Tarrano the Conqueror, page 158 by Raymond King Cummings
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--to get to Industriana; and in the background of my consciousness the vague belief that Elza would be there to greet me. Into the depths of the untrammeled forest with unguided steps I wandered.
At last I found myself wondering if the dawn were coming; the tri-night hour was long since passed; the auroral lights as I could sometimes see them through the tangle of vegetation overhead, were low in the sky. Insects--and sometimes larger beings--leaped and slithered unseen before my advance. But I did not heed them. Eyes may have peered at me as I stumbled through the blackness of the undergrowth; but if they did, I did not notice them.
And then at last I was brought abruptly to full rationality and consciousness. Stumbling through a tangle of low growth--a black thicket which tore at my garments and scratched my flesh--I was transfixed by a woman's scream. It came through the darkness from near at hand. A crashing of the underbrush, and a woman's scream of terror. It stopped my breath, turned me cold.
CHAPTER XXX
The Monster
I stood frozen with horror; but as my brain cleared--awake at last to full rationality and consciousness--beneath the horror came a surging joy of the knowledge that at last Elza was near me. The scream was repeated; inactive no longer, I dashed the thicket branches apart with my arms and plunged forward through the darkness.
Ahead of me the thickets opened into a sort of clearing. I saw the sky, the stars--paling stars with the first flush of dawn overpowering them. I stood at the edge of an open space in the dim, flat-grey illumination of morning twilight.
Elza! She was there, standing near a huge isolated tree; Elza, pale, trembling, a hand pressed against her mouth in terror; disheveled, her garments dirty and torn with her wanderings through the forest.
A swift glimpse as momentarily I paused; a second or two only, but the scene was impressed upon my