frantic hope, of numbing fear.

The finding of the telegraph-instrument practically assured me that
David Innes had driven Perry's iron mole back through the earth's crust
to the buried world of Pellucidar; but what adventures had befallen him
since his return?

Had he found Dian the Beautiful, his half-savage mate, safe among his
friends, or had Hooja the Sly One succeeded in his nefarious schemes to
abduct her?

Did Abner Perry, the lovable old inventor and paleontologist, still
live?

Had the federated tribes of Pellucidar succeeded in overthrowing the
mighty Mahars, the dominant race of reptilian monsters, and their
fierce, gorilla-like soldiery, the savage Sagoths?

I must admit that I was in a state bordering upon nervous prostration
when I entered the ---- and ---- Club, in Algiers, and inquired for Mr.
Nestor.  A moment later I was ushered into his presence, to find myself
clasping hands with the sort of chap that the world holds only too few
of.

He was a tall, smooth-faced man of about thirty, clean-cut, straight,
and strong, and weather-tanned to the hue of a desert Arab.  I liked
him immensely from the first, and I hope that after our three months
together in the desert country--three months not entirely lacking in
adventure--he found that a man may be a writer of "impossible trash"
and yet have some redeeming qualities.

The day following my arrival at Algiers we left for the south, Nestor
having made all arrangements in advance, guessing, as he naturally did,
that I could be coming to Africa for but a single purpose--to hasten at
once to the buried telegraph-instrument and wrest its secret from it.

In addition to our native servants, we took