His bravery giving way to wild panic, the hairy boy dashed down the narrow cavern at top speed, dodging in and out among the stalactites but never once stopping until thoroughly exhausted. Then, panting, he came to rest and sat on the cave floor, while the wolf dogs lay down beside him. They were very quiet for a long time and Og tested the air with his keen nose and listened for the slightest sound coming down the cave, for he was afraid that he might hear the scraping of the big snake pursuing him. All was quiet, and after a time in which he made certain that the reptile was not following him, Og breathed a sigh of relief and rested more comfortably.
The cave into which he had plunged went in an entirely different direction from the one into which the tree folk had disappeared and Og regretted this. Once again he felt that dreadful loneliness stealing upon him. The companionship[147] of the tree folk, even though it had not been as intimate or as congenial as would have been the company of his own kind, had meant a great deal to the hairy boy and he was sorry that they had been separated. In a vague way he wondered what was happening to them. He doubtless would have felt lonelier if not envious had he known that, even as he rested there, the ape men were swarming out of the cavern into which they had plunged and, their recent terrifying experience forgotten, were romping on the side of another mountain that looked out on a new palm-grown valley reaching southward.
Og wondered where the cave he had entered led to, if indeed it led anywhere save into the bowels of the mountain. With his loneliness, a sudden indescribable fear of the dark, damp passage settled down on him. He began to feel as if he were a prisoner doomed to stay there underground with the bats and other loathsome denizens of the caves.
This fear spurred him into action, and although he was still panting with the exertion of the chase, he began a feverish, almost panic-stricken search for a way out of the cave. The darkness was dense and heavy; almost oppressive. To be sure,[148] he still had his flickering torch but the feeble rays of this only served to make the blackness of the cave seem heavier. He began to feel as if this darkness was pressing in upon him, trying to smother him, to bury him alive there under the great mountain that he knew was above him.
He started forward again, hurrying down the cave as fast as he could. Sometimes it narrowed down to openings so small that Og was almost afraid to try to crawl through them, and each time the boy wondered whether he had come to a blind end of the labyrinth of underground passages. But always these narrow passages widened out again, though some of them were at times so narrow that he could hardly force his body through them without scraping hair, and even skin, from hips and shoulders.
On and on he traveled. Time seemed long to Og down there in the blackness and now and then he despaired at ever getting out again. Yet he kept on courageously. He must find a way out. He must get into the sunshine once more. He could not go on forever wandering about down there in the blackness.
Vague fears began to obsess him; needless fears brought on by the oppressiveness of the[149] blackness. What if another earthquake should occur? What if the cave walls should give way and the great mountain above him should sag downward? What if one of these huge pendant stalactites should drop upon him and pin him down to hold him a prisoner there in the cave until he died of hunger or thirst? Thoughts of hunger and thirst made him both hungry and thirsty. Og’s nerves were fast going to pieces under the strain. He plunged madly on, half frantic now in an insane desire to find the exit to the cave, and he worked himself into a state of almost complete collapse.
But just when he had reached utter despair, something happened that helped him to master himself and find his poise and lost courage once more. The narrow cave suddenly widened out a little more than usual and as Og stepped into the small room-like vault in the rocks, an odor that was most disgusting assailed his nostrils. By the light of the torch he beheld bones scattered about the floor of the cavern, bones of all shapes and sizes, some partly gnawed and some with shreds of decomposed meat still clinging to them. It was the den of some animal that Og had blundered[150] into, and his nose told him that it was the den of a great cave tiger.
For a moment Og was petrified with fear. But presently he beheld huddled in a far corner the shapes of two cub tigers, dead now and rotting.
Og could see that they had been dead for some time and his brain quickened by fear and all that he had recently gone through told him that these were cubs of the female tiger he had slain weeks before. They had starved to death there in the cave when their mother did not return.
Og smiled grimly, for he was glad to rid the world of the whelp of this ferocious cat. But he smiled, too, because he realized that all his recent panic had been groundless. From the den he could look down along the passageway ahead of him and see, not far off, a shaft of soft, warm light that he knew was sunlight. The exit to the cave was close at hand.
The hairy boy did not linger. He made for the entrance and presently he and the wolf dogs found themselves on a ledge overlooking a valley that extended away northward. And as he stood there, below him Og beheld a figure moving............