And I left my world behind forever.
Somehow I knew that I would not return again to that strong but crippled body that slept in an unbreakable trance in the dark room of the old house that had been home to my people for a little less than two hundred years. How I could be certain of this I could not say. But the inner conviction was very strong.
Staring into the black sky with the eyes of my spirit-body, I willed myself to the Green Star with all the force of will I had learned from my patient study of the old book from Tibet.
And the dead surface of the moon fell away beneath me—dwindled to a shining mote that hung beside a shrinking sphere of glittering blue—and vanished into the darkness between the stars.
The transition was timeless. That is, I was not aware of any lapse of time. My second flight to the Green Star, like my first, may have taken a moment—or a century. There was no way to measure the interval.
I have come to feel that a sense of the passing of time is an illusion of the flesh, not an absolute universal standard. The wise men of Lhasa teach that both time and space—the sense of distance and of interval—are delusions imposed upon the spirit which is imprisoned in a human body. They teach that to the liberated soul there is only the eternal and the infinite; no bounds, no limits, an endless Now… and an uncircumscribed Everywhere. As to the truth of this, I really cannot say. But I suspect that, in this as in certain other things, the timeless wisdom of the East has attained to an insight denied the little men of the West who huddle in narrow laboratories, probing at the secrets of the universe with narrow minds, minds too small to contain the measureless Truth.
There was no sensation of motion.
I was momentarily aware of an infinite darkness closing about me. The icy breath of a supernal cold touched the center of my being. The stars blurred… and shifted…
And the Green Star blazed up before me in all the glory of her tremendous dawn!
It was a spectacle such as few eyes could ever have seen. The star-strewn vastness of space was filled with a vast sphere of intolerable emerald flame. Thundering gouts of incandescent spume, like a fiery vapor of jade, blazed up from the shimmering surface of the immense orb… floated in arcs of unendurable brilliance against the dark… and sank again into the green furnace of the tremendous sun.
I stared enthralled upon the scene. How it was that I could look upon this cataclysmic vision of wonder and might I cannot explain. Had I been a fleshly visitor, my organs of vision would have been blinded in the first microsecond. As an invisible and bodiless spirit, it seems to me that I employed the eyes of my astral senses, but this is only a guess. However it was that an immaterial form can sense the vibrations of light—I saw. It is but one of the many enigmas of the bodiless state, and the solution of it I must leave to wiser men than I.
Circling this sphere of cold green fire I spied a smaller globe, sheathed in impenetrable silver mists. This was the world whereon I had ventured in the person of Chong the Mighty… and how my heart sprang with joy now that I beheld it again!
I directed the flight of my spirit toward it.
Nacreous, dawn-struck mists swirled up around me; for a long moment I sank through mists of turbulent vapors of spun silver, irradiated with fiery emerald.
Then the mists dispersed about me and whipped away, and I looked upon a landscape such as Earthly eyes have never beheld before my coming.
It was a world of Brobdingnagian trees. In their countless tens of thousands they marched from horizon to mist bound horizon, and most of them were as tall as Everest. Mountain-thick boles sprung from unseen depths beneath to fling their towering spires against the green-and-silver sky. Enormous branches sprouted from the soaring trunks, branches as broad as six-lane highways, bearing up immense clouds of leafage. These leaves were as huge as the sails of ships, and were like gold tissue struck through with sun.
It was an awesome spectacle; once seen it could never be forgotten. Earth affords no mightier, more impressive landscape.
Through the maze of intertwining branches I floated down as lightly as a drifting leaf.
Branches thrust about me now in every direction. Here and there a scarlet reptile clung with sucker-feet to the rough bark surface. An immense dragonfly shot past me, his wings of sheeted opal flashed suddenly with jeweled splendor as he transected a shaft of green-gold sunlight. I could see about half a mile in every direction… beyond that limit, branches and masses of aureate leafage blocked my vision.
I gazed down; the trunks of the colossal trees dwindled away beneath me like the shafts of skyscrapers, their bases lost in the dense gloom that reigned eternal at the forest’s floor.
I did not have even the slightest idea where I was. And it suddenly came to me that in this mysterious world of titan forests, one tree looks very like another. On my earlier trip here, I had been lucky enough to stumble upon the site of Phaolon, Jewel City of Niamh, through pure chance. Now, unless the Gods of Luck were with me, I had not the slightest chance of finding it again. Nor, for that matter, of finding the Secret City of the Outlaws, where I had taken my last look at the princess, and where, in the body of Chong the Mighty, I had been slain.
Phaolon or the Secret City might be on the next branch—or ten thousand miles away! I floated for a time, musing on this problem, realizing it was hopelessly insoluble.
Princess Niamh and I had been in the act of making our escape from the outlaw encampment of Siona the Huntress. The Amazon girl, who had foolishly conceived an unreciprocated passion for me, had been on the point of delivering the princess into the hands of certain envoys from her rival city of Ardha. We had fought our way out of Siona’s fortress to the zaiph pens. In that battle I had received my death wound and had fallen; but my last glimpse of Niamh was as she fled from the outlaw city, mounted on a fleet-winged zaiph.
Had she safely eluded her pursuers, or had the outlaws recaptured her? Had Siona sold her into the bondage of her Ardhanese enemies, or kept her prisoner to wreak upon the helpless princess her own jealous vengeance? Or had she indeed made her escape—in which case she might have found her way back to the Jewel City. Or had she fallen prey to the monstrous predators who roamed the world of the mighty trees? Or did she still wander, lost and alone, searching for the way back to Phaolon?
To have known the answer to any of these questions would have satisfied me. But it gnawed at my heart that I knew nothing of her fate for sure. And, myself completely lost, there seemed no way I could find the answers I so desperately desired.
For an immeasurable time I drifted aimlessly through the giant forest, searching for any sign of intelligent life. It tortured me to think that the girl I sought might be, quite literally, anywhere… on the next branch, or in the next tree, or on the other side of the planet, for all I knew.
And then, quite suddenly, I came upon a tense scene.
By sheerest accident, I had stumbled into the last act of a small, pitiful tragedy.
Four stakes of strange, glassy metal had been driven deep into the broad upper surface of one great tree-branch.
Bound spread-eagled between these stakes, a half-naked boy lay within inches of death. They had bound his wrists and ankles with cruel rawhide thongs to these stakes, stretching out his limbs to their limit, and left him there to die.
And death approached him now on silent, scuttling feet.
At first, the youth did not spy the monster as it stealthily crept near. He was straining every muscle and sinew in a last effort to free one hand from his bonds. Already the cruel thongs had bitten deep into his wrist; his hand was purple and swollen, and red blood dribbled from the tips of his numb fingers. The pain must have been excruciating, but, sinking his teeth into his lower lip, the brave boy struggled on. He would, I somehow knew, continue that struggle to the very last.