Ishmael lifted his eyebrows at this.
"I am indeed sorry," he said, "that you lost your family and your nation in such a short time and in such a manner. Tell me, are we going north because Zalarapamtra is there, and you hope to find some survivors and start rebuilding the city?"
"First I have to see for myself what happened," she said. "Perhaps it is not as bad as the captain said. After all, he fled the city during the destruction. He only surmised that everybody had been killed and that the city was totally destroyed.
"In any event, other whaling ships will be returning, and these will be carrying mostly men but each will have one of my sisters. We can make obeisance to our chief god, and promise to obey him better in the future so he will not allow such destruction to come again. And we will elect a new Grand He thought about her story for a while, feeling a great pity for her. She was, for all she knew, the last of her family and she might be the last of her nation before the story was ended.
"This kahamwoodoo," he said, using the name which, translated, meant the Purple Beast of the Stinging Death, "this kahamwoodoo must truly be gigantic. Its tentacles must be very long, too, if they can probe into every room of the city, which you say is carved out of rock and goes deep into the mountain. Surely, though, some must have been able to avoid the stinging death."
"They may have," she said, "but there are some things I did not tell you about the kahamwoodoo because I took it for granted that you knew. And I should not have done so, since you are not even of this world, if what you tell me is true."
"It is true," Ishmael said, smiling. He did not blame her for her doubts. If, when he had been sailing with Ahab, he had met a young woman who claimed to have been propelled from the past, would he have believed her?
"The kahamwoodoo, according to the stories told by the priests and by the grandmothers, is often accompanied by smaller beasts. These are of various kinds and travel on top of the great beast. When the great one kills, he is sometimes robbed by the smaller, though they dare not take too much. And he does not bother these fellow travelers unless he becomes too hungry or they annoy him. So, you see, the small beasts would have gone into the rooms of the city to kill what the great beast missed."
They were lying on two leaves side by side and over which was a thick canopy of interlacing leaves and vines. Ever since the huge red sun had dropped into the slot of night, she had been particular about having a heavy cover of vegetation over them. She was especially cautious when they prepared a place to sleep. Ishmael had asked her why, and she had replied that there were a number of reasons. She described some of them, and he had trouble getting to sleep thereafter and staying asleep.
This was the second sleep for them that night. He awoke suddenly, feeling a dull pain in his neck. He knew at once that a creeper had inserted its hollow tooth into his jugular. Namalee had told him that the plants went into a semihibemation during the night, but that some awoke enough to search for a victim, just as a sleeping person, half-awake, feeling thirsty, may stumble to the bathroom to get a drink of water. Namalee had advised him that, if this happened, he should submit. It was better to lose some blood than to jerk the tooth free and so fully awaken the plant.
He had asked her why it mattered if the plant was denied its drink. She had replied that it was best to cooperate with the earth growths. She was vague about what might happen if he did not. All she knew was that she had been taught that one should always go along with the arrangement. It was true that a person could avoid the creepers, if one had not drunk the paralyzing water, but it was better to submit.
Ishmael, thinking of the endless miles of jungle through which they would have to travel before coming to the mountain city of Zalarapamtra, decided to submit. He lay with his eyes closed and imagined the drain of blood. The red fluid was oozing through tiny capillaries of the creeper into the body of the parent stem. And then --
He started as he heard a very faint whistling sound somewhere above him. Something bent the tops of the plants, and something shook the vegetation. The rustling he now heard was not the never-ending motion of the plants quivering to the movements of the earth. The rustling was heavier and more prolonged and undoubtedly caused by some great body.
He managed to turn slowly on his side and reach out and swing Namalee's hammock-leaf. The creeper extended itself to compensate for his motion and so leave its tooth in his vein.
Namalee awoke suddenly and sat up, but she did not say anything. Moonlight filtering through spaces here and there enabled him to make out her body as a dim shape, and she could see his hand clearly in a shaft of light. She rolled over to the edge of the leaf very slowly and whispered, "What is it?"
"I don't know," he said. "Something big is out there."
He pointed upward at an angle.
The tentacle, which was a dark gray and about an inch thick, was blindly probing. But it was coming closer, sniffing for heat. The shivaradoo was blind, like most of the predatory beasts that came out at night, but its sense of heat detection gave it eyes and it had a strange hearing sense that enabled it to pinpoint its victims.
Ishmael plucked the creeper's tooth from his vein, hoping that the forcible ejection would not result in heavy bleeding. He rolled over and eased himself down from the leaf while Namalee did the same from hers. They had to drop a few feet and so could not avoid making some noise. About four seconds later, he heard a sound as of air escaping from pressure, and something pierced a leaf by his shoulder.
Namalee made a strangling sound, and both dropped flat on their faces to the ground. There were about six or seven hisses, and the thud of several objects striking the hard skins of stems.
Immediately after, the two got to their hands and knees and crawled swiftly to a fallen plant with a diameter of two feet. They went over and behind this just in time to escape three more missiles.
Ishmael reached over the trunk and groped until he found a tiny arrow-like thing embedded in the semi-wood. It was a needle-pointed shaft of bone about two inches long and one-sixteenth thick with four featherish growths at the other end. He did not test the sharp end, since Namalee had told him that this was coated with a poison.
According to her, the shivaradoo had thirty tentacles, all hollow. The beast grew the bony missiles in its own body. When they were fully developed, they dropped out into a pouch on the underside of its pancake- thin, sixty-feet-diametered body. The shivaradoo plucked the missiles out of the pouch with one tentacle and inserted them into the ends of other hollow tentacles. When the shivaradoo was close enough to a victim, it expelled a missile with air forced from a bladder-like organ on the top of its body. The range was about sixty feet.
The shivaradoo, like most of the creatures of the air, had large bladders of lighter-than-air gas to buoy it. These grew on top of its body.
Ishmael reached over the fallen trunk again to get some more missiles, and he heard hisses, followed by the dancing of leaves through which shafts pierced and the faint thud of more striking into the plant. One had plunged in only an inch from his hand.