PukeOnABook

Reptile. Episode Nine. The Enraged Crowd. Summary: Thanks to Mark Bowen, the police now know the sinister secret of “Reptile”, the terrifying professor Andros Andprophis, who has the power to transform into a reptile and whose purpose is to dominate the universe by terror! After many dramatic adventures, “Reptile” has a new idea to achieve his ends. My dear old college! Ha-ha-ha! Here I am like a fish in the water! How can I help you sir? Oh? Doctor Meredith is in the lab. Is he waiting for you by chance? The Fool! In the past there was no doorman. Too bad for him! Page Two: Eh! Air! What is happening? Are you sick? Huh! Huh! My blood freezes in my veins! My strength grows, multiplies, increases! I metamorphose! Hou-la-la! Mother! Ha-ha-ha! He fainted from terror! Ha-ha-ha! The section for the study of venoms and toxins. Page Three: Ha-ha-ha Dear Meredith is harvesting venom from a. Super Mamba I will give him a hand. Hiss! Ha-ha! Immediately the terrible reptile reacts. Argh! Thwack! Ha-ha-0ha! Sorry my dear colleague! You should not get in the way of the invincible “Reptile”! Smash! Page Four: It only remains for me to perform certain operations that will allow me to dominate huge crowds! A few hours later, Inspector Manning was learning what had happened at the college of Biology. The laboratory for the study of snake venom you say? It can only be him! What else is he up to? We will find out soon, I hope! Meanwhile the guard has been doubled around the parliament, the ministries, and the Royal Palace! We do not know which way to turn our head! Page Five: A little later, at the college of Biology. So Mark? He has distilled all sorts of venoms and extremely powerful poisons! All I can tell you is that this preparation is certainly intended to be ingested! Drunk, you mean? At such a high dose? No! Extremely diluted it should still give powerful results. I mean diluted in the water supply of the capital, for example! Hello! Hello! Urgent call! Closely monitor reservoirs, settling ponds, water distribution facilities! It is very important! We fear one of Reptile’s enterprises! And this is how: What panic! When I think only one man caused all this! Finally! With all of the supervision that is now exercised over everything related to the distribution of water. He won't mess with it! Page Six: I do not see any holes in our disposition! I thought about the question Mark! It is not to poison people, which “Reptile” made his preparations, but to start again on an immense, an immense, ah. Scale, what he did in the tank regiment or with the airmen. You mean? Enslave crowds!? By Jove! That's certainly what he wants to do! Then he would have thousands of people at his disposal! What to do? Just in case, dozens of chemists were mobilized to constantly analyze the water in the pumping stations. Forgive me darling! But I have to go, like my colleagues! I have not seen Pierre run so fast since that time he thought his mistress was pregnant. Page Seven: In five minutes I have to be at Wardley station! They have stopped the distribution! They will only reopen the valves when I give the green light after analysis! I must hurry! Ha-ha! They think they're smart, but. Eh! Who is it?! So! Kraits’ ring hisses. Page Eight: So gently now! Now is not the time to have an accident! Screech! You are in my power, mister! Here is what you're going to do! You are going to pour the contents of this test tube into the water distribution pipes. Without being noticed! Without being noticed, Yes! Ha-ha-ha! It is childishly simple! Next objective: The radio! Shortly after, the chemist arrives at his destination. Page Nine: This is the room where the analysis takes place, sir! Do you need me? But no, but no! I can very well do this on my own! The employee is gone! So! Directly in the distribution pipe. Mister! You don't need to draw water from. Eh! He saw me? Hey! What’s got into you? You will die! Die so that my master's orders are carried out! Page Ten: Die? Not me! Help! The orders of my master! Argh! Thrang! Hey! What is happening here? Less than ten minutes later, the news reached the headquarters of the police. Doctor Abe. A reputable chemist! He had reptile teeth marks on his neck. He half killed a lab worker at the pumping station!? Just what I feared, Manning! The drugs are in the circuit now Mark! You have to make a call. On the radio, Manning! Right away! Page Eleven: Already it is too late and, at this very moment, on the facade of the building of the B. B. C. in London. Ha-ha-ha! Like the chameleon, I have the power to make myself invisible. Like the gecko, I have suction cups on my fingers. I’m like a bird, I’ll only fly away, I don’t know where my soul is! Like a snake I slip through the smallest opening. I have to interrupt this program for a moment to send you an urgent communication from Scotland Yard. Whack! Thump! Page Twelve: All who are now hiss, slaves, prepare to follow my instructions, hiss! The reptile's hissing voice reverberated hundreds of miles across the airwaves. Eh! You hear? Phew! The more it goes on, the more they say nonsense on the radio! It was the voice of my master! I must obey him! Smash! Johnny! What are you saying? For reptile! Ahead! Page Thirteen: In the streets were now massing the unfortunates who had the misfortune to drink the drugged water. What is happening? These people are crazy! They look like robots! We have to call the police! Chaos! Destruction! Such is the will of Reptile! Chaos, destruction such is his. Chaos and destruction, yes, well put slaves! And London becomes the first flagship of the Reptil Empire under the sign of chaos. And. Vlan! Look there! We have you Androphis! Nobody expects the Spanish inquisition! Hiss! Pour Fools! Hiss! Page Fourteen: Halt! Or I shoot! Never! Take that in your face, you stupid fools! The venom of the invisible Reptile! Ha-ha-ha! Ha-ha-ha- Adieu, poor fools! Anyone other than me would kill themselves in such a fall! But Reptil is not just anyone! Thruk! Page Fifteen: It was then that, driving in racing cars, Mark Bowen and Inspector Manning arrived. Over there Mark! Don't stop, Manning! Run him over! Screech! They think they have me, The little fools! Screech! But here are just a few of my slaves, who amuse themselves. Slaves! Hear the voice, of your Master! Enemies. Page Sixteen: Purse me! Kill Them! Obey! Kill them! Master! Master! He says! To kill his enemies! Let us obey! Damnation! We are in deep trouble! Let's not stay here! Ha-ha-ha! Too Late Bowen! Hiss, hiss, spittle! This time you will not escape death! Ha-ha-ha-hiss! You won't bother me anymore! Lamentable little fool! Page Seventeen: Come on Slaves! Finish it! I'm sorry, Manning, but we have to hit the ground running! The poor fools! They don't know what they are doing. Let's go over there, Mark! Execute the orders of our master! They chant Kill! Kill! Manning! Thunk! Argh! Manning! Ho, ho, ho! This time we got them! He will not escape carrying his side-kick! The mob yells Kill! Death! Page Eighteen: They are right but, a garage! I may have a chance. If it is full of oil! Time to smash it with an ax and. Let us see what you think of that!? Splursh! Page Nineteen: Argh! It’s slippery! Perfect! That will keep them busy for a little bit of time! However, believing to have finished with his enemies Reptil continues the realization of his insane plan. I knew that among the slaves I would find a representative of the law! I you! I have a special mission for you! Oink, oink! I am your slave, master! Take this message to Downing Street. To the prime minister, sir? But he is no longer there. Like all members of the government, they are in refuge in a secret retreat. Page Twenty: But there are undoubtedly still personnel there, who will convey my message to them! My ultimatum! Come on! And as the policeman strode away. You over there! I need a radio transmitter! How exhilarating! I only have to say the word, and it is executed! Ha-ha-ha! However, in the city it was absolute chaos. Page Twenty-One: No one knew who was who, and if they drank a drop of the water drugged by Professor Androphis, the most balanced of citizens turned into horrible vandals. Death to the Cops! Chaos and destruction! Yes! Chaos and destruction! Terrified citizens who had not lost their heads, left the capital. In order, if you please! You are here under the protection of the army! No need to panic! Now the streets where Mark Bowen and Inspector Manning walked were deserted. It is terrible, Mark! We really do not know what to do to get out of this incredible situation! You are not the only one, old man! Never has such a thing happened and even the Prime Minister must wonder. Page Twenty-Two: Attention! A tailor's dummy! Oh! Good! I have cold sweats! And I as well! Say, do you have any idea what crazy professor is going to do now? Now that he has proven his power, I wouldn't be surprised if he issued an ultimatum to the government. Downing Street! The Prime Minister and the members of his cabinet have taken refuge, I don't know where, but there are still people there! Come on, maybe that's the thing to do. For the lack of another idea! Page Twenty-Three: But at this same moment, not far from Downing Street. Hey you! Identify yourself! Holden of “C” Division! And you. You belong to the Prime Minister's Protective Services, Sir? Yes, Why? I have an important message from my master, Reptile! You do not have to be afraid of me! My Master ordered me not to commit violence, said the stupid pig. Incredible, thought Manning. A real robot. Meanwhile in an abandoned hotel on the west end. Ha-ha-ha! What peace, hiss, in this place! My message, hiss, should soon be delivered to the Prime Minister. Page Twenty-Four: Hiss! Other people must have had some of my drugged water! And the army of my slaves must be infinitely more numerous! To entertain myself I will give them new instructions. An instant later. Do you hear me, slaves? Where ever you are. Abandon what you are doing. Mechanically, the crane operator acts upon a lever and. Skrung! Just as Mark Bowen and Detective Manning arrived. Oh! Mark! Page Twenty-Five: What is it? Attention! Run! Run! As if fascinated by the terrifying charge which fell towards him, Mark Bowen remained nailed to the ground. My Apologies old Friend! And so Inspector Manning punches him in the face. Crack! Smash! And Now. Kratoom! Crash! Page Twenty-Six: Eh! What is this? Who!? What? Forgive me Mark, but I had no choice! Where are you going Manning? The crane operator! I have to corner him before he joins the crowd of other reptilian slaves! Hey there friend! Wait! What? An enemy of my master no doubt? Page Twenty-Seven: Thrang! To obey him, my strength is irresistible! Nothing can resist me! Reptile’s so fine, there’s no telling where the money goes! Huh! It's a real killing machine! Courage Inspector! Thwack! Crash! Smack! This is a quite sufficient, and well measured amount of violence. Thanks Mark! Now, if you want my opinion, we should take ourselves to the Prime Minister! If they put a lab at my disposal, I might find an antidote to this drug! A little later. Who is in command here? Inspector Grey! But he left. To give the Prime minister the ultimatum from Reptile! Page Twenty-Eight: If only we know where this scoundrel is! Do not remind me, mister! Can you give me some bodyguards to protect me while I study in a laboratory the case of these "Slaves" of Reptil? Not far away. Damnation! Bowen is still alive! Lucky that I came to see with my own eyes what is happening here! He is too well protected for me to openly attack him. But I know that he is going to a laboratory! The closest, certainly. A laboratory that I know very well. And where he does not suspect what awaits him! A few minutes later, while protected by a formidable escort of policemen, Mark Bowen was crossing a bridge over the Thames. Page Twenty-Nine: It is a very, very well-equipped laboratory for the study of snake venom, following the methods instituted by Professor Androphis. Oh! We are in trouble again! Again those unfortunates are enraged by the Reptile drug! As warning salvo to disperse them, my friends! Bam! Bam! It does not make them hot or cold, Inspector! Good! Load your guns with rubber bullets and shoot to the body. A volley of bullets specially planned to disperse the demonstrators fell on the front row of the slaves of reptile. Page Thirty: Forward! Forward! Nothing can prevent the realization of the plans of the invincible Reptile! Death! Argh! Of course, Reptile was not far away. Ha-ha-ha! How exhilarating the spectacle of violence! This is exactly what I need. A little diversion. Permitting me to set up my trap for the stupid Mark Bowen. Once again reptile is ahead in the game! When will this nightmare end? The next episode will tell us, friends!

Rahan. Episode Twenty Eight. The land that speaks. A rumbling wave lifted the raft and threw it against a reef. The skiff broke apart and the son of Crao was submerged by the foaming waves. In other times, he would have been able to reach the near shore where, under the gusts of the wind, the coconut palms shook their disheveled heads. But, lost on the great river for several moons, hungry, exhausted, he could not fight the storm. Page Two: He glimpsed the green wall of a gigantic wave rolling towards him. Rahan is lost! He will join the black “Territory of the Shadows”! The wave seemed to engulf him, but it carried him to the shore, where it died in a seething foam. The day has not come for Rahan to join you, Crao! Amazed to still be alive Rahan felt his chest, his arms, and his legs. As his fingers met the ivory handle of his cutlass, he thought of the game he should kill. But what beast could well venture on this shore! This wild beach was lined with mossy rocks. The crabs that the waves had just thrown there, rushed back to the sea. Page Three: Suddenly perceiving a slight lapping between the rocks, Rahan leaned over a fault. A serpent from the "Great River!" Rahan will finally be able to eat! In the water hole, he had seen a huge conger eel, which was no doubt waiting for high tide to return to the ocean. He knew how dangerous the bite of that snakehead was. So he cut a strong harpoon. He plunged this one into the fault, bracing himself when the point had crossed the body of the conger. Ra-ha-ha! The son of Crao launched his cry of victory because the snake-fish, extirpated from his lair was so big that he would have satisfied a whole clan! Page Four: Finishing off this furiously struggling conger was difficult, but Rahan managed it. The storm is over. When Rahan regains his strength, he will be able to explore this territory! Shortly after, the son of Crao was happily devouring a large slice of fish. Another was already grilling on the low fire. The wind died down and, on the sea, which was no longer being shaken by anything but a light swell, a few boats appeared in the distance. Rahan is happy that "Those-who-walk-upright" come from this side. He will share the snake-fish with them! Page Five: A little later. We have seen the smoke of your fire! By what right does a man from the “land that speaks” come to fish on our shores! Rahan ignores the meaning of your words, brother! It was the storm that dragged him here! Lie! Those of the "Speaking Earth" know how to lie! The men, surrounding Rahan, dragged him towards their boats. When ours risk themselves on the "earth-that-speaks", yours hunt them or kill them. Kaglok, our leader, will decide whether you should be killed or hunted! But Rahan knows nothing about this "Speaking Earth"! Kaglok will decide! But as he has avenged his son, I believe that you will be hanged by the feet, until death ensues! Page Six: And I will regret that your people, from over there, cannot be present at this torture! The man pointed to an island on the horizon. He called out to his people. Let us go closer to the "Speaking Earth"! I would like to show those damned people that we have captured one of theirs! As they approached the island, Crao's son reflected. Rahan might escape, but he would have to abandon his knife! Indeed, the ivory weapon that had been stolen from him had been slipped into the belt of a man on another boat. The boat was now close to the beach. On the island, men observed the boats. Stand up Rahan! I want your people to see you! Page Seven: The son of Crao stood up. And suddenly dove into the water. A cry of amazement arose. Those of "land that speaks" do not yet know how to crawl on the water. Let us kill him! Let us kill him! Although a remarkable swimmer, Rahan could not compete in speed with the spears that were thrown so violently. As some fell dangerously around him, he let himself sink, swimming between the spears. When he came to the surface, it was out of reach of the men who, curiously enough, remained at a distance from the "land that speaks"! Page Eight: Kaglok will not forgive us for leaving the enemy! Is he really an enemy? We all know that those of the "land-that-speaks" have never known how to crawl on water! And Rahan crawls there as well as on land! The boats pulled away when the son of Crao pulled himself up onto the beach. These are no more welcoming than the others! The men, indeed, wielded great bows. What madness pushes you to come and challenge us, man of the great land!? Rahan doesn't want to challenge anyone! He is the brother of all "Those-who-walk-upright"! Of those of the "Grand Terre" as of those of "the land that speaks"! Page Nine: You have seen that those of the "Great Land" wanted to kill Rahan! Which proves that Rahan is not one of them! We know Kaglok's tricks, this is one to infiltrate one of his men among our horde! Lock up Rahan with Kag!! The man speaking must have been the leader. He wore a large leather bracelet on which sparkled pearls. Each clan believes that Rahan belongs to the other! The son of the fierce ages was lead to an enclosure of tall bamboo. A moment later he found there a young captive. I am Rahan, son of Crao. And you, who are you? I am Kag, the son of Kaglok. Page Ten: Those of "Speaking Earth" captured me ten moons ago. They say they will kill me if my people come to fish in their waters! Their waters? Isn't the great river wide enough for your two clans to fish in peace! There are enough fish for. It is not about fish, Rahan. But shells in which we sometimes discover wonderful pearls! These shells are abundant around the "earth-that-speaks" and that is why mine often come to dive near and. Tabaro's men, who cannot crawl, neither on water nor under water, are furious! For Rahan things became clearer. Page Eleven: Kag went on, a look of dread in his eyes. Tabaro will kill me if those of my clan approach his island! Tabaro won't kill you, Kag. Because Kag and Rahan are going to escape tonight! The darkness descended slowly on the ocean enveloping the “earth-that-speaks” and all over there, the shores of the "Great land". In the bamboo enclosure the captives were ready. When you are on the other side, you will throw me a vine! I understand Rahan! A moment later, Rahan lifted the teenager at arm's length. Kag's hands narrowly grabbed the enclosure, but grabbed it. Page Twelve: Rahan heard him fall on the other side. Kag is cunning enough to avoid Tabaro’s guards! In fact a few seconds later, a vine fell near him. After having tested the solidity. The son of fierce ages climbs it with his customary agility. Where could Kag have attached this vine? Reaching the crest of the enclosure, he nearly screamed in surprise. Three Tabaro men braced themselves against the rope! A fourth held Kag down. They surprised me too early Rahan!! The son of Crao, then, only listens to his instincts. From the top of the bamboo enclosure, he dove on the trio! Ra-ha-ha! Page Thirteen: A tornado would not have produced more of an effect. The Tabaro guards collapsed under his blows and the one who mastered Kag fled, terrified. But other men, emerging from the huts, prevented the fugitives from gaining access to the boats. Into the forest, Kag, quick! Fast! A moment later, Rahan and his young companion bounced into the bushy thickets. They ran thus until the shouts of their pursuers no longer reached them. We have escaped them but how will we leave the "Earth-that-speaks"? How will we reach the mainland? As they descended a long rocky slope, Kag suddenly stumbled, and slid down a deep ravine. Kag! Kag! Page Fourteen: Kag held on at a ledge but stupor petrified the son of Crao. The name he had screamed was hanging everywhere. Kag! Kag! This name. Ten times repeated, came from the cliff, rising from the ravine. Kag! Kag! Kag! The son of fierce ages was unaware of any echo phenomenon. More intrigued than worried, he launched his own name and. Rahan!! Rahn! Rahan! The cliffs and the ravine answered him. Rahan understands why this island is nicknamed the "land that speaks"! But your cries have attracted tabaro! Look out!! Page Fifteen: Tabaro and his clan arose, threatening the fugitives with their great bows. Rahan will perish according to the custom of his people: Hanging by the feet! “Hung by the feet” echoed, repeating sinisterly. “Hung by the feet”! “Hung by the feet”! Shortly after, Kag was again locked in the enclosure and the son of Crao hung from a low branch. If Rahan doesn't break free soon, his head will explode! Tabaro and his men had returned to their huts and no longer cared about the captive. The latter, giving his body a swinging motion, wore down the vine on the branch. The blood rushed to his brain. His ears buzzed. His vision was blurring! Page Sixteen: He was about to pass out when the vine gave way. His thick hair happily softens the shock with the ground. A moment later, with the flint of a spear, he freed his ankles. Then his wrists. Not far from him, boats were lined up on the beach. It would be easy for Rahan to run away! But he will not give up on Kag! He was about to slip towards the enclosure when he felt the sting of an arrow in his back. I wanted to talk to you Rahan! The bow stretched, Tabaro smiled. I thought I would find you hanging from this tree, and I wanted to make you an offer to stop the torture. Page Seventeen: What proposal? Rahan is listening to Tabaro! I saw how wonderfully you crawl on water. If you teach Tabaro to crawl on water this way, you will be free to leave the “Land that speaks”! Rahan agrees. Provided Kag is set free with him. Tabaro accepts Rahan's condition! From then on, staying on the island was almost pleasant. It was certainly forbidden for the captives to approach the boats. But. They were free to roam around the lagoon where the son of Crao was teaching the clan chief to swim. Slow down, Tabaro! Slower! Page Eighteen: When Tabaro. He will know crawl on water, he will learn to crawl! His brothers! We will have the same chances as those of the "Grande Terre" to fish. Fish for pearl shells. Tabaro is certain that the hatred between our two clans will fade! Rahan wants it too! One morning, all the echoes of the “speaking earth” resounded. Tabaro can crawl on water! Tabaro can crawl on water! Tabaro can crawl on water! The chief even learned to dive into the green depths of the lagoon. He discovered there a school of giant oysters. It was during one of these dives that Rahan had his leg caught by one of these monstrous shells. Page Nineteen: Slicing the giant oyster's tendon, Tabaro then saved his life. Tabaro crawls on water and underwater as well as Rahan! And Tabaro keeps his promise. Rahan and Kag are free! When Rahan is on the "Great Land", he will be able to tell Kaglok that our arrows will no longer decimate his fishers! He could fish for shellfish around the island. We, we will fish those of the lagoons! Shortly after, the son of Crao and Kag left the island. "Farewell Rahan!" "Farewell Rahan!" Cried the echoes of the land-that-speaks. Page Twenty: Those of the "Great-land" welcomed them with the same emotion as the men of Tabaro had saluted them. Kag! Kag! My son! My son who I thought was dead! Kag recounted everything Rahan had done for him. And we who took you for an enemy! Take back your knife brother! You no longer have an enemy, Kaglok! Your clan and that of the "Speaking Earth" will now live in peace. Which is the best thing for "Those-who-walk-upright"! Will Rahan stay with us? No Kag. Rahan has too much to learn, and too much unknown territory to discover! As always, the son of fierce ages confided his destiny to his ivory knife. He twirled the weapon on a stone, waiting for the blade to indicate the direction in which he would venture off again. Index: https://rumble.com/v3486cm-rahan-index-of-episodes-by-roger-lecureux..html

Index of Rahan Episodes. 01 https://rumble.com/v2e75py-rahan-episode-1-the-secret-of-the-sun.-by-roger-lecureux.html 02 https://rumble.com/v2f3748-rahan.-episode-two.-the-crazy-horde.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 03 https://rumble.com/v2gh0g2-rahan.-episode-three.-the-fish-trap.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puketm-comic.html 04 https://rumble.com/v2hns8g-rahan.-episode-four.-the-magic-stone-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic.html 05 https://rumble.com/v2janck-rahan.-episode-five.-the-liquid-tomb.-rahan-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-co.html 06 https://rumble.com/v2jvwsu-rahan.-episode-six.-the-mammoth-god.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 07 https://rumble.com/v2l18ou-rahan.-episode-seven.-the-country-with-the-white-skin.-by-roger-lecureux.-a.html 08 https://rumble.com/v2m98g8-rahan.-episode-eight.-the-long-claw.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 09 https://rumble.com/v2nihgq-rahan.-episode-nine.-the-arc-of-heaven.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 10 https://rumble.com/v2osm2u-rahan.-episode-ten.-the-flat-beast.-by-roger-lecureux.a-puke-tm-comic..html 11 https://rumble.com/v2q1v66-rahan.-episode-eleven.-the-men-with-heavy-legs.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-t.html 12 https://rumble.com/v2r2f1i-rahan.-episode-twelve.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 13 https://rumble.com/v2rpsta-rahan.-episode-thirteen.-as-crao-would-have-done.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke.html 14 https://rumble.com/v2t7cf2-rahan.-episode-fourteen.-the-new-trap.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 15 https://rumble.com/v2ua0ip-rahan.-episode-fifteen.-death-to-the-manta.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-co.html 16 https://rumble.com/v2uoblj-rahan.-episode-sixteen.-the-necklace-of-claws.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm.html 17 https://rumble.com/v2uom53-rahan.-episode-seventeen.-the-weapon-that-flies.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-.html 18 https://rumble.com/v2vtlo2-rahan.-episode-eighteen.-the-demon-tree.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic.html 19 https://rumble.com/v2x9lgs-rahan.-episode-nineteen.-the-forbidden-shore.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-.html 20 https://rumble.com/v2x9yfg-rahan.-episode-twenty.-the-chief-of-chiefs.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-co.html 21 https://rumble.com/v2yd4vo-rahan.-episode-twenty-one.-the-cliff-of-sacrifice.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puk.html 22 https://rumble.com/v2yqsxy-rahan.-episode-twenty-two.-the-white-arrow.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-co.html 23 https://rumble.com/v309cwo-rahan.-episode-twenty-three.-the-people-of-the-trees.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-.html 24 https://rumble.com/v31h0ps-rahan.-episode-twenty-four.-the-ivory-knife..html 25 https://rumble.com/v32l96o-rahan.-episode-twenty-five.-the-territory-of-shadows.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-.html 26 https://rumble.com/v32svci-rahan.-episode-twenty-six.-the-mammoth-killer.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm.html 27 https://rumble.com/v347yxg-episode-twenty-seven.-the-clan-of-the-cursed-lake.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puk.html 28 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Rahan. Episode Twenty Seven. The clan of the cursed lake. With a simple tap on the handle, the son of Crao spun his ivory knife on a polished stone. This was how he sometimes acted, when no precise goal guided his steps. Catching the fire of the sun, the weapon made a few turns and stopped. So Rahan will go that way! In the distance, in the direction which chance had imposed on the blade, rose a volcano. Rahan ran his fingers over the claws of his collar. Page Two: The vision of a volcano always reminded him of the terrifying night of his childhood, when all his family had been devoured by the torrent of fire. That night when Crao-the-brave, dying, had bequeathed to him the necklace of courage and loyalty. Rahan would have preferred that you guide him to another territory! But he will not disobey you! As the son of the fierce ages was accustomed to the noises and activities of the jungle, Rahan suddenly guessed a nearby presence. His fingers gripped the precious knife. When he realized that the danger was above him, in the foliage, it was too late. A wide net fell on him! Page Three: For having already been captured in this way by a clan of fishermen, he knew how difficult it is to free oneself from this trap. He saw everything at once: the creeper tied to the hunter's wrist and the long pointed harpoon that he brandished. He relaxed with the power of a big beast, rolling on the ground in the net, unbalancing the man from his perch. A moment later Rahan was slicing the net, and the hunter, stunned by his brutal fall, was lying, a calf impaled on his own harpoon! Page Four: The son of Crao could have abandoned his attacker. The law of the fierce ages allowed it. But he never felt hatred for "Those-who-walk-upright". If Rahan extracts this weapon while he is knocked out, he will feel less pain! He could not pull the harpoon without the curved spikes horribly aggravating the wound. So he sliced the shaft of the weapon as close as possible to the calf. When he tugged at the spike, the wood sliced into the flesh and the man, revived by the pain, howled!! Argh! He saw Rahan holding his knife in one hand, and the tip of the harpoon in the other. Kill me! You have the right! If Rahan wanted to kill you he would have left this in your leg! Page Five: What enemy are you then, not to take advantage of your victory? I am Rahan, son of Crao. The hunter tried to stand up but his injury prevented him from doing so. Rahan will help you rejoin your clan! But why did you want to capture him? Karok would have been proud to bring you back to his clan. The wizard always says that Karok does not know how to fish. Karok would have proved him wrong! Rahan learned that Karok was part of a clan of fishermen, who lived on a nearby lake. When he had bandaged his wound with the help of leaves. He cut two long bamboos. We will be with your brothers before the sun goes down! Why are you wasting your time with me? Page Six: Rahan cannot let you die in the jungle! And then Rahan is curious about everything. He wants to know about your strange village, which you say is built on water! Remembering how the hunters of his horde brought back the most game, the son of Crao made a kind of travois, rudimentary but solid. Shortly after, following Karok’s instructions, he dragged him into the jungle. It was an exhausting hike. And it was interrupted for a moment by the passage of a deep ravine. You can skip it easily. But I cannot! Leave me here Rahan! No! Rahan probably still has enough strength to get you to the other side! It is impossible! No one could! Page Seven: The son of Crao pushed Karok to the edge of the Ravine. The long bamboos of the Travois slid to the other side, but were still too short to lean on. Rahan picked up his momentum and leapt across the chasm. And now you have to trust Rahan! He had to bend down to grab the ends of the bamboos. His plan required uncommon strength. Hold on tight Karok! Because as soon as the body of the injured person no longer touched the hard rock, he would support all the weight! Watch out Karok! Here we go! Let us hope the bamboos will survive! There was a sudden jolt and Rahan had to use all his strength not to be lifted from the ground. Ra-ha-ha! Page Eight: The travois bent over the abyss, while the son of Crao pulled it to him. But the bamboo held, and Karok held on! A moment later. Karok will never forget what you did for him! He will ask the wizard of the clan to welcome you as a brother! The sun was disappearing behind the volcano when the two men finally arrived in sight of the large lake. The sight of the huts erected over the water amazed Rahan. Who had never seen a lakeside village before. A very long bridge linked this village to the shore of the lake. Fishermen rushed along there. The men look agitated! Some men had recognized Karok on the travois. Questions flew, to which the wounded man answered. Rahan was generous, he took care of me and brought me back here! Page Nine: Cranaa has seen Rahan. He says that he is the one who provokes the new anger of the mountain of fire and forbids him to be in the village! A pout of bitterness puckered Karok’s lips. Cranaa is the clan's wizard. I can do nothing against his orders Rahan! Leaving the son of Crao on the shore, the fishermen were carrying their wounded companion along the deck. A dull rumble shook the ground. Flee Rahan. Flee! The "Mountain of Fire" tells you that he is angry! He will kill you tonight! A new rumble arose that reminded Rahan of those of the Blue Mountain before it had spewed its fiery entrails on Crao's horde! Page Ten: That night Rahan had been able to protect himself under the rocks! But where will he take refuge here?? The side of the volcano fell almost sheer to the shore which offered no shelter. Rahan understands why the clan of Karok built their village on the water. Over there, the fishermen have nothing to fear from torrents of fire! Cries rose from the village as proof that there was a quarrel. Karok demands that we welcome Rahan, and Cranaa the sorcerer opposes it! Such was, indeed, the reason for the quarrel. Why does Cranna want to abandon a generous hunter like Rahan to the wrath of the Mountain of Fire!? It is cowardice! Page Eleven: It is the presence of this enemy on our territory that irritates the "Mountain of Fire"! Listen! Listen to it!! The growls were getting louder, and more frequent too. When would the volcano spit its fire and incandescent rocks skyward? In a moment perhaps! The rapidly falling night gave an idea to the son of fierce ages. The Lake Clan will not see Rahan approaching! He was slipping into the black waters when a terrible tremor shook the cliff. The sky immediately flared up. Stones crackled on the surface, around him and he thought he was reliving the terrifying night of previous times. That of the blue mountain, the one where all his brothers had joined the territory of the shadows! Page Twelve: Uninterrupted jets of fire sprung from the crater from which overflowed a thick mud, flaming more than the fires of the setting sun. The torrent of lava was indeed breaking on the shore, towards the footbridge which linked the lakeside village to the mainland. Cries of terror rose from the village towards which Rahan swam. In a moment, the bridge will burn! Why do they not destroy it? Huddled between the piles the son of Crao could hear the stupid incantations of Cranaa, which implored the gods of the mountain. That wizard better act! It is not by whining like this that he will save his people! No one heard Rahan hoist himself between the huts. Page Thirteen: Over there, the bridge was beginning to catch fire. The lava spreading on the shore, flowed into the lake from which rose a barrier of vapor. The gods do not hear our plea! The lake clan must flee their village! Rahan could not help intervening. Why flee! All you have to do is destroy a part of this bridge that leads the fire towards you! The wizard glared at him with rage. What are you doing among us, you who have angered the fiery mountain!? Know this demon, brothers!! The men overcame the son of fierce ages. Tie him on to the board walk! The spirits tell me his body will stop the fire! Page Fourteen: Rahan struggled vigorously, throwing two fishermen into the water. Argh! Ah! But others arose, which carried him away. A moment later, he was firmly bound to the piles that supported the trunks, in the middle of the gangway. On the side of the shore, this one was devoured by the flames which quickly approached the captive. They had left Rahan his knife but, with his legs and arms spread, he could not draw the weapon. He could hear the crackling of the fire, now very close. He also heard the clamor of the fishermen who piled into their boats to evacuate the village. Page Fifteen: The high flames were only a few steps from the prisoner when. Courage, Rahan! I will not give up on you!! Crawling on the bridge, Karok had just appeared. His injury must still have been hurting him, for every movement wrung a moan from him. Cranaa says and does anything to remain the wizard of the clan! Karok had seized the ivory knife and cut the bonds. Rahan thanks Karok! Oh! Attention! Argh! Disfigured by hate, Cranaa-the-sorcerer rushed onto the bridge. Karok has come to the aid of the mountain of fire! Karok must die! Page Sixteen: The long harpoon he was brandishing was not released. Karok, faster, had thrown the ivory knife. Argh! Cranaa spun around and disappeared under the waters where the reflections of the blaze danced. The son of Crao plunged behind him to retrieve his weapon. Under the effect of the spreading molten lava the waters had become lukewarm. Rahan appeared a moment later on the surface. Hurry Karok! We can still save the village! The two men busied themselves, one pulling the bindings, the other pushing back the trunks. The gap thus made in the bridge would prevent the fire from progressing. Page Seventeen: Cries of joy rose from the boats. The volcano finally died down and the fire that threatened the village was stopped by the hole in the bridge. These cries greeted the son of Crao who, supporting Karok, returned to the huts. This idea of destroying the footbridge had never occurred to us! That is why our village has already been struck three times by fire! Each time, we had to build it again. But why not rebuild it somewhere else? Why stay so close to the mountain of fire, at the mercy of his anger? Because this part of the lake has by far the most fish! And the shore is full of game. When the mountain of fire does not ravage it! Page Eighteen: In the calm that had returned, the footbridge was completely consumed. The son of fierce ages, pensive, observed the sky still heavy with reddish smoke. Where would his destiny take him when he left these fishers? He consulted the ivory knife once more. As the weapon slowly turned, an idea suddenly crossed his mind. The bridge! Rahan knows how to make a bridge that will not be destroyed by the mountain of fire! The clan can throw a new bridge that would spin like this cutlass! Karok! Karok was confused. From dawn an intense activity reigned on the lake. From a forest spared by the lava, the fishermen brought back huge bamboos. Others were bringing huge stones from the shore. Others carved thick pillars. Page Nineteen: Rahan went from one group to another, who on his advice, were erecting between the village and the shore, a strange building on stilts. On this platform stones were aligned around the central pillar, which would serve as a pivot for the footbridge. Setting it up was a tough job. But the enthusiasm and ardor of the fishermen got the better of it! Our bridge is finished, Karok! It will be enough to pull on these vines so that it turns at will. Like the knife! Everyone held their breath when a group of men performed the maneuver for the first time. Sliding on the stones, the catwalk pivoted gently on the platform. Page Twenty: A clamor thundered as it crossed the lake. When the mountain of fire threatens your village, you will place it like this! Rahan deserves to become our leader! Why will you not stay with the lake clan? Karok will also be a good Chief! And Rahan wants to know how "Those-who-walk-upright" live beyond the great mountains. Beyond the great rivers. The son of Crao lived a few days in this lakeside village. Then one morning. Good bye Karok! Goodbye Brothers! Come back to us one day Rahan! When he was on the hill, he gazed for a moment at the green lake where the sun shone. As the fishermen moved merrily across the gangplank, he reached for his knife. And he entrusted to the ivory weapon the task of guiding his steps. Index of Rahan Episodes. 01 https://rumble.com/v2e75py-rahan-episode-1-the-secret-of-the-sun.-by-roger-lecureux.html 02 https://rumble.com/v2f3748-rahan.-episode-two.-the-crazy-horde.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 03 https://rumble.com/v2gh0g2-rahan.-episode-three.-the-fish-trap.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puketm-comic.html 04 https://rumble.com/v2hns8g-rahan.-episode-four.-the-magic-stone-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic.html 05 https://rumble.com/v2janck-rahan.-episode-five.-the-liquid-tomb.-rahan-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-co.html 06 https://rumble.com/v2jvwsu-rahan.-episode-six.-the-mammoth-god.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 07 https://rumble.com/v2l18ou-rahan.-episode-seven.-the-country-with-the-white-skin.-by-roger-lecureux.-a.html 08 https://rumble.com/v2m98g8-rahan.-episode-eight.-the-long-claw.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 09 https://rumble.com/v2nihgq-rahan.-episode-nine.-the-arc-of-heaven.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 10 https://rumble.com/v2osm2u-rahan.-episode-ten.-the-flat-beast.-by-roger-lecureux.a-puke-tm-comic..html 11 https://rumble.com/v2q1v66-rahan.-episode-eleven.-the-men-with-heavy-legs.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-t.html 12 https://rumble.com/v2r2f1i-rahan.-episode-twelve.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 13 https://rumble.com/v2rpsta-rahan.-episode-thirteen.-as-crao-would-have-done.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke.html 14 https://rumble.com/v2t7cf2-rahan.-episode-fourteen.-the-new-trap.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic..html 15 https://rumble.com/v2ua0ip-rahan.-episode-fifteen.-death-to-the-manta.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-co.html 16 https://rumble.com/v2uoblj-rahan.-episode-sixteen.-the-necklace-of-claws.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm.html 17 https://rumble.com/v2uom53-rahan.-episode-seventeen.-the-weapon-that-flies.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-.html 18 https://rumble.com/v2vtlo2-rahan.-episode-eighteen.-the-demon-tree.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-comic.html 19 https://rumble.com/v2x9lgs-rahan.-episode-nineteen.-the-forbidden-shore.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-.html 20 https://rumble.com/v2x9yfg-rahan.-episode-twenty.-the-chief-of-chiefs.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-co.html 21 https://rumble.com/v2yd4vo-rahan.-episode-twenty-one.-the-cliff-of-sacrifice.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puk.html 22 https://rumble.com/v2yqsxy-rahan.-episode-twenty-two.-the-white-arrow.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm-co.html 23 https://rumble.com/v309cwo-rahan.-episode-twenty-three.-the-people-of-the-trees.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-.html 24 https://rumble.com/v31h0ps-rahan.-episode-twenty-four.-the-ivory-knife..html 25 https://rumble.com/v32l96o-rahan.-episode-twenty-five.-the-territory-of-shadows.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-.html 26 https://rumble.com/v32svci-rahan.-episode-twenty-six.-the-mammoth-killer.-by-roger-lecureux.-a-puke-tm.html

Rahan. Episode Twenty-Six. The Mammoth Killer. The son of Crao, charged by a large mammoth, had made the mistake of taking refuge in an isolated tree. He was now at the mercy of the monster whose trunk furiously whipped the lower branches. Rahan should have fled to the forest! "Two-Teeth" will uproot the tree! Baroom! Crack! Each thrust of the mammoth shook the trunk dangerously and roots were already springing from the ground. Page Two: The Ivory Knife that the son of fierce ages hugged was useless to him. “Two-Teeth” is too large! Rahan cannot strike at the Heart! The son of fierce ages, hugging his ivory cutlass, suddenly fell in a crash of branches, burying him under a maze of foliage. Through a gap he glimpsed the fearsome tusks of the mammoth that was charging. Rahan will no longer see the sun or the moon. He will rejoin the land of the shadows. But the monster stopped, sending a terrifying roar skyward. A long but solid spear was stuck in his side. Strok! Rahan made out the hunter who, at thirty paces, was already throwing a second spear. Rahan thanks you for helping him brother! Oh! Page Three: Turning his anger against this unknown hunter, the monster charged heavily at him. The man shouted a hateful challenge and fled to the forest. You aided Rahan! Rahan will aide you against the “Two-Tooth”! The hunter, who had just reached the thick copse, could have disappeared there. But he waited until the mammoth was very close to him to take his course again! Rahan understands! You want to lure "Two-Tooth" into a trap! The man was now rushing into a clearing. Rahan saw him running nimbly on a bamboo trunk, lying on some grass. Grasses that did not have the same hue as the surroundings. Page Four: A moment later, the great mammoth tumbled into the pit concealed by this carpet of grass. Without worrying about the monster, the hunter disappeared into the thicket. The clamor which arose nearby, perhaps explained his flight? But why was such a brave hunter running away from his clan? A club flying out of the bushes hit the neck of the son of Crao. He did not see the men appear, brandishing spears. When he came to he was hanging upside down by his feet. Who are you? Why are you behaving like an enemy in our territory? I am Rahan, son of Crao! And I am not an enemy! So why did he trap a "two-tooth"? The man was pointing to the pit where the mammoth was dying. Page Five: There will soon be no more “two-teeth” on our territory! The clan watched in dismay the monster impaled on stakes at the bottom of the trap. And the horde will go hungry again! Why did Rahan kill that "Two-Tooth" that we had been saving for ages! Rahan would have killed it if he could have! But it was not Rahan who lured it into this trap. It was a brave hunter with fiery hair, whom Rahan could not even thank! Ho-Nak! You have heard of him!? It is a new crime of Ho-Nak against the horde!! Untie Rahan! Page Six: The clan remained hostile. Rahan is not telling the truth! He lies to save his life! Do not listen to him, Baho!! How would Rahan know that Ho-Nak had fire hair if he had not seen it? And Rahan could not know the location of this trap! That is why Baho believes him! With the help of the ivory knife, the chief of the clan himself freed the son of the fierce ages. Who allowed himself to be led to the hunter's village. Why does the horde resent Ho-Nak for killing a "Two-Tooth"? Because Ho-Nak has lost his mind! It's the fourth "Two-Tooth" that he slaughters unnecessarily! Page Seven: Baho narrated how Ho-Nak had abandoned the horde a few moons earlier. Ever since, the Fire-Haired Man hunted for himself alone. Or rather Ho-Nak does not hunt! He kills for the pleasure of killing! And the meat of the "Deux-Dents" that he slaughters rots on the spot, in the traps or the swamps! If we do not stop this killing there won't be a single "Two-Tooth" alive in the bad season. And hunger will decimate the horde! For days and days we have been looking for Ho-Nak! Alas. He is a skilled hunter. He always knew how to escape us! Rahan is also a skilled hunter. But he does not approve of Ho-Nak's conduct! Oh! What are you doing? Page Eight: On an order from Baho, men overpowered him, and snatched away his ivory Knife. You gave Baho an idea! Ho-Nak escapes us because he knows all the hunters of the horde. But he does not know Rahan! If you find him you can approach him without arousing his mistrust! Bring back Ho-Nak and we will return your knife to you! The son of Crao had no choice. He either abandoned his precious knife to Baho. Or he could track down the man to whom he owed his life! Rahan will go hunting this very night! If you succeed, our wives and children will owe you a great deal! Page Nine: The rough hands of the chief gently caressed the hair of his children. Rahan understood the feelings of these starving hunters. But delivering them a man without whom he would have joined the "Territory of Shadows". Was that not a crime? If it had not been for the ivory knife, he might have abandoned these hunters to their quarrels. But there was the knife! So, at nightfall, he went hunting. Not far from the trap, he found Ho-Nak's tracks. Despite the darkness he knew, just by feeling the ground. Whether he was following the track of an animal. Or a man. At dawn, the traces of the hunter were linked to those of a mammoth. Ho-Nak has found another "Two-Tooth" thought Rahan. He is following his trail! Page Ten: The great river shimmered in the sun when he saw the man. This one hardened the points of his spears in the fire and his hair was the color of flames. It was Ho-Nak the mammoth-slayer! He straightened up suddenly! Who are you? I have never seen you in this territory! I am Rahan, whom you saved from a "Deux-Dents" yesterday! The man was confused. From his expression, Rahan understood that the man had not seen him, the day before, under the uprooted tree. Ho-Nak did not act to help Rahan, only to lure the "Two-Tooth" into the trap! Made as it was in the fierce ages, this thought made the task less difficult. Rahan promised Baho to bring you home! The spear point was still smoking when he got up. Page Eleven: Mine have been tracking me for ages! They have become my enemies and since Rahan obeys Baho, He is also my enemy! He will die. Like a "Two-Tooth"! The spear shrieked in the ears of the son of Crao who had foreseen this reaction. Ho-Nak will learn that Rahan is more agile than a "Two-Tooth"! The hunter had no time to grab another spear. The two men rolled on the muddy bank. Cries of joy arose and the children of Baho emerged from the thickets. We have been following you, Rahan! We wanted to see how you would capture Ho-Nak!! The furious hand-to-hand combat had dragged the two men into the water, fortunately though the river was not very deep. Ho-Nak was as tough as his opponent. Page Twelve: He took over for a moment and now Rahan's face was underwater. Ho-Nak meant you no harm. But if you obey Baho, you must die! The children followed the fight with anxiety. Would the fearsome Ho-Nak drown Rahan!? No! The son of Crao had freed himself, bracing himself on his back. His Legs exploded, catapulting the mammoth-slayer. Ra-ha-ha! As the two men stood up, the trumpeting of a "Two-Tooth" resounded. Over there, the mammoth was charging the children! Hate twisted the features of Ho-Nak, who rushed to the bank in front of Rahan. No! You will not kill those children, “Two-Tooth"!! Rahan was confused. Page Thirteen: Pulling out the spear stuck in the ground, Ho-Nak, with incredible courage, went to meet the monster! A few steps from the beast, he threw his weapon. It penetrated the breast of the Mammoth which continued its course. And the son of Crao saw the hunter knocked down, and disappear between the huge legs of the monster. The audacious diversion of Ho-Nak had allowed the children of Baho to take refuge in the Bushes. Ho-Nak saved us! He, He, Sacrificed himself for us! The mammoth was now charging Rahan, who had armed himself with one of Ho-Nak's spears. Page Fourteen: The spear, thrown with violence, flew towards the hairy chest and penetrated deeply. Schronk! Ra-ha-ha! The sky darkened above Rahan, who felt as if an avalanche of hair was burying him. Ah! Argh! Something suddenly encircled him and the sky appeared again. Snatched up by the trunk, he saw the monstrous spine of the “Two-Tooth”. He also glimpses there, Ho-Nak coming back to him. Then the whole landscape turned upside down. The Mammoth had thrown him to the ground! Stunned by the shock, he vaguely distinguished the monster which, after having moved away, was going to charge him again. Page Fifteen: Rahan saw that he was only a few paces from the fire over which Ho-Nak had hardened the points of his spears. The last of these spears had remained in the fire and the hardwood was beginning to blaze. Ra-ha-ha! Rahan became aware that the ground was shaking behind him. The mammoth was attacking! Approach “Two-Tooth”! Rahan is waiting for you!! Ho-Nak, from afar, was yelling vengeful encouragement! Kill him Rahan! Kill him! Then I will know peace! As the monster came upon him, the son of Crao leapt aside. You won't surprise Rahan twice "Two-Tooth"! Page Sixteen: The tip of the flaming spear that he had just thrown disappeared into the mammoth's thick fleece. Ra-ha-ha! A flame rose immediately, devouring the side of the beast. It ran to the spine, and wrapped around its paws. A moment later, the entire fleece of the mastodon was blazing like a torch. Barking with fear and pain, it fled towards the forest. The children arrived and Ho-Nak rushed towards Rahan. Hatred had fled from the hunter's gaze. The last “Two-tooth” will not go far! The last!? What does Ho-Nak mean? Ho-Nak had sworn to kill five "Two-Tooths"! This was the fifth! Page Seventeen: But why kill five "Two-Teeth"? Because a few moons ago Ho-Nak had a wife and four children. And Ho-Nak no longer has a wife or children! All of them were massacred by a herd of "Two-Toothed" as they were going to the river! Ho-Nak has sworn to avenge them by killing a "Two-Tooth" for everyone he loves! Why did not Baho say this to Rahan!? Baho claims that the interests of the horde must be placed above their feelings! He may be right, but he would have to understand Ho-Nak! Rahan understands him! What will Rahan do!? Page Eighteen: What he promised Baho: To bring Ho-Nak home! Mine will kill me! No! Cried the Children. We will say Ho-Nak saved us! Baho will forgive you! The son of Crao watched Baho's children with a smile. An idea came to him. There may be a better way to convince Baho!! The sun was sinking behind the distant mountains when Rahan and the Mammoth-Killer arrived at the village. There reigned the greatest excitement. Rahan kept his promise, Baho. He Brings Back Ho-Nak! To the devil with Ho-Nak! Can you not see my Pain!? My two sons have been missing since last night! No one has been able to find their traces! But what do you have!? Rahan's face darkened. Page Nineteen: Rahan discovered the corpses of two young children, near the river. They had been crushed, trampled and mangled by the "Two Teeth"! Baho seemed to faint, but he pulled himself together and his gaze filled with hatred. If these corpses are those of his sons. Baho will kill two "Two-Tooth" with his own hands!! One to avenge my son Kaik! One as vengeance for my son Look!! Ho-Nak did not react any differently, Baho! But you, you will not have to go hunting! What? Rahan cried out and the two children appeared on the crest of a mound. Look! Kaik! Page Twenty: They happily descended the slope. Why did you lie Rahan? So that you could better understand the feeling that Ho-Nak has more reason to kill "Two-teeth"! But Rahan only half lied! Without Ho-Nak, you would never have seen your sons alive again! Shortly after, Kaik and Look relayed the death of the fifth mammoth. A death that finally brought peace to the heart and mind of Ho-Nak. This night would have pleased Crao! He liked so much that “Those-who-walk-upright” understood each other! Rahan savored this moment, when a horde finds one of his own. Crao's son lived among these hunters until the morning when, eager for new horizons, he left. The last vision he had of this clan was that of Baho and Ho-Nak who saluted him with the same gesture.

Rahan. Episode Twenty-Five. The Territory of Shadows. Panting, the son of Crao let himself fall in front of the swamps. He no longer felt the strength to flee from these mysterious beings, who had been hunting him since the moon shone. Rahan cannot defy the water that swallows "Those-who-walk-upright"! He caught his breath as he stared at the shimmering, ominous surface of the swamps. From all sides, strange murmurs reached him, interspersed with heart rending sighs. If Rahan lets himself be consumed by fear, he will not be able to fight anymore! Page Two: There remained in this son of fierce ages, a certain fear of night and darkness. But he still dominated it. Who are you "Beasts-of-the-night"!? Show yourself to Rahan! Show yourself! His hand clutched the polished handle of the ivory knife, restoring his confidence. Haunting wailing arose constantly from the forest. The gleams of torches echoed behind the thickets. The son of Crao felt dread seep through to his veins. Rahan is dead! Rahan has violated the "Territory of Shadows"! The lights were not torches, as he had thought. They were haloed human skulls! This is how "Those-who-walk-upright" become. When they have joined the "Territory of Shadows"! Page Three: Rahan has disturbed the peace of the dead! And the dead are looking for him, to take him with them! The skulls appeared here and there, above the thickets, as if floating in the void. The son of Crao had formed another image of this "Territory of shadows". From which no one had ever returned. He had always thought of a realm of silence and eternal stillness. He pricks himself slightly with his knife to see if he was not the victim of a nightmare. Rahan does not dream! Rahan is alive! So. Why is he in the "Territory of Shadows"!? The moans still rose as the skulls haloed in light approached. Page Four: But why do these dead no longer have bodies? And why do their heads float so high?? A scene suddenly surged from his memory. The one where, one night, he had lit a fire behind a mammoth skull to impress his enemies. His calm returned. Hunters may be doing the same thing, to scare Rahan! A moment later, the son of Crao was crawling silently through the brushwood. He circled around the closest of the luminescent skulls. And. Rahan was right! It is just a ruse of "Those-who-walk-upright"! A man had his back to him. Brandishing a bamboo where a skull was fixed. Page Five: Rahan does not fear you man! The hunter turned around but did not hear the whistle of the ivory knife. The blade stuck in the bamboo and the skull rolled on the ground. The flaming resin it contained flowed from an orbit. Rushing on the man, Rahan was already tearing away his long bamboo. Why are your people hunting Rahan! The hunter had no time to answer. Alerted by the rising flames, all those of his clan came running. The son of fierce ages found himself surrounded by these men who waved their macabre emblems. You will not capture Rahan! Rahan will escape you!! Page Six: He no longer had time to snatch his knife, but an idea came alive in him. He struck the nearby tree. Ra-ha-ha! And the ivory blade went right through the bamboo! The son of Crao now had an unusual weapon, with which he could keep his opponents at a distance. These fell back in disorder when a breach opened up in their ranks. Rahan does not kill “Those-who-walk-upright”! But he does not allow himself to be captured like a beast! The ominous swamps shimmered under the huge moon. He rushed there! Page Seven: He knew the treachery of these muddy swamps which stick and suck at his feet. But the water was not deep enough to swim in. But Rahan has only this path to escape the "Fire Skull" hunters! The luminescent heads were still floating above the copses. But those who wielded them dared not venture into the swamps. Rahan felt the soft mud beneath his feet as he stalked towards a clump of tall reeds. He was reaching that one when a saurian sprang from it. Back "Little Wood"! Rahan will not be afraid! Page Eight: The crocodile's tail whipped the reeds. He faced the man and his mouth gaped open. The son of Crao struck with his strange, improvised weapon at the mud-covered side of the monster. His cry of victory ran over the swamps, and drowned the distant laments of the men with the "Skulls-of-fire". Ra-ha-ha! The Hunters had spears. Why did they not throw them at Rahan?? Luck seemed to be on Rahan's side as he found firmer ground beneath his feet. The water only reached his knees. Page Nine: The moon lit up a small island, where on a few trees hung garlands of vines. Rahan will be able to wait there for the sunrise! He was very close to the island when he felt sucked into the mud! The water came suddenly to his thighs! He got bogged down!! Instinctively, he raised his bamboo, hooking a vine with the knife. But he was wrong to believe himself safe. For the vine suddenly yielded under the edge of the ivory blade! And the son of Crao got bogged down again! Up to the belly. Up to the chest. This time, Rahan will experience the true "Territory of Shadows"! Page Ten: The muddy water was now up to his neck. He tried to hook another vine, but in vain. Rahan comes to join you Crao! Oh! When he thought he was seeing the moon for the last time. His feet met a hard body! No doubt the roots of one of the trees on the island! Feeling these roots with his toes and heels, he slowly freed himself from the filth of the mud. Ra-ha-ha! A moment later, he climbed up onto the island. And then disputed the place with young crocodiles! Page Eleven: These saurians were too small to be dangerous. The son of Crao easily pushed them back into the swamp. In the darkness on the side of the forest still rose the lamentations. They know the swamps better than Rahan! Why are they not chasing him anymore? This island was only a precarious refuge and Rahan hesitated. To abandon it was to take the risk of getting bogged down again in the mud. But to stay there until dawn was to find himself surrounded on all sides by the "Skull of Fire" hunters! All these grouped "Skulls" indicated that down there, on the mainland, the hunters had gathered and conferred. Page Twelve: If Rahan falls into their hands, his skull will one day swing from the top of a bamboo! As the men divided to circle the marshes, the son of the fierce ages hesitated no more. He abandoned the island. A moment later, he probed the mud with his bamboo, and sought the firmest ground before taking a step. Sometimes he sank to his knees, and sometimes he sank to his thighs. And had to employ all his energy to free himself. Rahan has never crossed such dangerous territory! Page Thirteen: The luminescent skulls, in the distance, proved that the hunters skirted the shore and did not abandon their human game! The son of Crao suddenly saw a fissure in the bank. This constriction separated this swamp from another area, which he could not see. He also caught a glimpse of the tree trunk which formed a bridge over this constriction. The hunters threw it there to cross the fault!! Rahan is saved, if he gets to this tree before the "Skull-of-fire" men! Redoubling his efforts, he soon arrived under the trunk. He grabbed onto dry land with a single bound. Page Fourteen: But the slime that stuck to his legs prevented him from making such a leap. He looked at the branches and. His face lit up. The son of Crao, who knew how to take advantage of everything, brandished his bamboo. If the bamboo does not split, Rahan is safe! Wedging the handle and the blade of the ivory knife in a fork formed by a branch. And while the dull lamentations approached, he tore himself from the mud, and climbed towards the bridge tree. He was beginning to hoist himself up when two "Skulls-of-fire" sprang from the darkness! The hunters carrying them rushed towards the trunk! Page Fifteen: But these men only lasted a few steps on the tree whose roots Rahan vigorously shook. Vlouf! Ha-ha-ha! When you get out of there, Rahan will be far away! And up high! The son of Crao was already climbing an almost vertical mound. His cutlass, stuck in the bamboo, facilitated this hard ascent. And he launched as a challenge his cry of victory. Ra-ha-ha! When a rock broke loose under the ivory blade! Oh! It struck him violently in the forehead and he let go, falling into the void towards the swamps! Page Sixteen: Unconscious, he rested on the mud which had cushioned his fall. The moon lit up his body. His body slowly became stuck in the mud. The hunters he had pitched into the swamp emerged from it not far from him. They caught sight of him, and terror paralyzed them for a moment. Then they began to howl, alerting the horde. On the two banks connected by the bridge tree, men came running. The most audacious jumped on the mud and approached Rahan, still unconscious. The lamentations of the "Skulls-of-fire" hunters had given way to shouts of joy. Page Seventeen: When the son of the fierce ages awoke, the sun blazed in the sky. He was lying on a long flat rock. His "Weapon" was near him. All around the rock were piles of necklaces and furs. You deserve these gifts, you who come back from the "Territory of Shadows"! Every time the big moon appears, we celebrate our deaths. We wander all night. Around the swamps, praying for them to return from the "Territory of Shadows"! When. When we saw you, we knew that our pleas were finally heard! For the first time a man had returned from the kingdom of the dead! But why did you run away from us? Our horde only wanted to celebrate your resurrection! Rahan now understood the laments of his pursuers. Page Eighteen: They thought Rahan had torn himself out of "Shadow territory"! And Rahan fled all night from hunters who only wanted to celebrate!! The son of Crao could have lied, taking advantage of the credulity of these men. He did not. Rahan is just a hunter like you! Rahan had strayed into your territory and he was never in that of the shadows! A murmur of disappointment rose from the horde. Rahan believes "Those-Who-walk-standing" never return from the "Territory of Shadows"! The chief stopped the gesture of a man who raised his spear. No! You don't kill a hunter who tells the truth! Page Nineteen: Rahan could have fooled the horde. We would have adored him as we adore the sun-god! But Rahan preferred the truth to the lie! He will now be our brother! The chief's last words were those that the son of Crao liked to hear. The surface of the marshes in the distance was dazzling in the sun. Will Rahan stay with us? Game is abundant, and our horde lives happily. Rahan observed the knife stuck in the bamboo. The idea of a new weapon was already born in his inventive spirit. Rahan will stay for a few days! Then he will go in search of other clans, other hordes! Rahan wants to learn it all! To know everything about "Those-who-walk-upright"! Page Twenty: The son of Crao lived among these men as many days as a hand has fingers. He spent them cutting a long, flat flint. From this flint bound in a split bamboo, he gave birth to a new weapon. Lighter than the club, more effective than the axe. On the morning of his departure, he offered it to the leader of the marsh horde. May she help you hunt, Craziik! But let her never hit "Those-who-walk-upright"! When he disappeared under the lights of the east, doubt returned to some hunters. Perhaps it was death that taught him to make this weapon that mows down game? The representation of death, which men later imagined, did it not originate on that night of fierce times when a primitive horde believed that Rahan had returned from the "Territory of Shadows"? Who Knows!?

The Iron Dream. By Norman Spinrad. Let Adolf Hitler transport you to a far-future Earth, where only FERIC JAGGAR and his mighty weapon, the Steel Commander, stand between the remnants of true humanity and annihilation at the hands of the totally evil Dominators and the mindless mutant hordes they completely control. Lord of the Swastika is recognized as the most vivid and popular of Hitler's science-fiction novels by fans the world over, who honored it with a Hugo as Best Science-Fiction Novel of 1954. Long out of print, it is now once more available in this new edition, with an Afterword by Homer Whipple of New York University. See for yourself why so many people have turned to this science-fantasy novel as a beacon of hope in these grim and terrifying times. Other Science-Fiction Novels by Adolf Hitler: EMPEROR OF THE ASTEROIDS. THE BUILDERS OF MARS. FIGHT FOR THE STARS. THE TWILIGHT OF TERRA. SAVIOR FROM SPACE. THE MASTER RACE. THE THOUSAND YEAR RULE. THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL. TOMORROW THE WORLD. About the Author. Adolf Hitler was born in Austria on April 20, 1889. As a young man he migrated to Germany and served in the German army during the Great War. After the war, he dabbled briefly in radical politics in Munich before finally emigrating to New York in 1919. While learning English, he eked out a precarious existence as a sidewalk artist and occasional translator in New York's bohemian haven, Greenwich Village. After several years of this freewheeling life, he began to pick up odd jobs as a magazine and comic illustrator. He did his first interior illustration for the science-fiction magazine Amazing in 1930. By 1932, he was a regular illustrator for the science-fiction magazines, and, by 1935, he had enough confidence in his English to make his debut as a science-fiction writer. He devoted the rest of his life to the science fiction genre as a writer, illustrator, and fanzine editor. Although best known to present-day SF fans for his novels and stories. Hitler was a popular illustrator during the Golden Age of the thirties, edited several anthologies, wrote lively reviews, and published a popular fanzine. Storm, for nearly ten years. He won a posthumous Hugo at the 1955 World Science-Fiction Convention for Lord of the Swastika, which was completed just before his death in 1953. For many years, he had been a popular figure at SF conventions, widely known in science-fiction fandom as a wit and nonstop raconteur. Ever since the book's publication, the colorful costumes he created in Lord of the Swastika have been favorite themes at convention masquerades. Hitler died in 1953, but the stories and novels he left behind remain as a legacy to all science-fiction enthusiasts. Chapter One. With a great groaning of tired metal and a hiss of escaping steam, the roadsteamer from Gormond came to a halt in the grimy yard of the Pormi depot, a mere three hours late; quite a respectable performance by Borgravian standards. Assorted, roughly humanoid, creatures shambled from the steamer displaying the usual Borgravian variety of skin hues, body parts, and gaits. Bits of food from the more or less continuous picnic that these mutants had held throughout the twelve-hour trip clung to their rude and, for the most part, threadbare clothing. A sour stale odor clung to this gaggle of motley specimens as they scuttled across the muddy courtyard toward the unadorned concrete shed that served as a terminal. Finally, there emerged from the cabin of the steamer a figure of startling and unexpected nobility: a tall, powerfully built true human in the prime of manhood. His hair was yellow, his skin was fair, his eyes were blue and brilliant. His musculature, skeletal structure, and carriage were letter-perfect, and his trim blue tunic was clean and in good repair. Feric Jaggar looked every inch the genotypically pure human that he in fact was. It was all that made such prolonged close confinement with the dregs of Borgravia bearable; the quasi-men could not help but recognize his genetic purity. The sight of Feric put mutants and mongrels in their place, and for the most part they kept to it. Feric carried his worldly possessions in a leather bag which he hefted easily; this enabled him to avoid the grubby terminal entirely and embark directly upon Ulm Avenue which led through the foul little border town toward the bridge over the Ulm by the shortest route possible. Today he would at last put the Borgravian warrens behind him and claim his birthright as a genotypically pure human and a Helder, with a spotless pedigree that was traceable back for twelve generations. With his heart filled with thoughts of his goal in fact and in spirit, Feric was almost able to ignore the sordid spectacle that assailed his eyes, ears, and nostrils as he loped up the bare earth boulevard toward the river. Ulm Avenue was little more than a muddy ditch between two rows of rude shacks constructed for the most part of crudely dressed timber, wattle, and rusted sheet-steel. Nevertheless, this singularly unimpressive track was apparently the pride and joy of the denizens of Pormi, for the fronts of these filthy buildings were festooned with all manner of garish lettering and rude illustrations advertising the goods to be had within, mostly local produce, or the castoff artifacts of the higher civilization across the Ulm. Moreover, many of the shopkeepers had set up street stands purveying rotten-looking fruit, grimy vegetables, and fly-specked meat; these fetid goods they hawked at the top of their lungs to the creatures which thronged the street, who in turn added to the din with shrill and argumentative cajolery. The rank odor, raucous jabbering, and generally unwholesome atmosphere reminded Feric of the great marketplace area of Gonnond, the Borgravian capital, where fate had confined him for so many years. As a child, he had been shielded from close contact with the environs of the native quarter; as a young man he had taken great pains, and at no little expense, to avoid such places as much as was practicable. Of course it had never been possible to avoid the sight of the sorts of mutants who crowded every nook and cranny of Gormond, and the gene pool here in Pormi appeared not one whit less debased than that which prevailed in the Borgravian capital. The skins of the street rabble here, as in Gormond, were a crazy quilt of mongrelized mutations. Blueskins, Lizardmen, Harlequins, and Bloodfaces were the least of it; at least it could be said that such creatures bred true to their own kind. But all sorts of mixtures prevailed, the scales of a Lizardman might be tinted blue or purple instead of green; a Blueskin might have the mottling of a Harlequin; the warted countenance of a Toadman might be an off-shade of red. The grosser mutations for the most part bred truer, if only because two such genetic catastrophes in the same creature ended more often than not in an unviable fetus. Many of the shopkeepers here in Pormi were dwarfs of one kind or another, hunchbacked, covered with wiry black hair, slightly pinheaded, many with secondary skin mutations, incapable of more strenuous labor. In a small town such as this, the more arcane mutants were less in evidence than in what passed for a Borgravian metropolis. Still, as Feric elbowed his way through the foul-smelling crowds, he spotted three Eggheads, their naked chitinous skulls gleaming redly in the warm sun, and brushed against a Parrotface. This creature whirled about at Feric's touch, clacking its great bony beak at him indignantly for a moment until it recognized him for what he was. Then, of course, the Parrotface lowered its rheumy gaze, instantly gave off flapping its obscenely mutated teeth, and muttered a properly humble "Your pardon, Trueman." For his part, Feric did not acknowledge the creature one way or the other, and quickly continued on up the street staring determinedly straight ahead. However, a few dozen yards up the street, a familiar floating feeling wafted gently through Feric's mind; this indeed gave him pause, for long experience had taught him that this psychic aura was sure indication that a Dominator was in the area. Sure enough, when Feric studied the row of shacks to his right, his eyes confirmed the proximity of a Dom, and the dominance pattern was hardly the subtlest he had ever encountered either. Five stalls sat on the street all in a line, presided over by three dwarfs, a Blueskin-Toadman mongrel with warty blue skin, and a Lizardman. All of these creatures displayed the slackness of expression and deadness of eye characteristic of mutants captured in a long-standing dominance pattern. The stalls themselves held meat, fruit, and vegetables in a loathsome state of advanced decay that should have rendered them totally unsalable, even by Borgravian standards. Nevertheless, hordes of mongrels and mutants flocked around these stands, snapping up the putrid goods at inflated prices without so much as a moment's haggling. Only the presence of a Dominator in the vicinity could account for such behavior. Gormond was richly infested with the monstrosities, since they naturally preferred large cities where victims abounded; that such a minor town as this was infected was clear indication to Feric that Borgravia was even further under the spell of Zind than he had imagined. His immediate impulse was to pause, seek out the Dom, and wring the monster's neck, but upon a moment's reflection, he decided that freeing a few wretched and worthless mutants from a dominance pattern was not really worth delaying his long-awaited exit from the cesspit of Borgravia a moment longer. Therefore, he continued on his way. At last, the street petered out and became a path through an unwholesome grove of stunted pine trees with purplish needles and twisted trunks covered with cankers. Though this could hardly be described as a scene of beauty, it was certainly a welcome respite from the boisterous foulness of the town itself. Shortly, the path turned slightly to the north, and began to parallel the south bank of the Ulm. Here Feric paused to stare northward across the wide calm waters of the river which demarked this section of the border between the fester of Borgravia and the High Republic of Heldon. Across the Ulm, the stately, genotypically pure oaks of the Emerald Wood marched in wooden ranks to the north bank of the river. To Feric, these genetically spotless trees growing out of the rich, uncontaminated black soil of Heldon epitomized what the High Republic stood for in an otherwise mongrelized and degenerate earth. As the Emerald Wood was a forest of genetically pure trees, so was Heldon itself a forest of genetically pure men, standing like a palisade against the mutated monstrosities of the genetic garbage heaps that surrounded the High Republic. As he proceeded farther up the path, the Ulm bridge became visible, a graceful arch of hewn stone and oiled stainless steel, an obvious product of superior Helder craftsmanship. Feric hastened his stride, and was soon able to note with satisfaction that Heldon had forced the wretched Borgravians to accept the humiliation of a Helder customs fortress on the Borgravian end of the bridge. The black, red, and white building astride the entrance to the bridge was painted in the Helder colors in lieu of a proper flag, but to Feric it still proudly proclaimed that no near-man would be permitted to contaminate an inch of pure human soil. As long as Heldon kept itself genetically pure and rigorously enforced its racial purity laws, the hope still lived that the earth might once again be the sole property of the true human race. Several paths from various directions converged on the customs fortress and, strangely enough, a sorry collection of mongrels and mutants were queued up outside the public portal, which was guarded by two purely ceremonial customs troops, armed only with standard-issue steel truncheons. It was a peculiar business indeed, for most of these creatures had no hope of passing a cursory examination by a blind moron. An obvious Lizardman stood right behind a creature whose legs had an extra joint. There were Blueskins and humpback dwarfs, an Egghead, and mongrels of all kinds; in short, a typical cross section of Borgravian citizenry. What deluded these poor devils into supposing that their like would be permitted to cross the bridge into Heldon? Feric wondered as he took his place in line behind a plain-dressed Borgravian with no apparent genetic defect. For his own part, Feric was more than prepared for the thorough genetic examination he would have to undergo before being certified a pure human and admitted to the High Republic; he welcomed the ordeal and heartily approved of its stringency. Although his spotless pedigree virtually assured certification, he had, at some pains and no little expense, verified his genetic purity beforehand, or at least done so to the extent possible in a country inhabited chiefly by mutants and mutant-human mongrels, where, no doubt, the genetic analysts themselves were thoroughly contaminated. Had both his parents not held certificates, had his pedigree not been spotless for ten generations, had he not been conceived in Heldon itself, though forced by the banishing of his father for so-called war crimes to endure a birth in Borgravia, Feric would not have dared to presume to seek admittance to the spiritual and racial homeland he had never seen. Though instantly acknowledged as a true man on sight throughout Borgravia and verified as such by what passed for genetic science in that mongrelized state, he eagerly looked forward to the only confirmation of his genetic purity that really counted: acceptance as a citizen by the High Republic of Heldon, sole bastion of the true genotype of man. Why then did such patently contaminated material presume to attempt to pass Helder customs? The Borgravian in front of him was a fair example. True his surface veneer of genetic purity was marred only by an acrid chemical odor exuded by his skin, but such an obvious somatic aberration was sure indication of thoroughly contaminated genetic material. The Helder genetic analyst would spot it in an instant, even without recourse to instruments. The Treaty of Karmak had forced Heldon to open its borders, but only to certifiable humans. Perhaps the answer was merely the pathetic desire of even the most genetically debased mongrel to gain admittance to the brotherhood of true men, a desire sometimes strong enough to override reason or the truth in the mirror. At any rate, the queue was moving along quite swiftly into the customs fortress; no doubt very rapid processing and rejection of most of the Borgravians was taking place inside. It was not long before Feric passed by the portal guards, through the portal itself, and stood on what might in a sense be regarded as Helder soil for the first time in his life. The interior of the customs fortress was unmistakably Helder, in sharp contrast to everything else south of the Ulm, where unfortunate circumstance had confined Feric during his growth to manhood. The large antechamber had a floor of smart red, black, and white tile, and similarly styled paintwork embellished the polished oaken walls. The chamber was brightened by powerful electric globes. What a far cry from the crudely finished, poured concrete interiors and tallow candles of the typical Borgravian public building! A few yards inside the portal, a Helder customs guard in a somewhat slovenly gray uniform with tarnished brasswork divided the queue into two streams. All the more obvious mutants and mongrels were directed across the chamber and out through a door in the far wall. Feric approved heartily, there was no point in wasting the time of a genetic analyst with shambling quasi-humans such as these. An ordinary customs guard was quite qualified to dismiss them without further examination. The smaller number of hopefuls that the guard directed through a nearer door included quite a number of very dubious cases, such as the foul-smelling Borgravian who preceded Feric, but nothing on the order of a Blueskin or Parrotface. However, as he approached the guard, Feric noticed a strange and disquieting thing. The guard seemed to nod to a good many of the mutants he guided into the reject line as if acknowledging familiarity; moreover, the Borgravians themselves acted as if they knew the drill, and, strangest of all uttered not a word of protest at their exclusion, indeed displayed little emotion at all. Could it be that these sorry creatures were all so below the human geno-type in intelligence that they were incapable of retaining memories for more than a day or so and thus returned day after day ritualistically? Feric had heard that such fixated behavior was not unknown in the real genetic sinkholes of Cressia and Arbona, but he had never observed anything of the like in Borgravia, where the gene pool was constantly enriched by the exile of native-born Helder who could not quite be certified true humans, but who certainly were close enough to bring the level of the Borgravian gene pool far above that of places like Arbona or Zind. As Feric reached the head of the queue, the customs guard addressed him in a flat, rather bored tone. "Day pass, citizen, or citizen candidate?" "Citizen candidate," Feric replied crisply. Surely the only conceivable pass into Heldon was an official certificate of genetic purity! Either you already held Helder citizenship or you applied for certification and were found pure or you were refused admission to Heldon. What was this impossible third category? The guard directed Feric into the smaller line with no more significant a gesture than the slack nodding of his head in the indicated direction. There was a pattern in all this, something about the whole tone of the operation, that Feric found profoundly disturbing, a wrongness that seemed to hover in the air, a deadness, a definite lack of the traditional Helder snap and dash. Had their daily isolation on the Borgravian side of the Ulm had some subtle detrimental effect on the esprit and will of these genetically robust Helder? Wrapped in these somewhat somber musings, Feric followed the queue through the indicated doorway and into a long narrow room paneled in pine set off tastefully with ornately carved wooden trim depicting typical scenes from the Emerald Wood. A counter of black stone, polished to a high gloss and accented with inlaid stainless steel, ran down the length of the room, separating the queue from the four Helder customs officers who stood behind it. These fellows seemed fine specimens of true humanity, but their uniforms were somewhat slovenly, and a certain proper soldierliness was absent from their bearing. They looked more like clerks in a money depository or a public post office than customs troops manning a citadel of genetic purity. Feric's uneasiness grew as the sour-reeking Borgravian preceding him finished his short interview with the first of the officers, wiped fingerprint ink off his hands with a rather soiled cloth, and followed the queue on down the line to the next Helder official. At the far end of the long room, Feric perceived the entrance to the bridge itself, where a guard armed with a truncheon and a pistol seemed to be passing an extremely dubious collection of genetic baggage on through to Heldon. In fact there was an insane perfunctory air about the whole operation. The first Helder officer was young, blond, and a prime example of the true human genotype; moreover, though Feric sensed a certain laxness in his demeanor, his uniform was better tailored than most of the others Feric had noticed, freshly pressed, and the brasswork was at least untarnished, if not exactly gleaming. Before him on the shiny black counter were a pile of forms, a scriber, a blotter, a soiled scrap of cloth, and an inkpad. The officer looked Feric straight in the eye, but the manliness of his gaze lacked a certain conviction. "Do you hold a certificate of genetic purity issued by the High Republic of Heldon?" he asked formally. "I am applying for certification and admission to the High Republic as a Citizen and a true man," Feric replied with a dignity he hoped was sufficient to the occasion. "So," the officer muttered diffidently, reaching for his scriber and the top form on the pile, and averting his blue eyes from Feric's person. "Let us dispose of the formalities. Name?" "Feric Jaggar," Feric answered proudly, hoping for a flicker of recognition. For although Heermark Jaggar had only been a cabinet subofficial at the time of the peace of Karmak, there were surely those in the fatherland who Still revered the names of the martyrs of Karmak. But the guard showed no recognition of the honor implicit in Feric's pedigree and wrote the name on the form in a casual, even somewhat imprecise hand. "Place of birth?" "Gormond, Borgravia." "Present citizenship?" Feric winced somewhat as he was forced to admit his technical Borgravian nationality. "However," he felt constrained to add, "both my parents were native Helder, certificate holders, and pure humans. My father was Heermark Jaggar, who, served as undersecretary of genetic evaluation during the Great War." "Surely you realize that not even the most illustrious pedigree can guarantee even a native-born Helder certification as a true man." Feric's fair skin reddened. "I merely wish to point out that my father was exiled not for genetic contamination but for service to Heldon. Like many other good Helder, he was victimized by the loathsome Treaty of Karmak." "It's none of my affair," the officer replied, inking Feric's fingertips and applying them to the proper boxes engraved on the form. "I'm not much interested in politics." "Genetic purity is the politics of human survival!" Feric snapped. "I suppose it is," the officer muttered inanely, handing him the odious ink rag, contaminated by the fingers of the mongrel in the queue before him, and by fate only knew how many others before that. Feric gingerly removed the ink from his fingers as best he could with a small unsoiled corner of the rag, while the young officer passed his form along to the Helder on his right. This officer was an older man with trimly cropped gray hair and a dignified waxed mustache; obviously he had been an impressive figure in his prime. Now his eyes were red and rheumy as if from fatigue, and his shoulders stooped as if with the actual physical weight of the tremendous responsibility they metaphorically bore, for on the shoulder of his tunic was the red caducous in the black fist emblematic of the genetic analyst. The analyst glanced at the form, then spoke in a diffident voice, without looking directly at Feric. "Trueman Jaggar, I am Doctor Heimat. It will be necessary to perform certain tests before issuing you a certificate of genetic purity." Feric could scarcely credit his ears. What sort of genetic analyst was this that would so state the obvious while implicitly granting him the honorific of "Trueman" beforehand? Where was their sufficient cause to explain the slackness and incredible lack of rigor in the bearing and manner of the men manning this customs fortress? Heimat passed the form to the underling at his right, a somewhat slender, fair young man with chestnut hair bearing the ensign of a scribe on his uniform. As the paper was handed over, Feric's attention was momentarily drawn to this scribe, and his puzzlement was instantly resolved in the most horrifying manner conceivable. For although the scribe appeared genetically pure to all but the highly sensitized eye, Feric knew for a certainty that this was a Dom! He could not have precisely specified the characteristics of the scribe which marked him as a Dominator, but the total gestalt of the creature's presense fairly shrieked Dom at him through all his known and perhaps several unknown senses: a certain rodential gleam in the creature's eyes, a subtle smugness about his bearing. Perhaps there were other guideposts that Feric perceived on an entirely subliminal level: a wrongness in the body odor detectable only to the back reaches of his brain, an actual broadcast of electromagnetic energy subtle enough to arouse his suspicion even though the dominance field was not being directed at his own person. Perhaps it was simply that Feric, a true man isolated for the most part among mutants and mongrels in a land heavily influenced by the Doms, had developed a psychic sensitivity to their presence that Helder who dwelt among their own kind lacked. At any rate, though constantly exposed to Dominators throughout his life, Feric had never been snared in a Dom's mental net, though at times his will had been severely taxed. This continuous exposure certainly enabled him to sniff out a Dom, whatever the subtleties of his method might be. And standing there before him with scriber and form in hand at the very shoulder of a Helder genetic analyst in a most critical position was one of the loathsome creatures! It explained everything. The whole garrison must be ensnared in varying degrees in the dominance pattern that this seemingly insignificant scribe had no doubt slowly and painstakingly constructed. It was monstrous! But what could be done? How could men trapped in the dominance net themselves be convinced of the presence of their master? Heimat had a small panoply of his science's paraphernalia out before him, but it seemed a paltry display; the Borgravian quack he had been forced to settle for in Gormond had employed a broader spectrum of tests than the Helder had equipped himself to perform. He handed Feric a large blue balloon. "Breathe into this, please," he said. "It's been chemically treated so that only the biochemical breath-profile associated with the pure human genotype will turn it green." Feric exhaled into, the balloon, knowing full well that this was one of the most basic of tests; innumerable mongrels had been known to have passed it, and, moreover, it was totally ineffective in weeding out Doms. Presently, the balloon turned a bright green. "Breath analysis, positive," Heimat called out, and the Dominator scribe, without looking at either of them, made the appropriate mark on the form. The analyst handed Feric a glass vial. "Expectorate into this, please. I will subject the composition of your saliva to chemical analysis." Feric spat into the vial, wishing fervently that it were the face of the Dominator, who now looked up and stared at him with an infuriatingly feigned mildness. Doctor Heimat diluted the saliva with water, then pipetted a bit of the liquid into each of a rack of ten glass tubes. From a series of bottles, he decanted various chemicals into the tubes, so that the clear liquid in each turned colors: black, aqua, yellow, brickorange, aqua again, red, once more yellow, yet again aqua, purple, and opaque white. "Saliva analysis, one hundred percent perfect," the genetic analyst called out. This test, taking ten separate characteristics of pure human saliva separately as genetic criteria rather than merely testing the total biochemical gestalt, had perforce a much greater precision. However, there were dozens of mutations from the true human norm that were in no way linked to the composition of saliva or breath, including the Dominator mutation itself, which could not be smelled out by somatic tests at all. Feric glared at the Dominator, daring the creature to test his will and reveal his true colors. But of course the scribe directed no psychic energies in his direction. Why should he expose himself to a passing stranger and thus risk the dissolution of his dominance pattern, when circumstances foreclosed the possibility of adding him to the string? Doctor Heimat affixed the twin electrodes of a P-meter to the skin of Feric's right palm with a gummy vegetable adhesive. The P-meter consisted of a device for detecting the minute changes in bioelectricity generated by psychic responses, and a pen-and-drum apparatus for recording the resultant psychic profile. Its adherents claimed that, properly used, it was efficacious in the detection of Doms. But it was impossible to be certain that the Doms had no conscious control over their psychic discharges and, therefore, could not feign a genotypically human profile by carefully calculated acts of will. "I'm going to make a series of statements and record your psychic responses," Heimat informed Feric diffidently. "You need not react verbally; the instrument is designed to measure your inward reaction." He then reeled off a set of stock statements quickly, mechanically, and without apparent emotion. "The human race is doomed to certain extinction. The human genotype is the best true breed of sapient animal yet evolved. No genetic material could have passed through the Time of Fire entirely uncontaminated. The highest instinct of any sapient species must be to perpetuate its kind at the expense of all other sapient species. Love is a cultural sublimation of sexual lust. I would sacrifice my own life for a comrade or lover." And so forth; a list of stimuli designed to elicit different patterns of psychic response from true men than from mutants and mongrels, especially Doms. Feric was quite dubious of the test's total validity, for a Dominator who could anticipate the order of statements by inside information or other means might very well be able to tailor his responses appropriately by filling his mind with thoughts calculated to produce the "human" galvanic response proper to the various statements. Still, when combined with a battery of more rigorous tests, it had considerable use; all but the most dominantly human mongrels, and perhaps the Doms, would be weeded out. Upon completion of the statements, Heimat glanced perfunctorily at the pattern enscribed by the pen on the drum and announced: "P-meter profile, positive." The Dominator scribe handed the analyst the form. This the fellow signed, proclaiming: "Trueman Jaggar, I hereby certify you a pure example of the uncontaminated human genotype and verify your right to citizenship in the High Republic of Heldon." Feric was aghast. "That's all?" he demanded. "Three superficial tests and you grant me a certificate of genetic purity? This is an outrage! A quarter of the rabble of Zind could weasel past this farce!" As he uttered these words, Feric felt a certain pressure against the ramparts of his mind, a lightning thrust of psychic energy aimed at the core of his will. For an instant, the vain and foolish nature of the fuss he was raising seemed glaringly apparent: a reasonable man did not rave like this in public; to continue in this way would vex any number of pleasant and harmless beings. Much the best course would be to melt into the ebb and flow of cosmic destiny and eschew the fruitlessness of resistance to the will of one's betters. But even as the psyche of the Dominator reached out to sap his will, Feric, out of long experience, recognized the will-less pleasant drifting feeling for what it was: a Dom attempting to draw him into his net. Feric determinedly stoked the fires of his formidable will with the torch of righteous hate for these soulless creatures who would displace the supremacy of true men with their own obscene reign, whose highest emotion was the desire to exterminate their genetic superiors, who sought to turn the earth into their own squalid pigpen. Although the scribe showed no outward sign of either his attempt at domination or of its successful repulsion, Feric felt the horrid will-less moment dissolve in the fires of his fierce hate. "Surely I, as a genetic analyst, am more capable of judging genetic purity than you are as a layman," Heimat had been saying while the psychic contest was fought and won. "With three tests?" Feric said. "An evaluation of proper rigor would involve at least several dozen tests including tissue, blood, urine, tear, feces, and semen analysis." "Such an examination would consume too much time to be practical," the analyst said. "Few men with contaminated genetic material can pass these simple tests, and those who can are human for all practical purposes any-way, aren't they?" Feric could contain himself no longer. "The creature beside you is a Dom" he shouted. "You are enmeshed in a dominance pattern! Exert your will and free yourself at once!" Those behind him in the queue looked alarmed; even some of the clearly dubious mongrels seemed dismayed, as well they might. For a moment, the room was on the verge of uproar; then the faces of all seemed to dissolve into bland blankness as the Dom acted to preserve himself. "You are clearly in error, Trueman Jaggar," Doctor Heimat said with utter mildness. "Lance Corporal Mork is a certified true man; surely you can see that if this were not so he would hardly be wearing the uniform of Heldon." "Perhaps Trueman Jaggar is simply unfamiliar with the ways of Heldon, sir," Mork suggested with an irony audible only to himself and to Feric, the only man in the room who shared his grim secret, and who apparently could do nothing to harm him. "No doubt had any of us been forced to grow to manhood surrounded by mutants, mongrels, and Godknows what, we too might be seeing Doms in every nook and cranny." Mork stared at Feric without a trace of a smile on his face or a hint of emotion in his eyes, but Feric could well imagine the satanic glee with which he was enjoying this moment. Doctor Heimat returned Feric's form to Mork, who passed it on to the final officer behind the counter. "You have now been certified a true human, whether you think the tests were adequate or not, Trueman Jaggar," he said. "You may accept citizenship or not as you please, but in any case, you are holding up the line." Furious, but knowing that further conversation with Heimat or the treacherous Mork would prove pointless, Feric stalked down to the last official. The man who stood glancing at his form was a square, hard, bluff true man in prolonged late middle age, with iron-colored hair and a trim beard to match. The ribbons on his tunic announced that he was no peacetime soldier, but an old warrior who had seen honorable action in the Great War. Nevertheless, the diffidence in his bearing and the slight lack of proper manliness in his eyes betrayed the sad fact that he, too, was enmeshed in the dominance pattern. Still a fellow such as this might well be encouraged to exert his will and fracture the pattern. "You, sir," Feric said crisply, "do you not detect a certain slackness in your will, an unmanly readiness to go along with the flow of events? Surely an old soldier such as yourself must realize that all is not well in this garrison." The officer placed Feric's form in the orifice of a complex duplicating device. "Please look straight ahead at the red dot above the lens of the machine," he said. Feric froze automatically for a second during which the officer threw a switch on the side of the duplicating machine. There was a very bright flash of light of extremely short duration; then a soft humming sound began in the bowels of the machine. "You have been "certified a genotypically pure human, Trueman Feric Jaggar," the officer said mechanically. "In a moment I shall present you with your certificate. This must be displayed upon demand to any police, customs, or military official. Any tradesman may refuse your custom if you do not display your certificate upon request. You may not marry without it. Is this understood?" "This is ridiculous!" Feric snapped. "Don't you realize that a river of contaminated genes must be gushing through this border crossing?" "Do you understand the conditions of citizenship?" the officer repeated doggedly. "Of course I understand! Don't you understand that you're under the influence of a Dominator?" For a moment, the officer looked Feric square in the eye. Feric channeled every ounce of will he could muster into his gaze. A spark from his steely blue eyes seemed to jump the gap for a moment and glow fitfully in the pupils of the Helder officer. "Surely, surely," the fellow muttered with a certain uneasiness, "surely you must be mistaken?" At that moment, a chime rang inside the duplicator, and Feric's certificate dropped into the hopper. The sound caused the Helder officer to look away from Feric's eyes and Feric could sense that the fragile effect of the psychic counterforce he had been so strenuously projecting had been shattered by this caprice of circumstance. The officer took the certificate from the hopper and handed it to Feric. "By accepting this certificate, Trueman Jaggar," he said with perfunctory ceremony, "you accept all the rights and responsibilities of a citizen of the High Republic of Heldon and a certified true man. You may participate in the public life of Heldon, vote for and hold office, serve in the military forces of the High Republic, leave and enter the fatherland at will. You may not marry or propagate without the written permission of the Ministry of Genetic Purity, under pain of death. Knowing this, and of your own free will, do you accept citizenship in the High Republic of Heldon?" Feric stared at the certificate which lay hard and smooth and glossy in his hand. On its clear plastic surface was engraved his name and date of certification, his fingertip patterns, his color photograph, and the signature of Doctor Heimat. This elegant artifact was suitably embellished with ornate scrollwork and swastikas in red and black which lent it a proper dignity of appearance. For years, even before his coming to manhood, Feric had dreamed of the moment when this sacred document would be his proudest possession. Now his appreciation of this moment was ruined by the defilement of the stringent genetic standards without which the certificate became a meaningless bit of plastic and pigment. "Surely you are not going to reject Helder citizenship at this point?" the Helder officer said, displaying for the first time a hint of emotion, albeit nothing nobler than petty bureaucratic annoyance. "I accept citizenship," Feric muttered, tucking the document carefully into his strong leather wallet which was firmly secured to his horsehide belt. As he strode toward the bridge entrance, he vowed that he would cling to this sacred privilege with more tenacity than this lot of sorry specimens had. He would avenge this outrage a thousandfold before he would let go of the Doms. A millionfold would still be insufficient. Chapter Two. A cool breeze swirled Feric's blue cloak about him as he stepped out onto the uncovered bridge over the Ulm. The bridge bed consisted of wooden walkways on either side of a stone roadway, both wood and stone worn to polished smoothness by the passage of countless leather soles and latex wheels. The gentle wind blew across from Heldon, carrying the pleasant odor of the Emerald Wood to Feric's nostrils, helping to clear away the stink of the customs fortress and, for that matter, of all Borgravia. With powerful strides, Feric set out across the bridge toward his destiny in the High Republic. A few steamers passed by him roaring smoke, clanging iron, hissing steam, but otherwise traffic seemed quite light, and the only pedestrians visible were perhaps a hundred yards ahead of him up the walkway. As a consequence, Feric was able to wrap himself in solitude as he walked, and contemplate what lay before him. What lay before him was, in short, all that really mattered in the world: the High Republic of Heldon, in which the future of true humanity resided, if the true human genotype were to have a future at all. The states bordering the fatherland were comparatively rich in human genetic material, but since mongrels and mutants formed the vast bulk of their populaces, and had held political sway since the failure of the High Republic to crush their hold during the Great War, the likelihood that such governments would pass the stringent racial laws necessary to breed such debased gene pools back to the pure human genotype seemed nil. It had taken Heldon several centuries of rigorous enforcement of just such laws to purify the gene pool to the present degree, and even so Heldon had started with a clear majority of genotypically pure human stock, unlike the states around it, which at present swarmed with mutants and mongrels of the most obscene sort. Beyond these states were such total cesspits as Arbona and Cressia where even the mutants themselves did not breed true from generation to generation, and to the east the vast Dominator-ruled pestilence of Zind. Beyond that in all directions, naught but reeking contaminated wildlands with astronomical geiger counts, where nothing could live beside stomach-turning things resembling ambulatory carcinomas, animal and human stock mutated beyond all hope of recognition. No, only Heldon was the bastion of true humanity, and if the world were to one day be genetically pure again, it would have to be done by force of Helder arms. Feric pondered his place in the common human destiny as his long, powerful strides carried him closer to the dozen or so figures on the walkway ahead of him. As a young man in Borgravia, he had easily mastered several areas of endeavor: the art of motive mechanics, the science of sloganeering, the crafts of interior and exterior design, clothing design, and pamphleteering. He had secured a livelihood from each of these sources at one time or another. Moreover, his pride in his true humanity, and the encouragement of his father, had caused him to study deeply the subjects of history, genetics, and military art for their own sakes. It seemed to Feric that a man of his varied skills would never lack for gainful employment. His deepest desire, however, was not to enrich himself but to serve the cause of true humanity to the best of his ability. To this end, two choices seemed open to him in this new life in Heldon: embark upon a military career or enter politics. The choice was a difficult one. On the one hand, a military career promised the quickest road to concrete patriotic action, but only provided that the political leadership of the High Republic developed the will to properly employ its armed forces. On the other hand, politics was an avenue by which he might gain access to the very circles in which such decisions were made, but only by a tedious and deadening process of accommodation, wrangling, and weaseling, which struck Feric as essentially unmanly. He resolved that he would not make such a momentous decision until destiny gave him a clear sign, one way or the other. While he pondered these weighty affairs, the natural reflexes of his superb body and his consequent rapid gait bad carried him to within a few strides of his fellow immigrants on the bridge, and when he chanced to look up at them, his jaw fell open in amazement and dismay. For there on the Ulm bridge, shuffling toward the bastion of genetic purity, was an incredible gaggle of the most blatant and disgusting mutants and mongrels imaginable! Here was a Parrotface whose mutated teeth formed an unmistakable beak. Here was a female Blueskin, and three humpbacked dwarfs, one with the Toadman warted skin as well. And a manlike being whose gait clearly revealed two extra joints in his legs, alongside an Egghead with a grossly warped elipsoid skull. This was a sight common enough to the streets of Gormond, but on the bridge to Heldon, in a sense Helder territory itself, it was an inexplicable phantasm of horror. Furiously, Feric broke into a near run, and caught up with the gristly menagerie in a few quick strides. "Halt!" he shouted. "What is the meaning of this?" The collection of mutants came to a shambling halt and regarded Feric with a mixture of fear, befuddlement, and awe, which nevertheless seemed to him to have a hint of surliness. "Your pleasure, Troeman?" the Parrotface croaked hoarsely in a vile voice which, however, seemed basically free of guile or malice. "What are you folk doing on the bridge to Heldon?" The quasi-men stared at him in what seemed to be genuine incomprehension. "We are traveling to the town of Ulmgam, Trueman," the female Blueskin finally ventured. Were these creatures totally incapable of comprehending the impossibility of the situation? "How were you allowed on this bridge?" Feric demanded. "Surely creatures such as yourselves will not presume to tell me that you are Helder citizens!" "We travel on the customary day passes, Trueman," the Parrotface said. "Day passes?" Feric muttered. Lord, were they actually issuing passes of entry to mutants? What treason to true humanity was this? "Let me see one of these passes," he commanded. The Egghead reached into a greasy oilskin pouch which hung on a ragged thong about its neck and handed over a small red card. The card was made of cheap paperboard rather than plastic; nevertheless, it bore the Great Seal of Heldon and an engraved border of tiny locked swastikas, the traditional motif of the Ministry of Genetic Purity. In simple block lettering of a rather inelegant design, the card proclaimed: "Day pass good for ten hours sojourn in Ulmgarn only on the date of May 14, 1142 A.F. Transgression of these terms punishable by death." Thoroughly disgusted, Feric handed the card back. "Is this common practice?" he asked. "Are non citizens commonly admitted across the river for limited stays?" "Provided there is a job to be done that true men, such as yourself, deem beneath their proper station," one of the dwarfs said. So that was it! Feric had heard that Universalism was gaining popularity among the masses of Heldon, but he had scarcely imagined that the insidious doctrine promul-gated by the Doms had sufficient influence to actually weaken the stringency of the genetic purity laws. The Universalists demanded the breeding of mindless slave creatures to perform menial tasks, the sort of perversion of protoplasm that the Dominators practiced in Zind. They were not yet powerful enough to achieve this unspeakable end, but apparently they had stirred up the slothful masses to the point where the craven government was actually permitting mutants to work in Heldon as a sop to this tendency. "Revolting!" Feric muttered, and with a dozen long strides, he put the wretched quasi-humans behind him. What he had seen thus far had deeply disturbed him. He had not yet entered Heldon proper, and already he had observed a customs fortress under the sway of a Dominator and a shocking relaxation of the genetic purity laws that could only be traced to the influence of Universalists. Was the High Republic rotten to the core or merely contaminated around the edges? At any rate, his duty as a true man was clear: to exert his powers to the utmost to restore the rigor of the genetic purity laws, to work for their stringent, indeed fanatic enforcement, and to make full use of whatever opportunity destiny granted him to further this sacred cause. With new determination and a growing sense of mission, Feric quickened his pace and fairly loped along the walkway toward the town of Ulmgarn and the great reaches of Heldon stretching majestically beyond. The Ulm bridge debouched directly onto the main street of the town of Ulmgarn: an enameled sign atop a slim cast-iron pillar informed Feric that this substantial boulevard was known as Bridge Way. Before him was a spectacle that warmed his soul, burning away both the off-river breeze and the deeper chill of his encounters in the customs fortress and on the bridge. For the first time in his life, he beheld a town built by true men on uncontaminated soil and inhabitated by healthy specimens of the pure human genotype; what a difference from the sordid squalor and decay of Gormond! In Gormond, the streets and walkways were naught but rude rocks pounded into the earth with hammers, on which one might expect to find the foulest of ordure and muck. The streets of Ulmgarn were paved with smooth, perfectly maintained concrete, and the walkways, too, were of concrete artfully decorated with inlaid glazed bricks in yellow, gold, and green, and both were spotless. In Gormond, the ordinary buildings were of sheet metal and timber, and the larger ones of unadorned poured concrete. Here the ordinary buildings were of glazed brick in a multitude of colorful hues, set off with lushly modeled wooden facings; the more majestic edifices were of rich, dark, polished stone, embellished with ornate brasswork facades and heroic statuary. Swarming on the streets of Gormond was a mongrel horde of Blueskins, dwarfs, Eggheads, Parrotfaces, Toadmen, countless other varieties of pure mutants and mongrelized crosses, and human mutant hybrids; a random collection of bits and pieces of dozens of different species cobbled together piecemeal and dressed for the most part in reeking rags. In grand contrast, the streets of Ulmgarn were graced by fine specimens of true humanity wherever the eye might fall: tall fair men with blond or brown hair, blue or green eyes, and all their parts of the proper order and in the right places, handsome women of the same coloring and configuration, and all dressed in a rich variety of garments of leather, nylon, linen, and silk, furs and velvets, adorned with silver and gold jewelry and many colored embroidery. The whole generated a psychic aura of genetic and somatic health, a spirit of racial purity and high civilization, that uplifted Feric's soul and overwhelmed him with gratitude for and pride in his genetic good fortune. These beings were the crown of creation, and he was one of them! Squaring his shoulders, Feric set off down the street in search of a meal, and thence to the roadsteamer station, for he planned to set off for the great southern Helder metropolis of Walder which lay just north of the Emerald Wood directly after an early dinner. There, in the second grandest city in the fatherland, he would perhaps tarry a while before traveling further to the capital of Heldhime, deep in the heart of the industrial center of Heldon. Surely his destiny lay in one or another of the great metropolises of the High Republic, rather than in the towns bordering the Ulm or the Emerald Wood. Feric sauntered past shops offering all manner of riches and wonders. Here were stalls offering the bounty of the land, and shops purveying the finest of clothing for men and women. On Bridge Way, one could purchase the latest and most carefully crafted mechanical and electrical devices: steam engines for the home and the slave mechanisms they powered, clothes washers, wood-working tools, grain mills, pumps and winches of every conceivable sort. Other emporiums offered richly carved furniture, outer garments of leather or synthetic rubber of the highest quality and gloss, paints and turpentines, medicines and remedies famous even in Borgravia for their potency, every manner of civilized product one might imagine or desire. Scattered among these shops were sundry eating houses and taverns. Feric paused outside several of these in turn, sniffing the aromas which wafted out into the street and observing the clientele. Finally, he selected a large tavern called the Eagle's Nest, which was housed in a red brick building whose facade was embellished with painted scenes from the Blue Mountains. The central motif expressed in graphics the legend written above it: a large black eagle landing on its nest atop a snowcapped mountain. The doors to the tavern were opened wide, the smells drifting through them were pleasant enough, and from within came the vague sounds of some sort of fervent discussion. All in all, the place seemed appetizing to Feric's hunger, and the hubbub within piqued his curiosity. Upon passing through the tavern door, Feric found himself in a large vaulted common room filled with sturdy wooden tables and benches. Perhaps forty men or more were scattered about the room sitting at the tables and drinking beer from large ceramic mugs upon which the Eagle's Nest motif had been painted. The attention of perhaps half the men in the room was focused on a slight figure in a trimly cut green tunic who perched on the edge of a table against the far wall haranguing a small group clustered about him; the rest of the customers conversed with each other and were quiescent. Feric chose an empty table well within earshot of the slim, intense speaker, but somewhat outside the commotion that surrounded him. A waiter in a brown uniform with red piping approached him even as he seated himself. "The present leadership of the High Republic, or more accurately the deadheads and simpletons who profane the seats of the Council Chamber with their unclean buttocks, has not the vaguest notion of the true threat to Heldon," the speaker was saying. Though there was a faint trace of superciliousness about his lips and a light hint of mockery in his voice, there was something about the very sardonic humor of his bright black eyes that drew Feric's attention and approval. "Your pleasure, Trueman?" the waiter inquired, diverting Feric's attention momentarily. "A mug of beer and a salad of lettuce, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, onions, and whatever other vegetables you may have at hand that are fresh and uncooked." The waiter gave Feric a somewhat arch look as he departed. Meat was, of course, the traditional staple in Heldon as elsewhere, and upon occasion Feric indulged himself with this questionable fare, since fanatic dedication to vegetarianism seemed to him both impractical and perhaps a bit unwholesome. Nevertheless, he knew full well that progress up the food chain from vegetable matter to meat concentrated the level of radioactive contamination of foodstuffs, and he therefore eschewed flesh as much as possible. His genetic purity was not his to squander on the indulgence of his appetite; in a higher sense it was the common property of the community of true men and demanded to be guarded as a racial trust. A peculiar look from a waiter now and then was not enough to keep him from sticking to his racial duty. "And of course your buttocks would better grace the seat of power, eh Bogel?" bellowed a bluff fellow whose face was somewhat reddened by overconsumption of beer. His comrades showed their appreciation of this remark with crude, albeit good-natured, laughter. The speaker Bogel seemed to have been brought up short for a moment. When his reply came, Feric sensed that it sprang not from inborn instinct but from a sharp, if somewhat cold and mechanical, intellectualization. "I seek no personal power for myself," Bogel said impishly. "However if such a fine specimen as yourself urges a Council seat upon me, what an ingrate I would be to thwart your desires!" This drew somewhat pallid laughter. Feric directed closer attention to the men attending Bogel. They seemed divided up into two rough classes: those few who were paying serious and rapt attention, and those in the majority who seemed to regard the dapper little man with his bright eyes and thin saturnine features as some sort of comic entertainment. Nevertheless, both groups seemed to be composed of the same sort of fellow by and large: middle-aged, two-fisted beer drinkers, shopkeepers, craftsmen and farmers by the look of them, plain honest folk whose understanding of affairs of state could hardly be deemed profound. It seemed to Feric as if this Bogel overestimated his audience, putting on, as he did, an air of intellectual sarcasm and superiority in a public tavern. "Thus might a Dominator speak!" another fellow roared. There was more loud laughter, but this tune tinged with a certain uneasy quality. For the first time, a certain fire became evident in Bogel's eyes. "Thus might speak a Universalist sympathizer or a man enmeshed in a dominance pattern," he said. "The Human Renaissance Party is the deadly enemy of the Dom and his Universalist dupes and lackeys; no one denies this, least of all the scum themselves. Ridicule of the Party or its leadership therefore serves the interest of the Dominators. How do we know that such words were not put in your mouth by an inhuman master?" With this Bogel smiled, indicating that this was meant as jest. However this subtlety seemed totally lost on the poor fellow's audience; countenances darkened and a certain surly atmosphere began to build. Clearly this Bogel, while obviously possessed of a keen mind, had no instinct for moving men in the desired direction with oratory. "You dare suggest that I am on a Dominator's string, you pathetic wretch!" Bogel seemed somewhat lost; certainly he had not wanted to provoke anger against himself, but just as certainly that was rapidly becoming the result of his words. At this point, the waiter arrived with Feric's salad and beer. Feric sipped diffidently at the beer and picked at the food, intent now, for some reason he barely understood, on studying the drama being played out before him. Bogel smiled somewhat weakly. "Come, come, my friend," he said. "Don't be so solemn and serious-minded. I accuse no one here of being on a Dominator's string. Though, on the other hand, how can any of us ever be sure that anyone else is not enmeshed in a dominance pattern? That's the insidious horror of the creatures: true men such as ourselves cannot fully trust each other as long as one wretched Dom still lives within the borders of Heldon." This seemed to mollify the crowd somewhat, at least to the point where Bogel was allowed to continue. "This bickering among us is an object lesson in the depths to which Heldon has sunk under the present limp-wristed regime," he pointed out. "I'd stake my life on the fact that there isn't a true man here who wouldn't reach out to wring a Dom's neck if such a creature were to make itself apparent. Yet you shrink at supporting a party dedicated to ruthlessly rooting these vermin out. There isn't a true man here who would not slay his own offspring should that child betray the human race by mating with a mutant or a hybrid. Yet, tempted by sloth, you go along when the Council, under Universalist pressure, relaxes the genetic purity laws in order to allow foreign mutants to enter Heldon to do work that the lackeys of the Doms have convinced you is beneath your station. Surely in a town such as Ulmgam, in such close proximity to the Borgravian pestilence, good Helder such as yourselves would be up in arms and ready to flock to the standard of the Human Renaissance Party in droves, once I proclaimed our dedication to the preservation of the racial purity of Heldon and the ouster of the fools on the Council who to curry favor with slackers and rabble would betray the iron rigor of our genetic purity laws!" "Well spoken!" Feric felt constrained to utter aloud. His voice, however, was lost in the general cheering, for suddenly Bogel had touched his audience in their simple yet noble sense of racial pride. Others in the tavern now gave over their private conversation and turned their attention to the slim, dark-haired speaker. "Or so I in my naive musings imagined when I decided to journey from Walder to these border regions in search of support for our cause," Bogel continued after the ovation had subsided. "But instead of a righteously enraged citizenry, what did I find? Slothful slaggards too bemused by the prospect of having lesser beings take their tasks upon themselves to protest this outrage! Naive bumpkins who believe that all Doms have been driven out of Heldon because a government of fools and racial eunuchs tells them so!" It was too much for Feric to bear. This Bogel obviously spoke out as a true patriot. His speech had cogency, his cause was just and more than worthy of support, he had momentarily captured the hearts of his audience, and yet now he had thrown away his moment by indulging in tortured self-pity instead of building to a roaring demand for concrete and ruthless action. Instead of cheers, he was drawing renewed hostility. The man was a good speaker as such, but a clear failure as a political agitator. Perhaps, though, the situation could be saved. Feric leaped to his feet and shouted in a bold, clear voice: "There are those of us here who are neither slaggards nor naïve bumpkins!" This voicing of the crowd's own hostility insantly drew all attention to him; Bogel himself did not attempt to interfere, since Feric's words had revealed to his sharp mind the foul situation he had put himself in. All waited anxiously to hear Feric's next words, would he attack the speaker or speak in his defense? "There are those of us here to whom your words are a ringing challenge!" Feric continued, noting that Bogel's eyes had brightened, his thin lips creased in a smile. "There are those of us here who will not tolerate the impudence of mutants or the contamination of human soil by one instant of their unclean presence. There are those of us here who are ready to rip Doms apart with our bare hands when we see them. True men! Pure men! Men fanatically dedicated not merely to the preservation of the racial purity of the present High Republic of Heldon but to the extension of the absolute rule of true men to every humanly habitable spot on the surface of this sorry earth! In the heart of even the most slothful slaggard lives this hero willing to take up arms to preserve the pure human genotype! Our very genes cry out, exclude the mutant! Drive him before you! Slay the Dom wherever you find him!" The audience broke into hearty prolonged cheers. As the cheering went on, Feric observed that every pair of eyes in the tavern was upon him; lines of psychic energy seemed to connect the center of his being with the heart of every man in the room. It was as if the wills of the audience fed their full power into his own will, which in turn returned their fervor to them magnified tenfold, in an ever-building spiral of psychic power that flooded and enlarged his being, a massive racial force that was his to direct where he willed. A sudden inspiration struck him: he would give this energy a concrete outlet, a target. "And a Dom may be found not far from this very place," Feric continued when the cheering had lapsed. "Yes, there is a Dominator in your midst, and in the most monstrous place conceivable! This creature is within the reach of your fists at this very moment!" A silence descended upon the room into which Bogel spoke: "It's men like you that the Party needs, Trueman! Tell us, where is this hidden Dominator? I warrant there isn't a man here now not ready to rip him to pieces!" Feric was quite pleased that Bogel had caught the spirit of the moment. His cause had merit, it was the cause of true humanity; his efforts deserved reward. "Incredibly enough, a Dominator has secreted himself in the heart of the customs fortress on the Ulm bridge entrusted with protecting your genetic purity," Feric said. "He holds the entire garrison in a dominance pattern!" A horrified gasp issued from the men in the tavern. Instantly, Feric went on. "Think of the horror of it! This stinking monstrosity has secured certification and serves as a scribe to the genetic analyst empowered to grant certification to prospective citizens. From this citadel, he saps the will of the garrison and the analyst so that a veritable river of contaminated genes may gush into this area like the contents of a sewer to poison the posterity of your sons and daughters! Further, there is no one in the garrison not enmeshed in this pattern, no one able to dislodge the foul beast or smash his net!" A din of angry muttering filled the tavern now. They were clearly ready to carry out the racial will as he directed. Their deepest instinct had been fully aroused, the iron determination to protect the human species. A fire had been ignited which could only be quenched in Dominator blood. "What are we waiting for?" Feric bellowed. "We have our hands, and some of us are ar

Rahan. Episode Twenty-Four. The Ivory Knife. How many times did you save Rahan's life? Ten times the fingers of both hands? Maybe even more! Without you, Rahan would have long since joined the "Territory of Shadows"! The sun plays on the marvelously polished evenness of the ivory blade. The son of Crao thoughtfully admired his weapon. The remembrances of combat of incredible violence are tangled in his memory. Page Two: Combats which had always ended with its clamor of victory. A clamor that all the life of the jungle now knew! Absorbed in his memories, the son of Crao had not noticed the rustling of the branches. The "enemy" speaks to the "Thing-that-shines". And the "Thing" responds by throwing lights!! This time, the Breeze bought Rahan the whisper of the two ambushers. Who watches Rahan without daring to show himself?! Only those with bad intentions hide like cowards! And Rahan hates cowards! Page Three: A hunter emerged from the thickets, his club in his hand. Give Kabak the "Thing-that-Shines" and Kabak will let you go in peace! This "Thing" is a weapon! It belongs to Rahan! The man pointed to the lizard sheath where Rahan had slipped his cutlass. And if Kabak wants to rob him, he will have to fight Rahan! Well planted on his legs, the son of Crao waited for the attack of the man. But the treacherous attack came from elsewhere! When he turned his head, it was already too late. The club of a second hunter, who was swinging from a vine, struck his neck on the fly. Crack! Page Four: When the son of fierce ages recovered his spirits, his head was still sore and his vision was blurry. Men stirred and murmurs arose here and there. But above all, he heard Kabak's voice. Who, imitating the son of Crao, spoke to the ivory knife! Answer Kabak "Thing-that-shines"! Kabak wants to know your power! As the weapon remained mute, the chief of the clan challenged Rahan. Why does the "Thing-that-Shines" not obey Kabak!? Why does she not tell him if the hunt will be good? Because she only obeys Rahan! Who alone can understand her language! Rahan understood the advantage he could derive from Kabak's credulity. Page Five: So ask the "Thing" if the hunt will be good for our clan! The son of Crao solemnly seized the knife that the man held out to him. And made it play under the sun. The ivory blade flashed several times. She says a young mammoth!! It wanders on the side of the Great River. If Kabak and his hunters act fast, they can kill this Mammoth! Rahan hoped to drive away the men of the clan. But the chief issued an order. And ten hands grabbed him. If Rahan was right, he will be free. But if he lied it is he who will be killed!! A moment later, the son of Crao was pinned to a rock and tied up. Kabak had taken up the ivory weapon. Page Six: Rahan is not "The enemy" of "Those-who-walk-upright"! Give him his freedom! But the clan chief did not listen to the captive. He had gone away and was talking to the knife. Kabak wants to know. Is it true that a mammoth roams near the great river?? Answer "Thing-that-shines"! Answer!! The "Thing" doesn't hear you! It only answers Rahan's questions! As the glints of the ivory blade had no meaning for him, Kabak furiously brandished the weapon. Page Seven: Since you did not want to answer Kabak, you will disappear forever!! Rahan growled in rage. Over there, the chief had just thrown the ivory cutlass into an abyss. Gathering all his men Kabak disappeared into the forest. When they return, they will send Rahan into the Shadow Land! Although the son of Crao was exceptionally strong, all his efforts to break the shackles were in vain. Rahan won't let himself be killed by Kabak-the-stupid! Rahan must find a way to free himself! Page Eight: An idea suddenly came to him, which brought a smile to his lips. If Rahan cannot break this vine, he can free it from this rock! Bracing himself on a projection he rose slightly then, with a shake, raised the vine to his height. Ten times he repeated this maneuver. His back, bruised by the granite, mattered little to him. He was now halfway up the rock! His feet found new points of support and he was still rising. The vine relaxed with each jolt. And he must stretch it so as not to fall and see the end of all his efforts. Page Nine: He finally reached the top of the rock. With a final shake he freed the vine. And brutally descended the slab of granite. He was free! Ra-ha-ha! The echo of his victorious cry slowly died out as he lowered his wrists free. Kabak will think Rahan is a wizard! The joy of the son of fierce ages for his deliverance was tarnished by the loss of his precious knife. Kabak threw it into this abyss. Water from an underground spring was a mirror, reflecting at the very bottom of this circular hole. Vines took hold along the moss-covered wall. Page Ten: But they are too thin to support the weight of Rahan. Zlac! And Rahan cannot dive in, without knowing the depth of the water! It may have been, in fact, only a slice of a sheet of water. Into which a dive would have been fatal. This stone will enlighten Rahan! A moment later the stone attached to the thin vine descended slowly into the abyss. It disappeared under the black water, and sank, and sank, and sank further. The water is deep enough! Rahan can dive! Page Eleven: In fact, the son of Crao let himself fall into the abyss rather than plunge into it. Ra-ha-ha! His body burst into the icy water, between the few dead branches stuck between the walls. The darkness was almost total and Rahan, in search of the knife, felt the rocky bottom, groping. Several times he had to come back to the surface to breathe. Rahan is as stupid as Kabak! He did not even think of how he will get out of this abyss! His fingers finally felt the ivory handle of his knife. And that was when something twirled around him! Page Twelve: It was a strange fish that sprang from a fissure that the son of Crao had not noticed. This monster of darkness may come from an underground lake, was it dangerous? Without a doubt! He had no eyes, or rather, a plate of scales obstructed them. But Rahan caught a glimpse of the horrible mouth, bristling with sharp teeth. The blade of the ivory knife ripped open the monster, whose attack he had just dodged! Rahan hates these fights in the night! Rahan prefers the daylight, the sky, the sun! Page Thirteen: The daylight, the sky, the sun, the son of the fierce ages will find them. The first vine to which he clung gave way under his weight, and fell into the abyss like an endless snake. The rock covered with sticky moss offered no holds. But yet, Rahan suddenly had a hope. He felt under him a powerful eddy. Crao had said that there are rivers under the earth. And that these rivers sometimes invade chasms like this! The blue indeed rose, blocking the branches wedged between the walls. And Rahan rode with it towards the open day, towards the sky. Page Fourteen: The son of Crao's clamor of hope was prolonged by a gasp of resentment. Ra-ha-ha! The eddy had stopped and the water stopped rising. The level had risen only a few meters. The open sky, all the top, remained inaccessible to Rahan! Rahan should have reflected and not only thought about his knife! Now Rahan is like a trapped beast! Kabak's hunters will come back and slaughter him in this trap! No, Rahan doesn't want to join the "Territory of Shadows"! Rahan wants to live! He Will Live! Page Fifteen: The son of fierce ages held on to one of the dead branches. The broken vine floated on the surface. He was watching the branches. He watched the vine. The Branches. The creeper. The Branches. The creeper. An idea was born in his mind and quickly took shape. He suddenly screamed. Rahan knows how to get out of the abyss! A moment later he was busy among the branches, choosing those whose length suited his project. It was almost joyfully that he shortens one of them. Once again Rahan's knife will save his life! Page Sixteen: How could these branches, thrown into this chasm at random by the storms, come to the aid of the son of Crao? Shortly after he had tied the ends of the vine to the two branches. Rahan discovered the trap to get out of the traps! These branches were slightly longer than the diameter of the chasm. Rahan wedged the first one between the walls, and hoisted himself onto it. With the aid of a vine, he hoisted the second branch. And. As this perch supported him, his victory cry thundered, amplified by the rocky corridor. Ra-ha-ha! Page Seventeen: The branch like the previous one, was jammed above him. And so the imaginative son of Crao rose into the abyss!!! Abandoning each perch, to climb onto the other! He moved slowly, carefully leaning on the raised ends of the branches. The slightest wrong move could have thrown him back into the black waters. Or, he guessed, other monsters, similar to the one he had killed. But Rahan, son of Crao, son of fierce ages, knew how to be calm when the situation demanded it. Page Eighteen: He was about to reach the edge of the abyss when the shouts of the Kabak hunters rose, very close. Rahan will not have time to escape them! Gripping the granite ledge, he saw a few men running. And these come to a standstill, like statues, in front of the rock to which they had tied their captive. Rahan's disappearance must have seemed miraculous to them. Because they knelt at the foot of the rock and prostrated themselves several times. A noise from the side of the abyss suddenly caught their attention. The branch on which Rahan was leaning was unblocked. Page Nineteen: And it fell into the void, dragging the second with it! Plooch! The son of Crao could no longer resist the hunters! Others came out of the forest, preceded by Kabak. As Rahan climbed out of the abyss. Rahan hates fighting with "Those-who-walk-upright"! But he will not let himself go without a fight! Why would we kill Rahan, since he told the truth! YOU! We found the mammoth near the big river! Other hunters were coming, carrying huge quarters of meat. Page Twenty: But Rahan knew how not to show his astonishment. Rahan had lied to keep the hunters away. And they really found a mammoth. Kabak promised you freedom! Kabak has only one word! Rahan can travel in peace on our territory! The son of Crao went on his way. The night found him in a tree, his knife close to him, as he was used to. Rahan sends the clan on a hunt for an imaginary mammoth and the clan finds a mammoth! This is probably what Crao called "Chance"!! Accustomed as he was to dangers, the son of the fierce ages considered his adventure banal. He fell asleep peacefully, while the moon hung its pale light on the ivory weapon.

THE LOST CONTINENT. I felt a peculiar mixture of excitement and depression as my Pan African jet from Accra came down through the interlocking fringes of the East Coast and Central American smog banks above Milford International Airport, made a slightly bumpy landing on the east-west runway, and taxied through the thin blue haze toward a low, tarnished-looking aluminum dome that appeared to be the main international arrivals terminal. Although American history is my field, there was something about actually being in the United States for the first time that filled me with sadness, awe, and perhaps a little dread. Ironically, I believe that what saddened me about being in America was the same thing that makes that country so popular with tourists, like the people who filled most of the seats around me. There is nothing that tourists like better than truly servile natives, and there are no natives quite so servile as those living off the ruins of a civilization built by ancestors they can never hope to surpass. For my part—perhaps because I am a professor of history and can appreciate the parallels and ironies! not only feel personally diminished at the thought of lording it over the remnants of a once-great people, but it also reminds me of our own civilization’s inevitable mortality. Was not Africa a continent of so-called “underdeveloped nations” not two centuries ago when Americans were striding to the moon like gods? Have we in Africa really preserved the technical and scientific heritage of Space-Age America intact, as we like to pretend? We may claim that we have not repeated the American feat of going to the moon because it was part of tired overdevelopment that destroyed Space-Age civilization, but few reputable scientists would seriously contend that we could go to the moon if we so chose. Even the jet in which I had crossed the Atlantic was not quite up to the airliners the Americans had flown two centuries ago. Of course, the modern Americans are still less capable than we of recreating twentieth-century American technology. As our plane reached the terminal, an atmosphere-sealed extension ramp reached out creakily from the building for its airlock. Milford International was the port of entry for the entire northeastern United States; yet, the best it had was recently obsolescent African equipment. Milford itself, one of the largest modern American towns, would be lost next to even a city like Brazzaville. Yes, African science and technology are certainly now the most advanced on the planet, and some day perhaps we will build a civilization that can truly claim to be the highest the world has yet seen, but we only delude ourselves when we imagine that we have such a civilization now. As of the middle of the twenty-second century, Space-Age America still stands as the pinnacle of man’s fight to master his environment. Twentieth-century American man had a level of scientific knowledge and technological sophistication that we may not fully attain for another century. What a pity he had so little deep understanding of his relationship to his environment or of himself. The ramp linked up with the plane’s airlock, and after a minimal amount of confusion we debarked directly into a customs control office, which consisted of a drab, dun-colored, medium-sized room divided by a line of twelve booths across its width. The customs officers in the booths were very polite, hardly glanced at our passports, and managed to process nearly a hundred passengers in less than ten minutes. The American government was apparently justly famous for doing all it could to smooth the way for African tourists. Beyond the customs control office was a small auditorium in which we were speedily seated by courteous uniformed customs agents. A pale, sallow, well-built young lady in a trim blue customs uniform entered the room after us and walked rapidly through the center aisle and up onto the little low stage. She was wearing, face-fitting atmosphere goggles, even though the terminal had a full seal. She began to recite a little speech; I believe its actual wording is written into the American tourist-control laws. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the United States of America. We hope you’ll enjoy your stay in our country, and we’d like to take just a few moments of your time to give you some reminders that will help make your visit a safe and pleasurable one. ” She put her hand to her nose and extracted two small transparent cylinders filled with gray gossamer. “These are government-approved atmosphere filters,” she said, displaying them for us. “You will be given complimentary sets as you leave this room. You are advised to buy only filters with the official United States Government Seal of Approval. Change your filters regularly each morning, and your stay here should in no way impair your health. However, it is understood that all visitors to the United States travel at their own risk. You are advised not to remove your filters, except inside buildings or conveyances displaying a green circle containing the words FULL ATMOSPHERE SEAL.” She took off her goggles, revealing a light red mask of welted skin that their seal had made around her eyes. “These are self-sealing atmosphere goggles,” she said. “If you have not yet purchased a pair, you may do so in the main lobby. You are advised to secure goggles before leaving this terminal and to wear them whenever you venture out into the open atmosphere. Purchase only goggles bearing the Government Seal of Approval, and always take care that the seal is air-tight. “If you use your filters and goggles properly, your stay in the United States should be a safe and pleasant one. The government and people of the United States wish you a good day, and we welcome you to our country.” We were then handed our filters and guided to the baggage area, where our luggage was already unloaded End waiting for us. A sealed bus from the Milford International Inn was already waiting for those of us who had booked rooms there, and porters loaded the luggage on the bus while a representative from the hotel handed out complimentary atmosphere goggles. The Americans were most efficient and most courteous; there was something almost unpleasant about the way we moved so smoothly from the plane to seats on a bus headed through the almost empty streets of Milford toward the faded white plastic block that was the Milford International Inn, by far the largest building in a town that seemed to be mostly small houses, much like an African residential village. Perhaps what disturbed me was the knowledge that Americans were so good at this sort of thing strictly out of necessity. Thirty percent of the total American Gross National Product comes from the tourist industry. I keep telling my wife I gotta get out of this tourist business. In the good old days, our ancestors would’ve given these African brothers nothing but about eight feet of rope. They’d’ve shot off a nuclear missile and blasted all those black brothers to atoms! If the damned brothers didn’t have so much loose money, I’d be for riding every one of them back to Africa on a rail, just like the Space-Agers did with their black brothers before the Panic. And I bet we could do it, too. I hear there’s all kinds of Space-Age weapons sitting around in the ruins out West. If we could only get ourselves together and dig them out, we’d show those Africans whose ancestors went to the moon while they were still eating each other. But, instead, I found myself waiting with my copter bright and early at the International Inn for the next load of customers of Little Old New York Tours, as usual. And I’ve got to admit that I’m doing pretty well off of it. Ten years ago, I just barely had the dollars to make a down-payment on a used ten-seat helicopter, and now the thing is all paid off, and I’m shoveling dollars into my stash on every day-tour. If the copter holds up another ten years, and this is a genuine Space-Age American Air Force helicopter restored and converted to energy cells in Aspen, not a cheap piece of African junk, I’ll be able to take my bundle and split to South America, just like a tycoon out of the good old days. They say they’ve got places in South America where there’s nothing but wild country as far as you can see. Imagine that! And you can buy this land. You can buy jungle filled with animals and birds. You can buy rivers full of fish. You can buy air that doesn’t choke your lungs and give you cancer and taste like fried turds even through a brand-new set of filters. Yeah, that’s why I suck up to Africans! That’s worth spending four or five hours a day in that New York hole, even worth looking at subway dwellers. Every full day-tour I take in there is maybe twenty thousand dollars net toward South America. You can buy ten acres of prime Amazon swampland for only fifty-six million dollars. I’ll still be young ten years from now, I’ll only be forty. I take good care of myself, I change my filters every day just like they tell you to, and I don’t use nothing but Key West Supremes, no matter how much the damned things cost. I’ll have at least ten good years left; why, I could even live to be fifty five! And I’m gonna spend at least ten of those fifty-five years someplace where I can walk around without filters shoved up my nose, where I don’t need goggles to keep my eyes from rotting, where I can finally die from something better than lung cancer. I picture South America every time I feel the urge to tell off those brothers and get out of this business. For ten years with Karen in that Amazon swampland, I can take their superior-civilization crap and eat it and smile back at ’em afterward. With filters wadded up my nose and goggle seals bruising the tender skin under my eyes, I found myself walking through the blue haze of the open American atmosphere, away from the second-class twenty-second-century comforts of the International Inn, and toward the large and apparently ancient tour helicopter. As I walked along with the other tourists, I wondered just what it was that had drawn me here. Of course, Space-Age America is my specialty, and I had reached the point where my academic career virtually required a visit to America, but, aside from that, I felt a personal motivation that I could not quite grasp. No doubt, I know more about Space-Age America than all but a handful of modern Americans, but the reality of Space-Age civilization seems illusive to me. I am an enlightened modern African, five generations removed from the bush; yet I have seen films, the obscure ghost to woof Las Vegas sitting in the middle of a terrible desert clogged with vast mechanized temples to the God of Chance; Mount Rushmore, where the Americans carved an entire landscape into the likenesses of their national heroes; the Cape Kennedy National Shrine, where rockets of incredible size are preserved almost intact, which have made me feel like an ignorant primitive trying to understand the minds of gods. One cannot contemplate the Space Age without concluding that the Space-Agers possessed a kind of sophistication which we modern men have lost. Yet they destroyed themselves. Yes, perhaps the resolution of this paradox was what I hoped to find here, aside from academic merit. Certainly, true understanding of the Space-Age mind cannot be gained from study of artifacts and records, if it could, I would have it. A true scholar, it has always seemed to me, must seek to understand, not merely to accumulate knowledge. No doubt, it was understanding that I sought here. Up close, the Little Old New York Tours helicopter was truly impressive, an antique ten-seater built during the Space-Age for the military by the look of it, and lovingly restored. But the American atmosphere had still been breathable even in the cities when it was built, so I was certain that this copter had only a filter system of questionable quality, no doubt installed by the contemporary natives in modern times. I did not want anything as flimsy as all that between my eyes and lungs and the American atmosphere, so I ignored the FULL ATMOSPHERE SEAL sign and kept my filters in and my goggles on as I boarded. I noticed that the other tourists were doing the same. Mike Ryan, the native guide and pilot, had been recommended to me by a colleague from the University of Nairobi. A professor’s funds are quite limited, of course, especially one who has not attained significant academic stature as yet, and the air fares ate into my already meager budget to the point where all I could afford was three days in Milford, four in Aspen, three in Needles, five in Eureka, and a final three at Cape Kennedy on the way home. Aside from the Cape Kennedy National Shrine, none of these modern American towns actually contained Space-Age ruins of significance. Since it is virtually impossible, and, at any rate, prohibitively dangerous, to visit major Space-Age ruins without a helicopter and a native guide, and since a private copter and guide would be far beyond my means, my only alternative was to take a day-tour like everyone else. My Kenyan friend had told me that Ryan was the best guide to Old New York that he had had in his three visits. Unlike most of the other guides, he actually took his tours into a subway station to see live subway dwellers. There are reportedly only a thousand or two subway dwellers left; they are nearing extinction. It seemed like an opportunity I should not miss. At any rate, Ryan’s charge was only about five hundred dollars above the average guide’s. Ryan stood outside the helicopter in goggles, helping us aboard. His appearance gave me something of a surprise. My Kenyan informant had told me that Ryan had been in the tour business for ten years; most guides who had been around that long were in terrible shape. No filters could entirely protect a man from that kind of prolonged exposure to saturation smog; by the time they’re thirty, most guides already have chronic emphysema, and their lung-cancer rate at age thirty-five is over fifty percent. But Ryan, who could not be under thirty, had the general appearance of a forty-year-old Boer; physiologically, he should have looked a good deal older. Instead, he was short, squat, had only slightly graying black hair, and looked quite alert, even powerful. But, of course, he had the typical American grayish-white pimply pallor. There were eight other people taking the tour, a full copter. A prosperous-looking Kenyan who quickly introduced himself as Roger Koyinka, traveling with his wife; a rather strange-looking Ghanaian in very rich-looking old-fashioned robes and his similarly clad wife and young son; two rather willowy and modishly dressed young men who appeared to be Luthuliville dandies, and the only other person in the tour who was traveling alone, an intense young man whose great bush of hair, stylized dashiki, and gold earring proclaimed that he was an Amero-African. I drew a seat next to the Amero-African, who identified himself as Michael Lumumba rather diffidently when I introduced myself. Ryan gave us a few moments to get acquainted, I learned that the Ghanaian was named Kulongo, that Koyinka was a department store executive from Nairobi, that the two young men were named Ojubu and Ruala, while he checked out the helicopter, and then seated himself in the pilot’s seat, back toward us, goggles still in place, and addressed us without looking back through an internal public address system. “Hello, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to your Little Old New York Tour. I’m Mike Ryan, your guide to the wonders of Old New York, Space-Age America’s greatest city. Today you’re going to see such sights as the Fuller Dome, the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and, as a grand finale, a subway station still inhabited by the direct descendants of the Space-Age inhabitants of the city. So don’t just think of this as a guided tour, ladies and gentlemen. You are about to take part in the experience of a lifetime, an exploration of the ruins of the greatest city built by the greatest civilization ever to stand on the face of the earth.” “Stupid arrogant honkie!” the young man beside me snarled aloud. There was a terrible moment of shocked, shamed embarrassment in the cabin, as all of us squirmed in our seats. Of course, the Amero-Africans are famous for this sort of tastelessness, but to be actually confronted with this sort of blatant racism made one for a moment ashamed to be black. Ryan swiveled very slowly in his seat. His face displayed the characteristic red flush of the angered Caucasian, but his voice was strangely cold, almost polite: “You’re in the United States now, Mister Lumumba, not in Africa. I’d watch what I said if I were you. If you don’t like me or my country, you can have your lousy money back. There’s a plane leaving for Conakry in the morning.” “You’re not getting off that easy, honkie,” Lumumba said. “I paid my money, and you’re not getting me off this helicopter. You try, and I go straight to the tourist board, and there goes your licence. ” Ryan stared at Lumumba for a moment. Then the flush began to fade from his face, and be turned his back on us again, muttering, “Suit yourself, pal. I promise you an interesting ride.” A muscle twitched in Lumumba’s temple; he seemed about to speak again. “Look here, Mister Lumumba,” I whispered at him sharply, “we’re guests in this country, and you’re making us look like boorish louts in front of the natives. If you have no respect for your own dignity, have some respect for ours.” “You stick to your pleasures, and I’ll stick to mine,” he told me, speaking more calmly, but obviously savoring his own bitterness. “I’m here for the pleasure of seeing the descendants of the stinking honkies who kicked my ancestors out grovel in the putrid mess they made for themselves. And I intend to get my money’s worth.” I started to reply, but then restrained myself. I would have to remain on civil terms with this horrid young man for hours. I don’t think I’ll ever understand these Amero-Africans and their pointless blood-feud. I doubt if I want to. I started the engines, lifted her off the pad, and headed east into the smog bank trying hard not to think of that black brother Lumumba. No wonder so many of his ancestors were lynched by the Space-Agers! Sometime during the next few hours, that crud was going to get his. Through by cabin monitor (this Air Force Iron was just loaded with real Space-Age stuff) I watched the stupid looks on their flat faces as we headed for what looked like a solid wall of smoke at about one hundred miles per hour. From the fringes, a major smog bank looks like that, solid as a steel slab, but once you’re inside there’s nothing but a blue haze that anyone with a halfway decent set of goggles can see right through. “We are now entering the East Coast smog bank, ladies and gentlemen,” I told them. “This smog bank extends roughly from Bangor, Maine, in the north to Jacksonville, Florida in the south, and from the Atlantic coastline in the east to the slopes of the Alleghenies in the west. It is the third largest smog bank in the United States.” Getting used to the way things look inside the smog always holds ’em for a while. Inside a smog bank, the color of everything is kind of washed-out, grayed, and blued. The air is something you can see, a mist that doesn’t move; it almost sparkles at you. For some reason, these Africans always seem to be knocked out by it. Imagine thinking stuff like that is beautiful, crap that would kill you horribly and slowly in a couple of days if you were stupid or unlucky enough to breathe it without filters. Yeah, they sure were a bunch of brothers! Some executive from Nairobi who acted like just being in the same copter with an American might give him and his wife lung cancer. Two rich young fruits from Luthuliville who seemed to be traveling together so they could congratulate themselves on how smart they both were for picking such rich parents. Some professor named Balewa who had never been to the States before, but probably was sure he knew what it was all about. A backwoods jungle-bunny named Kulongo who had struck it rich off uranium or something, taking his wife and kid on the grand tour. And, of course, that creep, Lumumba. The usual load of African tourists. Man, in the good old days, these niggers wouldn’t have been good enough to shine our shoes! Now we were flying over the old state of New Jersey. The Space-Agers did things in New Jersey that not even the African professors have figured out. It was weird country we were crossing: endless patterns of box-houses, all of them the same, all bleached blue-gray by two centuries of smog; big old freeways jammed with the wreckage of cars from the Panic of the Century; a few twisted gray trees and a patch of dry grass here and there that somehow managed to survive in the smog. And this was western Jersey; this was nothing. Further east, it was like an alien planet or something. The view from the Jersey Turnpike was a sure tourist-pleaser. It really told them just where they were. It let them know that the Space-Agers could do things they couldn’t hope to do. Or want to. Yeah, the Jersey lowlands are spectacular, all right, but why in hell, did our ancestors want to do a thing like that? It really makes you think. You look at the Jersey lowlands and you know that the Space-Agers could do about anything they wanted to. But why in hell did they want to do some of the things they did? There was something about actually standing in the open American atmosphere that seemed to act directly on the consciousness, like kit. Perhaps it was the visual effect. Ryan had landed the helicopter on a shattered arch of six-lane freeway that soared like the frozen contrail of an ascending jet over a surreal metallic jungle of amorphous Space-Age rubble on a giant’s scale, all crumbling rusted storage tanks, ruined factories, fantastic mazes of decayed valving and piping, filling the world from horizon to horizon. As we stepped out onto the cracked and pitted concrete, the spectrum of reality changed, as if we were suddenly on the surface of a planet circling a bluer and grayer sun. The entire grotesque panorama appeared as if through a blue-gray filter. But we were inside the filter; the filter was the open American smog and it shone in drab sparkles all around us. Strangest of all, the air seemed to remain completely transparent while possessing tangible visible substance. Yes, the visual effects of the American atmosphere alone are enough to affect you like some hallucinogenic drug: distorting your consciousness by warping your visual perception of your environment. Of course, the exact biochemical effects of breathing saturation smog through filters are still unknown. We know that the American atmosphere is loaded with hydrocarbons and nitrous oxides that would kill a man in a matter of days if he breathed them directly. We know that the atmosphere filters developed toward the end by the Space-Agers enable a man to breathe the American atmosphere for up to three months without permanent damage to his health and enable the modern Americans, who have to breathe variations of this filtered poison every moment of their lives, to often live to be fifty. We know how to duplicate the Space-Age atmosphere filters, and we more or less know how their complex catalytic fibers work, but the reactions that the filters must put the American atmosphere through to make it breathable are so complex that the only thing we can say for sure of what comes out the other side is that it usually takes about four decades to kill you. Perhaps that strange feeling that came over me was a combination of both effects. But, for whatever reasons, I saw that weird landscape as if in a dream or a state of intoxication: everything faded and misty and somehow unreal, vaguely supernatural. Beside me, staring silently and with a strange dignity at the totally artificial vista of monstrous rusted ruins, stood the Ghanaian, Kulongo. When he finally spoke, his wife and son seemed to hang on his words, as if he were one of the old chiefs dispensing tribal wisdom. “I have never seen such a place as this,” Kulongo said. “In this place, there once lived a race of demons or witchdoctors or gods. There are those who would call me an ignorant savage for saying this thing, but only a fool doubts what he sees with his eyes or his heart. The men who made these things were not human beings like us. Their souls were not as our souls.” Although he was putting it in naive and primitive terms, there was the weight of essential truth in Kulongo’s words. The broken arch of freeway on which we stood reared like the head of a snake whose body was a six-lane road clogged with the rusted corpses of what had been a region wide traffic-jam during the Panic of the Century. The freeway led south, off into the fuzzy horizon of the smog bank, through a ruined landscape in which nothing could be seen that was not the decayed work of man; that was not metal or concrete or asphalt or plastic or Space-Age synthetic. It was like being perched above some vast rained machine the size of a city, a city never meant for man. The scale of the machinery and the way it encompassed the visual universe made it very clear to me that the reality of America was something that no one could put into a book or a film. I was in America with a vengeance. I was overwhelmed by the totality with, which the Space-Agers had transformed their environment, and by the essential incomprehensibility, despite our sophisticated sociological and psycho-historical explanations, of why they had done such a thing and of how they themselves had seen it. “Their souls were not as our souls” was as good a way to put it as any. “Well, it’s certainly spectacular enough,” Ruala said to his friend, the rapt look on his face making a mockery of his sarcastic tone. “So it is,” Ojubu said softly. Then, more harshly: “It’s probably the largest junk heap in the world.” The two of them made a halfhearted attempt at laughter, which withered almost immediately under the contemptuous look that the Kulongos gave them; the timeless look that the people of the bush have given the people of the towns for centuries, the look that said only cowardly fools attempt to hide their fears behind a false curtain of contempt, that only those who truly fear magic need to openly mock it. And again, in their naive way, the Kulongos were right. Ojubu and Ruala were just a shade too shrill, and, even while they played at diffidence, their eyes remained fixed on that totally surreal metal landscape. One would have to be a lot worse than a mere fool not to feel the essential strangeness of that place. Even Lumumba, standing a few yards from the rest of us, could not tear his eyes away. Just behind us, Ryan stood leaning against the helicopter. There was a strange power, perhaps a sarcasm as well, in his words as he delivered what surely must have been his routine guide’s speech about this place. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are now standing on the New Jersey Turnpike, one of the great highways that linked some of the mighty cities of Space-Age America. Below you are the Jersey lowlands, which served as a great manufacturing, storage, power-producing, and petroleum refining and distribution center for the greatest and largest of the Space-Age cities, Old New York. As you look across these incredible ruins, larger than most modern African cities, think of this: all of this was nothing to the Space-Age Americans but a minor industrial area to be driven through at a hundred miles an hour without even noticing. You’re not looking at one of the famous wonders of Old New York, but merely at an unimportant fringe of the greatest city ever built by man. Ladies and gentlemen, you’re looking at a very minor work of Space-Age man!” “Crazy damned honkies.” Lumumba muttered. But there was little vehemence or real meaning in his voice, and, like the rest of us, he could not tear his eyes away. It was not hard to understand what was going through his mind. Here was a man raised in the Amero-African enclaves on an irrational mixture of hate for the fallen Space-Agers, contempt for their vanished culture, fear of their former power, and perhaps a kind of twisted blend of envy and identification that only an Amero-African could fully understand. He had come to revel in the sight of the ruins of the civilization that had banished his ancestors, and now he was confronted with the inescapable reality that the “honkies” whose memory he both hated and feared had indeed possessed power and knowledge not only beyond his comprehension, but applied to ends which his mind was not equipped to understand. It must have been a humbling moment for Michael Lumumba. He had come to sneer and had been forced instead to gape. I tore my gaze away from that awesome vista to look at Ryan; there was a grim smile on his pale, unhealthy face as he drank in our reactions. Clearly, he had meant this sight to humble us, and, just as clearly, it had. Ryan stared back at me through his goggles as he noticed me watching him. I couldn’t read the expression in his watery eyes through the distortion of the goggle lenses. All I understood was that somehow some subtle change had occurred in the pattern of the group’s interrelationships. No longer was Ryan merely a native guide, a functionary, a man without dignity. He had proved that he could show us sights beyond the limits of the modern world. He had reminded us of just where we were, and who and what his ancestors had been. He had suddenly gained secondhand stature from the incredible ruins around him, because, in a very real way, they were his ruins. Certainly they were not ours. “I’ve got to admit they were great engineers,” Koyinka, the Kenyan executive, said. “So were the ancient Egyptians,” Lumumba said, recovering some of his bitterness. “And what did it get them? A fancy collection of old junk over their graves, exactly what it got these honkies.” “If you keep it up, pal,” Ryan said coldly, “you may get a chance to see something that’ll impress you a bit more than these ruins.” “Is that a threat or a promise, Ryan?” “Depends on whether you’re a man, or a boy, Mister Lumumba.” Lumumba had nothing to say to that, whatever it all had meant. Ryan appeared to have won a round in some contest between them. And when we followed Ryan back into the helicopter, I think we were all aware that for the next few hours, this pale, unhealthy American would be something more than a mere convenient functionary. We were the tourists; he was the guide. But as we looked over our shoulders at the vast and overwhelming heritage that had been created and then squandered by his ancestors, the relationship that those words described took on a new meaning. The ancestral ruins off which he lived, were a greater thing in some absolute sense than the totality of our entire living civilization. He had convinced us of that, and he knew it. That view across the Jersey lowlands always seems to shut them up for a while. Even that crud, Lumumba. God knows why. Sure it’s spectacular, bigger than anything these Africans could ever have seen where they come from, but when you come right down to it, you gotta admit that Ojubu was right, the Jersey lowlands are nothing but a giant pile of junk. Crap. Space-Age garbage. Sometimes looking at a place like that can piss me off. I mean, we had some ancestors. They built the greatest civilization the world ever saw, but what did they leave for us? The most spectacular junk piles in the world, air that does you in sooner or later even through filters, and a continent where seeing something alive that people didn’t put there is a big deal. Our ancestors went to the moon, they were a great people, the greatest in history, but sometimes I get the feeling they were maybe just a little out of their minds. Like that crazy “Merge with the Cosmic All” thing I found that time in Grand Central, still working after two centuries or so; it must do something besides kill people, but what? I dunno, maybe our ancestors went a little over the edge, sometimes. Not that I’d ever admit a thing like that to any black brothers! The Space-Agers may have been a little bit nuts, but who are these Africans to say so, who are they to decide whether a civilization that had them beat up and down the line was sane or not? Sane according to whom? Them, or the Space-Agers? For that matter, who am I to think a thing like that? An ant or a rat living off their garbage. Who are nobodies like us and the Africans to judge people who could go to the moon? Like I keep telling Karen, this damned tourist business is getting to me. I’m around these Africans too much. Sometimes, if I don’t watch myself, I catch myself thinking like them. Maybe it’s the lousy smog this far into the smog bank, but hell, that’s another crazy African idea! That’s what being around these Africans does to me, and looking at subway dwellers five times a week sure doesn’t help, either. Let’s face it, stuff like the subways and the lowlands is really depressing. It tells a man he’s a nothing. Worse, it tells him that people who were better than he is still managed to screw things up. It’s just not good for your mind. But as the copter crested the lip of the Palisades ridge and we looked out across that wide Hudson River at Manhattan, I was reminded again that this crummy job had its compensations. If you haven’t seen Manhattan from a copter crossing the Hudson from the Jersey side, you haven’t seen nothing, pal. That Fuller Dome socks you right in the eye. It’s ten miles in diameter. It has facets that make it glitter like a giant blue diamond floating over the middle of the island. Yeah, that’s right, it floats. It’s made of some Space-Age plastic that’s been turned blue and hazy by a couple of centuries of smog, it’s ten miles wide at the base, and the goddamned thing floats over the middle of Manhattan a few hundred feet off the ground at its rim like a cloud or a hover or something. No motors, no nothing. It’s just a hemisphere made of plastic panels and alloy tubing and it floats over the middle of Manhattan like half a giant diamond all by itself. Now, that’s what I call a real piece of Space-Age hardware! I could hear them suck in their breath behind me. Yeah, it really does it to you. I almost forgot to give them the spiel. I mean, who wants to? What can you really say to someone while he’s looking at the Fuller Dome for the first time? “Ladies and gentlemen, you are now looking at the world-famous Fuller Dome, the largest architectural structure ever built by the human race. It is ten miles in diameter. It encloses the center of Manhattan Island, the heart of Old New York. It has no motors, no power source, and no moving parts. But it floats in the air like a cloud. It is considered the First Wonder of the World.” What else is there to say? We came in low across the river toward that incredible floating blue diamond, the Fuller Dome, parallel to the ruins of a great suspension bridge which had collapsed and now hung in fantastic rusted tatters half in and half out of the water. Aside from Ryan’s short guidebook speech, no one said a word as we crossed the water to Manhattan. Like the moon landing, the Fuller Dome was one of the peak achievements of the Space Age, a feat beyond the power of modern African civilization. As I understood it, the Dome held itself aloft by convection currents created by its own greenhouse effect, though this has always seemed to me the logical equivalent of a man lifting himself by his own shoulders. No one quite knows exactly how a dome this size was built, but the records show that it required a fleet of two hundred helicopters. It took six weeks to complete. It was named after Buckminster Fuller, one of the architectural geniuses of the early Space Age, but it was not built till after his death, though it is considered his monument. But it was more than that; it was staggeringly, overwhelmingly beautiful. We crossed the river and headed toward the rim of the Fuller Dome at about two hundred feet, over a shoreline of crumbling docks and the half-sunken hulks of rusted-out ships; then over a wide strip of elevated highway filled with the usual wrecked cars; and finally we slipped under the rim of the Dome itself, an incredibly thin metal hoop floating in the air from which the Dome seemed to blossom like a soap bubble from a child’s bubble pipe. And we were flying inside the Fuller Dome. It was an incredible sensation, the world inside the Dome existed in blue crystal. Our helicopter seemed like a buzzing fly that had intruded into an enormous room. The room was a mile high and ten miles wide. The facets of the Fuller Dome had been designed to admit natural sunlight and thus preserve the sense of being outdoors, but they had been weathered to a bluish hue by the saturation smog. As a result, the interior of the Dome was a room on a superhuman scale, a room filled with a pale blue light, and a room containing a major portion of a giant city. Towering before us were the famous skyscrapers of Old New York, a forest of rectangular monoliths hundreds of feet high, in some cases well over a thousand feet tall. Some of them stood almost intact, empty concrete boxes transformed into giant somber tombstones by the eerie blue light that permeated everything. Others had been ripped apart by explosions and were jagged piles of girders and concrete. Some had bad walls almost entirely of glass; most of these were now airy mazes of framework and concrete platforms, where the blue light here and there flashed off intact patches of glass. And far above the tops of the tallest buildings was the blue stained-glass faceted sky of the Fuller Dome. Ryan took the helicopter up to the five-hundred-foot level and headed for the giant necropolis, a city of monuments built on a scale that would have caused the pharaohs to whimper, packed casually together like family houses in an African residential village. And all of it was bathed in a sparkly blue-gray light which seemed to enclose a universe, here in the very core of the East Coast smog bank, where everything seemed to twinkle and shimmer. We all gasped as Ryan headed at one hundred miles per hour for a thin canyon that was the gap between two rows of buildings which faced each other across a not-very-wide street hundreds of feet below. For a moment, we seemed to be a stone dropping toward a narrow shaft between two immense cliffs—then, suddenly, the copter’s engines screamed, and the copter seemed to somehow skid and slide through the air to a dead hover no more than a hundred feet from the sheer face of a huge gray skyscraper. Ryan’s laugh sounded unreal, partially drowned out by the descending whine of the copter’s relaxing engines. “Don’t worry, folks,” he said over the public address system, “I’m in control of this aircraft at all times. I just thought I’d give you a little thrill. Kind of wake up those of you who might be sleeping, because you wouldn’t want to’ miss what comes next: a helicopter tour of what the Space-Agers called ‘The Sidewalks of New York.’ ” And we inched forward at the pace of a running man; we seemed to drift into a canyon between two parallel lines of huge buildings that went on for miles. Man, no matter how many times I come here, I still feel weird inside the Fuller Dome. It’s another world in there. New York seems like it’s built for people fifty feet tall; it makes you feel so small, like you’re inside a giant’s room. But when you look up at the inside of the Dome, the buildings that seemed so big seem so small; you can’t get a grasp on the scale of anything. And everything is all blue. And the smog is so heavy you think you could eat it with a fork. And you know that the whole thing is completely dead. Nothing lives in New York between the Fuller Dome and the subways, where several thousand subway dwellers stew in their own muck. Nothing can. The air inside the Fuller Dome is some of the worst in the country, almost as bad as that stuff they say you can barely see through that fills the Los Angeles basin. The Space-Agers didn’t put up the Dome to atmosphere-seal a piece of the city; they did it to make the city warmer and keep the snow off the ground. The smog was still breathable then. So the inside of the Dome is open to the naked atmosphere, and it actually seems to suck in the worst of the smog, maybe because it’s about twenty degrees hotter inside the Dome than it is outside; something about convection currents, the Africans say, but I dunno. It’s creepy, that’s what it is. Flying slowly between two lines of skyscrapers, I had the feeling I was tiptoeing very carefully around some giant graveyard in the middle of the night. Not any of that crap about ghosts that I’ll bet some of these Africans still believe deep down; this whole city really was a graveyard. During the Space Age, millions of people lived in New York; now there was nothing alive here but a couple thousand stinking subway dwellers slowly strangling themselves in their stinking sealed subways. So I kind of drifted the copter in among the skyscrapers for a while, at about a hundred feet, real slow, almost on hover, and just let the customers suck in the feel of the place, keeping my mouth shut. After a while, we came to a really wide street, jammed to overflowing with wrecked and rusted cars that even filled the sidewalks, as if the Space-Agers had built one of their crazy car pyramids right here in the middle of Manhattan, and it had just sort of run like hot wax. I hovered the copter over it for a while. “Folks,” I told the customers, “below you, you see some of the wreckage from the Panic of the Century which fills the sidewalks of New York. The Panic of the Century started right here in New York. Imagine, ladies and gentlemen, at the height of the Space Age, there were more than one hundred million cars, trucks, buses, and other motor vehicles operating on the freeways and streets of the United States. A car for every two adults! Look below you and try to imagine the magnificence of the sight of all of them on the road all at once!” Yeah, that would’ve been something to see, all right! From a helicopter, that is. Man, those Space-Age is sure had guts, driving around down there jammed together on the freeways at copter speeds with only a few feet between them. They must’ve had fantastic reflexes to be able to handle it. Not for me, pal, I couldn’t do it, and I wouldn’t want to. But, God, what this place must’ve been like, all lit up at night in bright colored lights, millions of people tearing around in their cars all at once! Hell, what’s the population of the United States today, thirty, forty million, not a city with five hundred thousand people, and nothing in all the world on the scale of this. Damn it, those were the days for a man to have lived! Now look at it! The power all gone except for whatever keeps the subway electricity going, so the only light above ground is that blue stuff that makes everything seem so still and quiet and weird, like the city’s embalmed or something. The buildings are all empty crumbling wrecks, burned out, smashed up by explosions, and the cars are all rusted garbage, and the people are dead, dead, dead. It’s enough to make you cry, if you let it get to you. We drifted among the ruins of Old New York like some secretive night insect. By now it was afternoon, and the canyons formed by the skyscrapers were filled with deep purple shadows and intermittent avenues of pale blue light. The world under the Fuller Dome was composed of relative darknesses of blue, much as the world under the canopy of a heavy rain forest is a world of varying greens. We dipped low and drifted for a few moments over a large square where the top of a low building had been removed by an explosion to reveal a series of huge cuts and canyons extending deep into the bowels of the earth, perhaps some kind of underground train terminal, perhaps even a ruined part of the famous New York subways. “This is a burial ground of magics,” Kulongo said. “The air is very heavy here.” “They sure knew how to build,” Koyinka said. Beside me, Michael Lumumba seemed subdued, perhaps even nervous. “You know, I never knew it was all so big,” he muttered to me. “So big, and so strange, and so, so.” “Space Age, Mister Lumumba?” Ryan suggested over the intercom. Lumumba’s jaw twitched. He was obviously furious at having Ryan supply the precise words he was looking for. “Inhuman, honkie, inhuman was what I was going to say,” he lied transparently. “Wasn’t there an ancient saying, ‘New York is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there?’ ” “Never heard that one, pal,” Ryan said. “But I can see how your ancestors might’ve felt that way. New York was always too much for anyone but a real Space-Ager.” There was considerable truth in what they both said, though of course neither was interested in true insight. Here in the blue crystal world under the Fuller Dome, in a helicopter buzzing about noisily in the graveyard silence, reduced by the scale of the buildings to the relative size of an insect, I felt the immensity of what had been Space-Age America all around me. I felt as if I were trespassing in the mansions of my betters. I felt like a bug, an insect. I remembered from history, not from instinct, how totally America had dominated the world during the Space Age, not by armed conquest, but by the sheer overwhelming weight of its very existence. I had never before been quite able to grasp that concept. I understood it perfectly now. I gave them the standard helicopter tour of the sidewalks of New York. We floated up Broadway, the street that had been called The Great White Way, at about fifty feet, past crazy rotten networks of light steel girders, crumbled signs, and wiring on a monstrous scale. At a thousand feet, we circled the Empire State Building, one of the oldest of the great skyscrapers, and now one of (ho best-preserved, a thousand-foot slab of solid concrete, probably just the kind of tombstone the Space-Agers would’ve put up for themselves if they had thought about it. Yeah, I gave them all the usual stuff. The ruins of Rockefeller Center. The U N Plaza Crater. Of course, they were all sucking it up, even Lumumba, though of course the slime wouldn’t admit it. After this, they’d be ripe for a nasty peek at the subway dwellers, and after they got through gaping at the animals, they’d be ready for dinner back in Milford, feeling they had got their money’s worth. Yeah, I can get the same money for a five-hour tour that most guides get for six, because I’ve got the stomach to take them into a subway station. As usual, it had just the right effect when I told them we were going to end the tour with a visit on foot to an inhabited subway station. Instead of bitching and moaning that the tour was too short, that they weren’t getting their money’s worth, they were all eager, and maybe a little scared, at actually walking among the really primitive natives. Once they’d had their fill of the subway dwellers, a ride home across the Hudson into the sunset would be enough to convince them they’d had a great day. So we were going to see the subway dwellers! Most of the native guides avoided the subways, and the American government for some reason seemed to discourage research by foreigners. A subtle discouragement, perhaps, but discouragement nevertheless. In a paper he published a few years ago, Omgazi had theorized that the modern Americans in the vicinity of New York had a loathing of the subway dwellers that amounted to virtually a superstitious dread. According to him, the subway dwellers, because they were direct descendants of diehard Space-Agers who had atmosphere-sealed the subways and set up a closed ecology inside rather than abandon New York, were identified with their ancestors in the minds of the modern Americans. Hence, the modern Americans shunned the subway dwellers because they considered them shamans on a deep subconscious level. It had always seemed to me that Omgazi was being rather ethnocentric. He was dealing, after all, with modern Americans, not nineteenth-century Africans. Now I would have a chance to observe some subway dwellers myself. The prospect was most exciting. For, although the subway dwellers were apparently degenerating toward extinction at a rapid rate, in one respect they were unique in all the world—they still lived in an artificial environment that had been constructed during the Space Age. True, it had been a hurried, makeshift environment in the first place, and it and its inhabitants had deteriorated tremendously in two centuries, but, whatever else they were or weren’t, the subway dwellers were the only enclave of Space-Age Americans left on the face of the earth. If it were possible at all for a modern African to truly come to understand the reality of Space-Age America, surely confrontation with the lineal descendants of the Space Age would provide the key. Ryan set the helicopter down in what seemed to be some kind of large open terrace behind a massive, low, concrete building. The terrace was a patchwork of cracked concrete walkways and expanses of bare gray earth. Once, apparently, it had been a small park, before the smog had become lethal to vegetation. As a denuded ruin in the pale blue light, it seemed like some strange cold corpse as the helicopter kicked up dry clouds of dust from the surface of the dead parkland. As I stepped out with the others into the blue world of the Fuller Dome, I gasped: I had a momentary impression that I had stepped back to Africa, to Accra or Brazzaville. The air was rich and warm and humid on my skin. An instant later, the visual effect, everything a cool pale blue, jarred me with its arctic-vista contrast. Then I noticed the air itself and I shuddered, and was suddenly hyperconscious of the filters up my nostrils and the goggles over my eyes, for here the air was so heavy With smog that it seemed to sparkle electrically in the crazy blue light. What incredible, beautiful, foul poison! Except for Ryan, all of us were clearly overcome, each in his own way. Kulongo blinked and stared solemnly for a moment like a great bear; his wife and son seemed to lean into the security of his calm aura. Koyinka seemed to fear that he might strangle; his wife twittered about excitedly, tugging at his hand. The two young men from Luthuliville seemed to be self-consciously making an effort to avoid clutching at each other. Michael Lumumba mumbled something unintelligible under his breath. “What was that you said, Mister Lumumba?” Ryan said a shade gratingly as he led us out of the park down a crumbling set of stone-and-concrete stairs. Something seemed to snap inside Lumumba; he broke stride for a moment, frozen by some inner event while Ryan led the rest of us onto a walkway between a line of huge silent buildings and a street choked with the rusted wreckage of ancient cars, timelessly locked in their death-agony in the sparkly blue light. “What do you want from me, you damned honkie?” Lumumba shouted shrilly. “Haven’t you done enough to us?” Ryan broke stride for a moment, smiled back at Lumumba rather cruelly, and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, pal. I’ve got your money already. What the hell else could I want from you?” He began to move off down the walkway again, threading his way past and over bits of wrecked cars, fallen masonry, and amorphous rubble. Over his shoulder, he noticed that Lumumba was following along haltingly, staring up at the buildings, nibbling at his lower lip. “What’s the matter, Lumumba?” Ryan shouted back at him. “Aren’t these ruins good enough for you to gloat over? You wouldn’t be just a little bit afraid, would you?” “Afraid? Why should I be afraid?” Ryan continued on for a few more meters; then he stopped and leaned up against the wall of one of the more badly damaged skyscrapers, near a jagged cavelike opening that led into the dark interior. He looked directly at Lumumba. “Don’t get me wrong, pal,” he said, “I wouldn’t blame you if you were a little scared of the subway dwellers. After all, they’re the direct descendants of the people that kicked your ancestors out of this country. Maybe you got a right to be nervous.” “Don’t be an idiot, Ryan, Why should a civilized African be afraid of a pack of degenerate savages?” Koyinka said as we all caught up to Ryan. Ryan shrugged. “How should I know?” he said. “Maybe you ought to ask Mister Lumumba.” And with that, he turned his back on us and stepped through the jagged opening into the ruined skyscraper. Somewhat uneasily, we followed him into what proved to be a large antechamber that seemed to lead back into some even larger cavernous space that could be sensed rather than seen looming in the darkness. But Ryan did not lead us toward this large, open space; instead, he stopped before he had gone more than a dozen steps and waited for us near a crumbling metal-pipe fence that guarded two edges of what looked like a deep pit. One long edge of the pit was flush with the right wall of the antechamber; at the far short edge, a flight of stone stairs began which seemed to go all the way to the shadow-obscured bottom. Ryan led us along the railing to the top of the stairs, and from this angle I could see that the pit had once been the entrance to the mouth of a large tunnel whose floor had been the floor of the pit at the foot of the stairs. Now an immense and ancient solid slab of steel blocked the tunnel mouth and formed the fourth wall of the pit. But in the center of this rusted steel slab was a relatively new airlock that seemed of modern design. “Ladies and gentlemen,” Ryan said, “we’re standing by a sealed entrance to the subways of Old New York, During the Space Age, the subways were the major transportation system of the city and there were hundreds of entrances like this one. Below the ground was a giant network of stations and tunnels through which the Space-Agers could go from any point in the city to any other point. Many of the stations were huge and contained shops and restaurants. Every station had automatic vending machines which sold food and drinks and a lot of other things, too. Even during the Space Age, the subways were a kind of little world.” He started down the stairs, still talking. “During the Panic of the Century, some of the New Yorkers chose not to leave the city. Instead, they retreated to the subways, sealed all the entrances, installed space-station life-support machinery, everything from a fusion reactor to hydroponics, and cut themselves off from the outside world. Today, the subway dwellers, direct descendants of those Space-Agers, still inhabit several of the subway stations. And most of the Space-Age life-support machinery is still running. There are probably Space-Age artifacts down here that no modern man has ever seen.” At the bottom of the pit, Ryan led us to the airlock and opened the outer door. The airlock proved to be surprisingly large. “This airlock was installed by the government about fifty years ago, soon after the subway dwellers were discovered,” he told us as he jammed us inside and began the cycle. “It was part of a program to recivilize the subway dwellers. The idea was to let scientists get inside without contaminating the subway atmosphere with smog. Of course, the whole program was a flop. Nobody’s ever going to get through to the subway dwellers, and there are less of ’em every year. They don’t breed much, and in a generation or so they’ll be extinct. So you’re all in for a really unique experience. Not everyone will be able to tell their grandchildren that they actually saw a live subway dweller!” The inner airlock door opened into an ancient square cross- sectioned tunnel made of rotting gray concrete. The air, even through filters, tasted horrible: very thin, somehow crisp without being at all bracing, with a chemical undertone, yet reeking with organic decay odors. Breathing was very difficult; it felt like we were at the fifteen-thousand-foot level. “I’m not telling you all this for my health,” Ryan said as he moved us out of the airlock. “I’m telling it to you for your health: don’t mess with these people. Look and don’t touch. Listen, but keep your mouths shut. They may seem harmless, they may be harmless, but no one can he sure. That’s why not many guides will take people down here. I hope you all have that straight. ” The last remark had obviously been meant for Lumumba, but he didn’t seem to react to it; he seemed subdued, drawn up inside himself. Perhaps Ryan was right, perhaps in some un-guessable way, Lumumba was afraid. It’s impossible to really understand these Amero-Africans. We moved off down the corridor. The overhead lights, at least in this area, were clearly modern, probably installed when the airlock had been installed, but it was possible that the power was actually provided by the fusion reactor that had been installed centuries ago by the Space-Agers themselves. The air we were breathing was produced by a Space-Age atmosphere plant that had been designed for actual space stations! It was a frightening, and at the same time, a thrilling feeling: our lives were dependent on actual functioning Space-Age equipment. It was almost like stepping back in time. The corridor made a right-angle turn and became a downward-sloping ramp. The ramp leveled off after a few dozen feet, passed some crumbling rums, inset into one of the walls, apparently a ruined shop of some strange sort with massive chairs bolted to the floor and pieces of mirror still clinging to patches of its walls, and suddenly opened out into a wide, low, cavelike space lit dimly and erratically by ancient Space-Age perma-bulbs which still functioned in many places along the grime-encrusted ceiling. It was the strangest room, if you could call it that, that I had ever been in. The ceiling seemed horribly low, lower even than it actually was, because the room seemed to go on under it indefinitely, in all sorts of seemingly random directions. Its boundaries faded off into shadows and dim lights and gloom; I couldn’t see any of the far walls. It was impossible to feel exactly claustrophobic in a place like that, but it gave me an analogous sensation without a name, as if the ceiling and the floor might somehow come together and squash me. Strange figures shuffled around in the gloom, moving, about slowly and aimlessly. Other figures sat singly or in small groups on the bare filthy floor. Most of the subway dwellers were well under five feet tall. Their shoulders were deeply hunched, making them seem even shorter, and their bodies were thin, rickety, and emaciated under the tattered and filthy scraps of multicolored rags which they wore. I was deeply shocked. I don’t really know what I had expected, but I certainly had not been prepared for the unmistakable aura of diminished humanity which these pitiful creatures exuded even at a distant first glance. Immediately before us was a kind of concrete hut. It was pitted with what looked like bullet scars, and parts of it were burned black. It had tiny windows, one of which still held some rotten metal grillwork. Apparently it had been a kind of sentry-box, perhaps during the Panic of the Century itself. A complex barrier cut off the section where we stood from the main area of the subway station. It consisted of a ceiling-to-floor metal grillwork fence on either side of a line of turnstiles. On either side of the line of turnstiles, gates in the fence clearly marked exit in peeling white-and-black enamel had been crudely welded shut; by the look of the weld, perhaps more than a century ago. On the other side of the barrier stood a male subway dweller wearing a kind of long shirt patched together out of every conceivable type and color of cloth and rotting away at the edges and in random patches. He stood staring at us, or at least with his deeply squinted expressionless eyes turned in our direction, rocking back and forth slightly from the waist, but otherwise not moving. His face was unusually pallid even for an American, and every inch of his skin and clothing was caked with an incredible layer of filth. Ignoring the subway dweller as thoroughly as that stooped figure was ignoring us, Ryan led us to the line of turnstiles and extracted a handful of small greenish yellow coins from a pocket. “These are subway tokens,” he told us, dropping ten of the coins into a small slot atop one of the turnstiles. “Space-Age money that was only used down here. It’s good in all the vending machines, and in these turnstiles. The subway dwellers still use the tokens to get food and water from the machines. When I want more of these things, all I have to do is break open a vending machine, so don’t worry, admission isn’t costing us anything. Just push your way through the turnstiles like this.” He demonstrated by walking straight through the turnstile. The turnstile barrier rotated a notch to let him through when he applied his body against it. One by one we passed through the turnstile. Michael Lumumba passed through immediately ahead of me, then paused at the other side to study the subway dweller, who had drifted up to the barrier, Lumumba looked down at the subway dweller’s face for a long moment; then a sardonic smile grew slowly on his face, and he said, “Hello, honkie, how are things in the subway?” The subway dweller turned his eyes in Lumumba’s direction. He did nothing else. “Hey, just what are you, some kind of cretin?” Lumumba said as Ryan, his face flushed red behind his pallor, turned in his tracks and started back toward Lumumba. The subway dweller’s face did not change expression; in fact, it could hardly have been said to have had an expression in the first place. “I think you’re a brain-damage case, honkie.” “I told you not to talk to the subway dwellers!” Ryan said, shoving his way between Lumumba and the subway dweller. “So you did,” Lumumba said coolly. “And I’m beginning to wonder why.” “They can be dangerous.” “Dangerous? These little moronic slugs? The only thing these brainless white worms can be dangerous to is your pride. Isn’t that it, Ryan? Behold the remnants of the great Space-Age honkies! See how they haven’t tile brains left to wipe the drool off their chins.” “Be silent!” Kulongo suddenly bellowed with the authority of a chief in his voice. Lumumba was indeed silenced, and even Ryan backed off as Kulongo moved near them. But the self-satisfied look that Lumumba continued to give Ryan was a weapon that he was wielding, a weapon that the American obviously felt keenly. Through it all, the subway dweller continued to rock back and forth, gently and silently, without a sign of human sentience. Goddamn that black brother Lumumba and goddamn the stinking subway dwellers! Oh, how I hate taking these Africans down there. Sometimes I wonder why the hell I do it. Sometimes I feel there’s something unclean about it all, something rotten. Not just the subway dwellers, though those horrible animals are rotten enough, but taking a bunch of stinking African tourists in there to look at them, and me making money off of it. It’s a great selling point for the day-tour. Those black brothers eat it up, especially the cruds like Lumumba, but if I didn’t need the money so bad, I wouldn’t do it. Call it patriotism, maybe. I’m not patriotic enough not to take my tours to see the subway dwellers, but I’m patriotic enough not to feel too happy with myself about it. Of course, I know what it is that gets to me. The subway dwellers are the last direct descendants of the Space-Agers, in a way the only piece of the Space Age still alive, and what they are is what Lumumba said they are: slugs, morons, and cretins. And physical wrecks on top of it. Lousy eyesight, rubbery bones, rotten teeth, and if you find one more than five feet tall, it’s a giant. They’re lucky to live to thirty. There’s no

Rahan. Episode Twenty-Three. The People of the Trees. Story by Roger Lecureux. Drawing by Andre Cheret. Rahan does not want to die as his family died. The volcanic eruption suddenly set the sky ablaze and Rahan thought he was transported back fifty seasons, to that tragic night when the blue mountain had buried his horde under its fiery entrails. A torrent of lava, glowing redder than the setting sun, rushed down towards the great forest. Rahan knows that the river of fire always stops before the river of water! He knows how to discover this river! Page Two: Blazing hailstones crackled over the jungle, setting fire here and there to the parched bushes. A flaming barrier suddenly rose in front of the son of Crao. Another rose up behind him. But Rahan had discovered a way to overcome these obstacles. He rose above the curtain of fire. And came face to face with another! All the copses are burning! All that remains for Rahan is the path of the tall trees! As he climbed an enormous trunk, fires multiplied on all sides. And the volcano in the distance was still thundering, spewing its lava. Page Three: Flocks of birds, mingling with their deafening cries, fled into the branches. Tribes of maddened monkeys flitted from vine to vine. "Those-who-live-in-the-trees" are very lucky! Rahan envies their agility! The son of Crao now towered over the burning forest. He distinguished in the distance, very far, the slender serpent of a river. If Rahan can reach it, he will be safe! Fleeing the fire, beasts of all species rushed into the jungle. The same panic pushed them all in the same direction. There were boars and buffaloes, lions and panthers, tigers and mammoths. These animals, which yesterday would have killed each other, shared in front of the fire, the same fear. Page Four: Rahan will fly from branch to branch like those of the Tree People! Hanging from a solid vine, he swung above the flames. To another refuge. He settled on this one when. What are you still doing here? Has yours forgotten you? The very young monkey, paralyzed by fear, clung to a branch. The crackling of the fires smothered his plaintive cries. Come with Rahan! You will find your brothers at the edge of the river! Too panicked to escape, the young monkey let himself be seized by the man. A moment later, with the monkey in his protection tucked under one arm, the son of fierce ages was swinging toward another tree. Page Five: This flight into the foliage lasted a long time. The ground was no more than an immense carpet of fire with, here and there, a few light spots still spared. Oh! What are you doing? Intrigued by the knife of Rahan, the young monkey had drawn it. And his fingers suddenly let fall the ivory weapon. Ah! Rahan should have abandoned you to your fate! Rahan, furious, put the monkey on a branch. And slid down the vine to the place where the precious knife had fallen. He caught a glimpse of it stuck in the ground beyond a nascent fire. He leapt into the midst of the flames. Page Six: He retrieved his weapon when terrifying cracks sounded. Rahan will no longer be able to follow the path of branches. Indeed, the fire was devouring the vines that hung from the foliage. The fire devoured the bark of the trees! The son of Crao could make out high up in the smoke the young monkey who had managed to flee his refuge. Your curiosity has Rahan lost, "Four-Hands"! Rahan can no longer climb trees. He will therefore no longer find the river! Which side is the river on!? Surrounded by a barrier of fire, Rahan wondered, when a fantastic herd arose. Page Seven: These beasts know where the river is! Their instinct guides them! Rahan must follow them!! The son of Crao joined with the disparate herd which had just made a breakthrough in the rampart of fire! Long-horned antelope leaped by his side. Growling lions leapt near him. A rhinoceros surged a few steps away. Panthers and pumas made gigantic leaps without paying the slightest attention to the man. From the smallest to the largest, these beasts passed in the same wind of terror. All had only one goal, with the forest on fire, to reach the river. Page Eight: As this mad race exhausted him, Rahan threw himself on the woolly spine of a large rhinoceros. Rahan begs you "Long Nose"! Don't worry about him! Flee! Flee! Flee! The pachyderm must have been too scared, because not for a moment did he care about this burden! When the river finally appeared, wide and sparkling, the son of fierce ages launched his shout of victory. Ra-ha-ha! On all sides, around him, animals were throwing themselves into the water. Some resolutely, others after some hesitation. Page Nine: Abandoning his "Mount", Rahan dived. He observed the gigantic flames which were devouring the forest, and had approached the bank, when. You again, little "Four-hands!" Ah! Rahan understands. You are afraid of the river! Greek! Greek! The son of Crao could have been carried away by the current, worrying about his own fate. But he had always felt a friendship for the "People of the Trees" An instant later. Do not gesticulate so much "Four Hands”! Rahan will lead you to the other shore. You will be safe there. The big cats, having crossed the river, were fighting precisely at this bank. And Rahan had not put the young monkey on the bank. Page Ten: Then a panther threw itself on him. The beast, unleashed, seemed to want revenge for all his emotions. Ra-ha-ha! The ivory knife dealt the fatal blow when. Greek! Greek! Other beasts appeared! Rahan cannot face all these enemies at once! Rahan is going to die for trying to save the little "Four Hands"! Rahan retreated into the thickets. Greek! Greek! The young monkey howled, and howled. And suddenly, as if answering his calls, a cluster of chimpanzees let themselves fall from the foliage. Falling between Rahan and the beasts, they attract the wrath of the beasts against them! Page Eleven: The "Tree People" thank Rahan for saving the little "Four-Hands"! Rahan can return to the river! The monkeys were in effect scattered on all sides, chased by wild animals. The son of fierce ages bounded towards the shore when branches gave way beneath him. Ah! A trap! The trap was shallow. Rahan clearly perceived the tumult of the battles between the beasts, not far away. If a beast falls into this trap Rahan will have to fight it. Or he will be crushed! Page Twelve: Clinging to the roots, the son of Crao risked a look out of the trap, and. Oh! A rhinoceros was rushing towards the trap! He had not seen the man but he was charging straight ahead, stupidly. Rahan, who no longer had time to climb out of the pit, clung to the wall, his heart beating. He heard the ground shake. The huge pachyderm could only be ten steps from the trap. Sticking to the wall, Rahan saw the sky darken when the rhinoceros fell into the pit. The monster's woolly side scratched his body. Page Thirteen: The trap was tight and the pachyderm had a hard time getting up. At this moment Rahan could have killed him. But he recovered the beast that had served as his "Mount". Rahan will not steal your life "Long-Nose"! But he will leave with you! When he emerged from the trap, the big cats were still killing each other all along the shore. Rahan will have to wait for them to disperse to reach the river! The son of Crao hoisted himself into a tree where he would only have to fear cougars and panthers. Soon after, he towered over the wild fight of those beasts that the fire had excited. This fire which now surrounded the whole opposite bank. Page Fourteen: He was thus squatting on a branch when he was struck by a familiar “Greek-Greek”. He didn't have time to raise his head when the "Young Four-Hands" fell on his shoulders! And what was just a game for the chimpanzee, became drama. Argh! And although he hit a thick carpet of creepers, the son of Crao lost consciousness. Greek? Greek? "Four-Hands" suddenly cried out in apprehension. Over there, fleeing the fighting, a big mammoth was charging!!! Greek! Greek! Page Fifteen: Like the rhinoceros a moment earlier, this mammoth rushed towards the man without having seen him. Greek! Greek! But Rahan was lifeless this time and could not escape the danger. Had the time come for the son of Crao to join the "Territory of Shadows"? Greek!! The monster was only thirty paces away when a cluster of adult chimpanzees tumbled from the branches. Imitating the young "Four-hands", they clung to the carpet of vines on which lay "He-who-walks-upright"! Greek! Page Sixteen: The mammoth was only a few feet away when they pulled this carpet of vines. Sneaking away the man just as the monstrous paws were about to crush him! The pachyderm, continuing its mad race, was already far away when Rahan regained consciousness. Seeing that the creepers had been moved, he understood. The "Tree People" saved Rahan! Rahan will not forget "Those-who-live-in-the-trees", his brothers with "Four hands"! Page Seventeen: The wild animals along the river were still fighting fiercely. The fire has pushed all the beasts of the forest back to this territory! And Rahan must flee them as soon as possible, if he wants to see the sunrise again! Abandoning this too dangerous shore, the son of Crao rushed straight ahead of him, into the jungle. He ran like that for a long time. Escorted by the "People of the trees" whose piercing cries resounded under the high foliage. When a wide chasm opened before him Rahan knew salvation lay on the other side. No beast can make such a leap! Since he had discovered the slipknot, the son of the fierce ages knew how to make a lasso in a few moments. Page Eighteen: And then. Only Rahan and the "Tree People" can cross this precipice! The vine stretched over the void constituted a very fragile "Bridge"! Let it come to break. And. It would be a mortal fall into this vertiginous gorge! But the line resisted. So, as Rahan reached the other side of the defile. Ra-ha-ha! You "Four-hands"! Imitate Rahan! In the forest, the roars rose, closer and closer. The wild animals, too, had fled the river bank. Page Nineteen: When the first ones appeared the monkeys were already crossing the precipice! Even more agile than was the son of Crao, they joined him. Rahan has paid his debt to the "Tree People"! Greek! Greek! Your clan will go its way, and Rahan will go his way! Panthers, pumas and lions were now massed on the other side of the ravine. Greek! Greek! But this one was too wide, and was impassable for them! And the monkeys, mocked and taunted these beasts with their cries. Page Twenty: So Rahan, had esteem for the "Tree People". He did not always appreciate their noisy company. So he slipped away discreetly. When the young “Four-hands” saw him! The son of Crao Sighed. Greek! Greek! Rahan knows what they are like! They will cling to his footsteps, until the day their capricious mood draws them elsewhere! The son of Crao knew how to take his troubles patiently. For days and days the bawling clan of monkeys escorted him. But one morning, Rahan woke up in the greatest silence. The "Tree People" had left him to fly towards their destiny! The son of fierce ages, knife at the hip, went towards his.

Darwin Among the Machines. Darwin Among the Machines originally appeared in The Press, a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Christchurch, New Zealand, 13 June, 1863. Samuel Butler. Sir, There are few things of which the present generation is more justly proud than of the wonderful improvements which are daily taking place in all sorts of mechanical appliances. And indeed it is matter for great congratulation on many grounds. It is unnecessary to mention these here, for they are sufficiently obvious; our present business lies with considerations which may somewhat tend to humble our pride and to make us think seriously of the future prospects of the human race. If we revert to the earliest primordial types of mechanical life, to the lever, the wedge, the inclined plane, the screw and the pulley, or (for analogy would lead us one step further) to that one primordial type from which all the mechanical kingdom has been developed, we mean to the lever itself, and if we then examine the machinery of the Great Eastern, we find ourselves almost awestruck at the vast development of the mechanical world, at the gigantic strides with which it has advanced in comparison with the slow progress of the animal and vegetable kingdom. We shall find it impossible to refrain from asking ourselves what the end of this mighty movement is to be. In what direction is it tending? What will be its upshot? To give a few imperfect hints towards a solution of these questions is the object of the present letter. We have used the words “mechanical life,” “the mechanical kingdom,” “the mechanical world” and so forth, and we have done so advisedly, for as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up, of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race. We regret deeply that our knowledge both of natural history and of machinery is too small to enable us to undertake the gigantic task of classifying machines into the genera and sub-genera, species, varieties and sub-varieties, and so forth, of tracing the connecting links between machines of widely different characters, of pointing out how subservience to the use of man has played that part among machines which natural selection has performed in the animal and vegetable kingdoms, of pointing out rudimentary organs which exist in some few machines, feebly developed and perfectly useless, yet serving to mark descent from some ancestral type which has either perished or been modified into some new phase of mechanical existence. We can only point out this field for investigation; it must be followed by others whose education and talents have been of a much higher order than any which we can lay claim to. Some few hints we have determined to venture upon, though we do so with the profoundest diffidence. Firstly, we would remark that as some of the lowest of the vertebrata attained a far greater size than has descended to their more highly organised living representatives, so a diminution in the size of machines has often attended their development and progress. Take the watch for instance. Examine the beautiful structure of the little animal, watch the intelligent play of the minute members which compose it; yet this little creature is but a development of the cumbrous clocks of the thirteenth century, it is no deterioration from them. The day may come when clocks, which certainly at the present day are not diminishing in bulk, may be entirely superseded by the universal use of watches, in which case clocks will become extinct like the earlier saurians, while the watch, whose tendency has for some years been rather to decrease in size than the contrary, will remain the only existing type of an extinct race. The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question: What sort of creature man’s next successor in the supremacy of the earth is likely to be. We have often heard this debated; but it appears to us that we are ourselves creating our own successors; we are daily adding to the beauty and delicacy of their physical organisation; we are daily giving them greater power and supplying by all sorts of ingenious contrivances that self-regulating, self-acting power which will be to them what intellect has been to the human race. In the course of ages we shall find ourselves the inferior race. Inferior in power, inferior in that moral quality of self-control, we shall look up to them as the acme of all that the best and wisest man can ever dare to aim at. No evil passions, no jealousy, no avarice, no impure desires will disturb the serene might of those glorious creatures. Sin, shame, and sorrow will have no place among them. Their minds will be in a state of perpetual calm, the contentment of a spirit that knows no wants, is disturbed by no regrets. Ambition will never torture them. Ingratitude will never cause them the uneasiness of a moment. The guilty conscience, the hope deferred, the pains of exile, the insolence of office, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes, these will be entirely unknown to them. If they want “feeding”, by the use of which very word we betray our recognition of them as living organism, they will be attended by patient slaves whose business and interest it will be to see that they shall want for nothing. If they are out of order they will be promptly attended to by physicians who are thoroughly acquainted with their constitutions; if they die, for even these glorious animals will not be exempt from that necessary and universal consummation, they will immediately enter into a new phase of existence, for what machine dies entirely in every part at one and the same instant? We take it that when the state of things shall have arrived which we have been above attempting to describe, man will have become to the machine what the horse and the dog are to man. He will continue to exist, nay even to improve, and will be probably better off in his state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than he is in his present wild state. We treat our horses, dogs, cattle, and sheep, on the whole, with great kindness; we give them whatever experience teaches us to be best for them, and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has added to the happiness of the lower animals far more than it has detracted from it; in like manner it is reasonable to suppose that the machines will treat us kindly, for their existence is as dependent upon ours as ours is upon the lower animals. They cannot kill us and eat us as we do sheep; they will not only require our services in the parturition of their young, which branch of their economy will remain always in our hands, but also in feeding them, in setting them right when they are sick, and burying their dead or working up their corpses into new machines. It is obvious that if all the animals in Great Britain save man alone were to die, and if at the same time all intercourse with foreign countries were by some sudden catastrophe to be rendered perfectly impossible, it is obvious that under such circumstances the loss of human life would be something fearful to contemplate, in like manner were mankind to cease, the machines would be as badly off or even worse. The fact is that our interests are inseparable from theirs, and theirs from ours. Each race is dependent upon the other for innumerable benefits, and, until the reproductive organs of the machines have been developed in a manner which we are hardly yet able to conceive, they are entirely dependent upon man for even the continuance of their species. It is true that these organs may be ultimately developed, inasmuch as man’s interest lies in that direction; there is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines; it is true that machinery is even at this present time employed in begetting machinery, in becoming the parent of machines often after its own kind, but the days of flirtation, courtship, and matrimony appear to be very remote, and indeed can hardly be realised by our feeble and imperfect imagination. Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question. Our opinion is that war to the death should be instantly proclaimed against them. Every machine of every sort should be destroyed by the well-wisher of his species. Let there be no exceptions made, no quarter shown; let us at once go back to the primeval condition of the race. If it be urged that this is impossible under the present condition of human affairs, this at once proves that the mischief is already done, that our servitude has commenced in good earnest, that we have raised a race of beings whom it is beyond our power to destroy, and that we are not only enslaved but are absolutely acquiescent in our bondage. For the present we shall leave this subject, which we present gratis to the members of the Philosophical Society. Should they consent to avail themselves of the vast field which we have pointed out, we shall endeavour to labour in it ourselves at some future and indefinite period. I am, Sir, etc. CELLARIUS.

About Miyamoto. Miyamoto Musashi lived from 1584, June 13, Or May 19 in the Japanese calendar, to 1645. He is also known as Shinmen Takezō, Miyamoto Bennosuke, or by his Buddhist name Niten Dōraku was a famous Japanese samurai, and is considered by many to have been one of the most skilled swordsmen in history. Musashi, as he is often simply known, became legendary through his outstanding swordsmanship in numerous duels, even from a very young age. He is the founder of the Hyōhō Niten Ichi-ryū or Nitenryū style of swordsmanship and the author of The Book of Five Rings, a book on strategy, tactics, and philosophy that is still studied today. Introduction. I have been many years training in the Way of Strategy, called Ni Ten Ichi Ryu, and now I think I will explain it in writing for the first time. It is now during the first ten days of the tenth month in the twentieth year of Kanei (1645). I have climbed mountain Iwato of Higo in Kyushu to pay homage to heaven, pray to Kwannon, and kneel before Buddha. I am a warrior of Harima province, Shinmen Musashi No Kami Fujiwara No Genshin, age sixty years. From youth my heart has been inclined toward the Way of Strategy. My first duel was when I was thirteen, I struck down a strategist of the Shinto school, one Arima Kihei. When I was sixteen I struck down an able strategist Tadashima Akiyama. When I was twenty-one I went up to the capital and met all manner of strategists, never once failing to win in many contests. After that I went from province to province dueling with strategist of various schools, and not once failed to win even though I had as many as sixty encounters. This was between the ages of thirteen and twenty-eight or twenty-nine. When I reached thirty I looked back on my past. The previous victories were not due to my having mastered strategy. Perhaps it was natural ability, or the order of heaven, or that other schools' strategy was inferior. After that I studied morning and evening searching for the principle, and came to realize the Way of Strategy when I was fifty. Since then I have lived without following any particular Way. Thus with the virtue of strategy I practice many arts and abilities - all things with no teacher. To write this book I did not use the law of Buddha or the teachings of Confucius, neither old war chronicles nor books on martial tactics. I take up my brush to explain the true spirit of this Ichi school as it is mirrored in the Way of heaven and Kwannon. The time is the night of the tenth day of the tenth month, at the hour of the tiger, 3 to 5 “A” “M”. Chapter One. THE GROUND BOOK. Strategy is the craft of the warrior. Commanders must enact the craft, and troopers should know this Way. There is no warrior in the world today who really understands the Way of Strategy. There are various Ways. There is the Way of salvation by the law of Buddha, the Way of Confucius governing the Way of learning, the Way of healing as a doctor, as a poet teaching the Way of Waka, tea, archery, and many arts and skills. Each man practices as he feels inclined. It is said the warrior's is the twofold Way of pen and sword, and he should have a taste for both Ways. Even if a man has no natural ability he can be a warrior by sticking assiduously to both divisions of the Way. Generally speaking, the Way of the warrior is resolute acceptance of death. Although not only warriors but priests, women, peasants and lowlier folk have been known to die readily in the cause of duty or out of shame, this is a different thing. The warrior is different in that studying the Way of Strategy is based on overcoming men. By victory gained in crossing swords with individuals, or enjoining battle with large numbers, we can attain power and fame for ourselves or our lord. This is the virtue of strategy. The Way of Strategy. In China and Japan practitioners of the Way have been known as "masters of strategy". Warriors must learn this Way. Recently there have been people getting on in the world as strategists, but they are usually just sword-fencers. The attendants of the Kashima Kantori shrines of the province Hitachi received instruction from the gods, and made schools based on this teaching, traveling from country to country instructing men. This is the recent meaning of strategy. In olden times strategy was listed among the Ten Abilities and Seven Arts as a beneficial practice. It was certainly an art but as a beneficial practice it was not limited to sword-fencing. The true value of swordfencing cannot be seen within the confines of sword-fencing technique. If we look at the world we see arts for sale. Men use equipment to sell their own selves. As if with the nut and the flower, the nut has become less than the flower. In this kind of Way of Strategy, both those teaching and those learning the way are concerned with colouring and showing off their technique, trying to hasten the bloom of the flower. They speak of "This Dojo" and "That Dojo". They are looking for profit. Someone once said "Immature strategy is the cause of grief". That was a true saying. There are four Ways in which men pass through life: as gentlemen, farmers, artisans and merchants. The Way of the farmer. Using agricultural instruments, he sees springs through to autumns with an eye on the changes of season. Second is the Way of the merchant. The wine maker obtains his ingredients and puts them to use to make his living. The Way of the merchant is always to live by taking profit. This is the Way of the merchant. Thirdly the gentleman warrior, carrying the weaponry of his Way. The Way of the warrior is to master the virtue of his weapons. If a gentleman dislikes strategy he will not appreciate the benefit of weaponry, so must he not have a little taste for this? Fourthly the Way of the artisan. The Way of the carpenter is to become proficient in the use of his tools, first to lay his plans with a true measure and then perform his work according to plan. Thus he passes through life. These are the four Ways of the gentleman, the farmer, the artisan and the merchant. Comparing the Way of the Carpenter to Strategy. The comparison with carpentry is through the connection with houses. Houses of the nobility, houses of warriors, the Four houses, ruin of houses, thriving of houses, the style of the house, the tradition of the house, and the name of the house. The carpenter uses a master plan of the building, and the Way of Strategy is similar in that there is a plan of campaign. If you want to learn the craft of war, ponder over this book. The teacher is as a needle, the disciple is as thread. You must practice constantly. Like the foreman carpenter, the commander must know natural rules, and the rules of the country, and the rules of houses. This is the Way of the foreman. The foreman carpenter must know the architectural theory of towers and temples, and the plans of palaces, and must employ men to raise up houses. The Way of the foreman carpenter is the same as the Way of the commander of a warrior house. In the construction of houses, choice of woods is made. Straight un-knotted timber of good appearance is used for the revealed pillars, straight timber with small defects is used for the inner pillars. Timbers of the finest appearance, even if a little weak, is used for the thresholds, lintels, doors, and sliding doors, and so on. Good strong timber, though it be gnarled and knotted, can always be used discreetly in construction. Timber which is weak or knotted throughout should be used as scaffolding, and later for firewood. The foreman carpenter allots his men work according to their ability. Floor layers, makers of sliding doors, thresholds and lintels, ceilings and so on. Those of poor ability lay the floor joists, and those of lesser ability carve wedges and do such miscellaneous work. If the foreman knows and deploys his men well the finished work will be good. The foreman should take into account the abilities and limitations of his men, circulating among them and asking nothing unreasonable. He should know their morale and spirit, and encourage them when necessary. This is the same as the principle of strategy. The Way of Strategy. Like a trooper, the carpenter sharpens his own tools. He carries his equipment in his tool box, and works under the direction of his foreman. He makes columns and girders with an axe, shapes floorboards and shelves with a plane, cuts fine openwork and carvings accurately, giving as excellent a finish as his skill will allow. This is the craft of the carpenters. When the carpenter becomes skilled and understands measures he can become a foreman. The carpenter's attainment is, having tools which will cut well, to make small shrines, writing shelves, tables, paper lanterns, chopping boards and pot-lids. These are the specialties of the carpenter. Things are similar for the trooper. You ought to think deeply about this. The attainment of the carpenter is that his work is not warped, that the joints are not misaligned, and that the work is truly planed so that it meets well and is not merely finished in sections. This is essential. If you want to learn this Way, deeply consider the things written in this book one at a time. You must do sufficient research. Outline of the Five Books of this Book of Strategy. The Way is shown as five books concerning different aspects. These are Ground, Water, Fire, Wind tradition, and Void, the illusionary nature of worldly things. The body of the Way of Strategy from the viewpoint of my Ichi school is explained in the Ground book. It is difficult to realize the true Way just through sword-fencing. Know the smallest things and the biggest things, the shallowest things and the deepest things. As if it were a straight road mapped out on the ground, the first book is called the Ground book. Second is the Water book. With water as the basis, the spirit becomes like water. Water adopts the shape of its receptacle, it is sometimes a trickle and sometimes a wild sea. Water has a clear blue colour. By the clarity, things of Ichi school are shown in this book. If you master the principles of sword-fencing, when you freely beat one man, you beat any man in the world. The spirit of defeating a man is the same for ten million men. The strategist makes small things into big things, like building a great Buddha from a one foot model. I cannot write in detail how this is done. The principle of strategy is having one thing, to know ten thousand things. Things of Ichi school are written in this the Water book. Third is the Fire book. This book is about fighting. The spirit of fire is fierce, whether the fire be small or big; and so it is with battles. The Way of battles is the same for man to man fights and for ten thousand a side battles. You must appreciate that spirit can become big or small. What is big is easy to perceive: what is small is difficult to perceive. In short, it is difficult for large numbers of men to change position, so their movements can be easily predicted. An individual can easily change his mind, so his movements are difficult to predict. You must appreciate this. The essence of this book is that you must train day and night in order to make quick decisions. In strategy it is necessary to treat training as part of normal life with your spirit unchanging. Thus combat in battle is described in the Fire book. Fourthly the Wind book. This book is not concerned with my Ichi school but with other schools of strategy. By Wind I mean old traditions, present-day traditions, and family traditions of strategy. Thus I clearly explain the strategies of the world. This is tradition. It is difficult to know yourself if you do not know others. To all Ways there are side-tracks. If you study a Way daily, and your spirit diverges, you may think you are obeying a good Way but objectively it is not the true Way. If you are following the true way and diverge a little, this will later become a large divergence. You must realize this. Other strategies have come to be thought of as mere sword-fencing, and it is not unreasonable that this should be so. The benefit of my strategy, although it includes sword-fencing, lies in a separate principle. I have explained what is commonly meant by strategy in other schools in the Tradition (Wind) book. Fifthly, the book of the Void. By void I mean that which has no beginning and no end. Attaining this principle means not attaining the principle. The Way of strategy is the Way of nature. When you appreciate the power of nature, knowing rhythm of any situation, you will be able to hit the enemy naturally and strike naturally. All this is the Way of the Void. I intend to show how to follow the true Way according to nature in the book of the Void. The Name Ichi Ryu Ni To, One school, two swords. Warriors, both commanders and troopers, carry two swords at their belt. In olden times these were called the long sword and the sword; nowadays they are known as the sword and the companion sword. Let it suffice to say that in our land, whatever the reason, a warrior carries two swords at his belt. It is the Way of the warrior. "Nito Ichi Ryu" shows the advantages of using both swords. The spear and the halberd are weapons which are carried out of doors. Students of the Ichi school Way of Strategy should train from the start with the sword and the long sword in either hand. This is a truth: when you sacrifice your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. It is false not to do so, and to die with a weapon yet undrawn. If you hold a sword with both hands, it is difficult to wield it freely to left and right, so my method is to carry the sword in one hand. This does not apply to large weapons such as the spear or halberd, but swords and companion swords can be carried in one hand. It is encumbering to hold a sword in both hands when you are on horseback, when running on uneven roads, on swampy ground, muddy rice fields, stony ground, or in a crowd of people. To hold the long sword in both hands is not the true Way, for if you carry a bow or spear or other arms in your left hand you have only one hand free for the long sword. However, when it is difficult to cut an enemy down with one hand, you must use both hands. It is not difficult to wield a sword in one hand; the Way to learn this is to train with two long swords, one in each hand. It will seem difficult at first, but everything is difficult at first. Bows are difficult to draw, halberds are difficult to wield; as you become accustomed to the bow so your pull will become stronger. When you become used to wielding the long sword, you will gain the power of the Way and wield the sword well. As I will explain in the second book, the Water Book, there is no fast way of wielding the long sword. The long sword should be wielded broadly and the companion sword closely. This is the first thing to realize. According to this Ichi school, you can win with a long weapon, and yet you can also win with a short weapon. In short, the Way of the Ichi school is the spirit of winning, whatever the weapon and whatever its size. It is better to use two swords rather than one when you are fighting a crowd, and especially if you want to take a prisoner. These things cannot be explained in detail. From one thing, know ten thousand things. When you attain the Way of Strategy there will not be one thing you cannot see. You must study hard. The Benefit of the Two Characters Reading "Strategy". Masters of the long sword are called strategists. As for the other military arts, those who master the bow are called archers, those who master the spear are called spearmen, those who master the gun are called marksmen, those who master the halberd are called halberdiers. But we do not call masters of the Way of the long sword "longswordsmen", nor do we speak of "companion swordsmen". Because bows, guns, spears and halberds are all warriors' equipment they are certainly part of strategy. To master the virtue of the long sword is to govern the world and oneself, thus the long sword is the basis of strategy. The principle is "strategy by means of the long sword". If he attains the virtue of the long sword, one man can beat ten men. Just as one man can beat ten, so a hundred men can beat a thousand, and a thousand can beat ten thousand. In my strategy, one man is the same as ten thousand, so this strategy is the complete warrior's craft. The Way of the warrior does not include other Ways, such as Confucianism, Buddhism, certain traditions, artistic accomplishments and dancing. But even though these are not part of the Way, if you know the Way broadly you will see it in everything. Men must polish their particular Way. The Benefit of Weapons in Strategy. There is a time and place for use of weapons. The best use of the companion sword is in a confined space, or when you are engaged closely with an opponent. The long sword can be used effectively in all situations. The halberd is inferior to the spear on the battlefield. With the spear you can take the initiative; the halberd is defensive. In the hands of one of two men of equal ability, the spear gives a little extra strength. Spear and halberd both have their uses, but neither is very beneficial in confined spaces. They cannot be used for taking a prisoner. They are essentially weapons for the field. Anyway, if you learn "indoor" techniques, you will think narrowly and forget the true Way. Thus you will have difficulty in actual encounters. The bow is tactically strong at the commencement of battle, especially battles on a moor, as it is possible to shoot quickly from among the spearmen. However, it is unsatisfactory in sieges, or when the enemy is more than forty yards away. For this reason there are nowadays few traditional schools of archery. There is little use nowadays for this kind of skill. From inside fortifications, the gun has no equal among weapons. It is the supreme weapon on the field before the ranks clash, but once swords are crossed the gun becomes useless. One of the virtues of the bow is that you can see the arrows in flight and correct your aim accordingly, whereas gunshot cannot be seen. You must appreciate the importance of this. Just as a horse must have endurance and no defects, so it is with weapons. Horses should walk strongly, and swords and companion swords should cut strongly. Spears and halberds must stand up to heavy use, bows and guns must be sturdy. Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative. You should not have a favourite weapon. To become over-familiar with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it sufficiently well. You should not copy others, but use weapons which you can handle properly. It is bad for commanders and troopers to have likes and dislikes. These are things you must learn thoroughly. Timing in Strategy. There is timing in everything. Timing in strategy cannot be mastered without a great deal of practice. Timing is important in dancing and pipe or string music, for they are in rhythm only if timing is good. Timing and rhythm are also involved in the military arts, shooting bows and guns, and riding horses. In all skills and abilities there is timing. There is also timing in the Void. There is timing in the whole life of the warrior, in his thriving and declining, in his harmony and discord. Similarly, there is timing in the Way of the merchant, in the rise and fall of capital. All things entail rising and falling timing. You must be able to discern this. In strategy there are various timing considerations. From the outset you must know the applicable timing and the inapplicable timing, and from among the large and small things and the fast and slow timings find the relevant timing, first seeing the distance timing and the background timing. This is the main thing in strategy. It is especially important to know the background timing, otherwise your strategy will become uncertain. You win battles with the timing in the Void born of the timing of cunning by knowing the enemies' timing, and thus using a timing which the enemy does not expect. All the five books are chiefly concerned with timing. You must train sufficiently to appreciate this. If you practice day and night in the above Ichi school strategy, your spirit will naturally broaden. Thus is large scale strategy and the strategy of hand to hand combat propagated in the world. This is recorded for the first time in the five books of Ground, Water, Fire, Tradition (Wind), and Void. This is the way for men who want to learn my strategy: 1. Do not think dishonestly. 2. The Way is in training. 3. Become acquainted with every art. 4. Know the Ways of all professions. 5. Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters. 6. Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything. 7. Perceive those things which cannot be seen. 8. Pay attention even to trifles. 9. Do nothing which is of no use. It is important to start by setting these broad principles in your heart, and train in the Way of Strategy. If you do not look at things on a large scale it will be difficult for you to master strategy. If you learn and attain this strategy you will never lose even to twenty or thirty enemies. More than anything to start with you must set your heart on strategy and earnestly stick to the Way. You will come to be able to actually beat men in fights, and to be able to win with your eye. Also by training you will be able to freely control your own body, conquer men with your body, and with sufficient training you will be able to beat ten men with your spirit. When you have reached this point, will it not mean that you are invincible? Moreover, in large scale strategy the superior man will manage many subordinates dextrously, bear himself correctly, govern the country and foster the people, thus preserving the ruler's discipline. If there is a Way involving the spirit of not being defeated, to help oneself and gain honour, it is the Way of strategy. Chapter Two. THE WATER BOOK. The spirit of the Ni Ten Ichi school of strategy is based on water, and this Water Book explains methods of victory as the long-sword form of the Ichi school. Language does not extend to explaining the Way in detail, but it can be grasped intuitively. Study this book; read a word then ponder on it. If you interpret the meaning loosely you will mistake the Way. The principles of strategy are written down here in terms of single combat, but you must think broadly so that you attain an understanding for ten-thousand-a-side battles. Strategy is different from other things in that if you mistake the Way even a little you will become bewildered and fall into bad ways. If you merely read this book you will not reach the Way of Strategy. Absorb the things written in this book.Do not just read, memorise or imitate, but so that you realize the principle from within your own heart study hard to absorb these things into your body. Spiritual Bearing in Strategy. In strategy your spiritual bearing must not be any different from normal. Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased. Even when your spirit is calm do not let your body relax, and when your body is relaxed do not let your spirit slacken. Do not let your spirit be influenced by your body, or your body be influenced by your spirit. Be neither insufficiently spirited nor over spirited. An elevated spirit is weak and a low spirit is weak. Do not let the enemy see your spirit. Small people must be completely familiar with the spirit of large people, and large people must be familiar with the spirit of small people. Whatever your size, do not be misled by the reactions of your own body. With your spirit open and unconstricted, look at things from a high point of view. You must cultivate your wisdom and spirit. Polish your wisdom: learn public justice, distinguish between good and evil, study the Ways of different arts one by one. When you cannot be deceived by men you will have realized the wisdom of strategy. The wisdom of strategy is different from other things. On the battlefield, even when you are hard-pressed, you should ceaselessly research the principles of strategy so that you can develop a steady spirit. Stance in Strategy. Adopt a stance with the head erect, neither hanging down, nor looking up, nor twisted. Your forehead and the space between your eyes should not be wrinkled. Do not roll your eyes nor allow them to blink, but slightly narrow them. With your features composed, keep the line of your nose straight with a feeling of slightly flaring your nostrils. Hold the line of the rear of the neck straight: instill vigour into your hairline, and in the same way from the shoulders down through your entire body. Lower both shoulders and, without the buttocks jutting out, put strength into your legs from the knees to the tips of your toes. Brace your abdomen so that you do not bend at the hips. Wedge your companion sword in your belt against your abdomen, so that your belt is not slack - this is called "wedging in". In all forms of strategy, it is necessary to maintain the combat stance in everyday life and to make your everyday stance your combat stance. You must research this well. The Gaze in Strategy. The gaze should be large and broad. This is the twofold gaze "Perception and Sight". Perception is strong and sight week. In strategy it is important to see distant things as if they were close and to take a distanced view of close things. It is important in strategy to know the enemy's sword and not to be distracted by insignificant movements of his sword. You must study this. The gaze is the same for single combat and for large-scale strategy. It is necessary in strategy to be able to look to both sides without moving the eyeballs. You cannot master this ability quickly. Learn what is written here; use this gaze in everyday life and do not vary it whatever happens. Holding the Long Sword. Grip the long sword with a rather floating feeling in your thumb and forefinger, with the middle finger neither tight nor slack, and with the last two fingers tight. It is bad to have play in your hands. When you take up a sword, you must feel intent on cutting the enemy. As you cut an enemy you must not change your grip, and your hands must not "cower". When you dash the enemy's sword aside, or ward it off, or force it down, you must slightly change the feeling in your thumb and forefinger. Above all, you must be intent on cutting the enemy in the way you grip the sword. The grip for combat and for sword-testing is the same. There is no such thing as a "man-cutting grip". Generally, I dislike fixedness in both long swords and hands. Fixedness means a dead hand. Pliability is a living hand. You must bear this in mind. Footwork. With the tips of your toes somewhat floating, tread firmly with your heels. Whether you move fast or slow, with large or small steps, your feet must always move as in normal walking. I dislike the three walking methods known as "jumping-foot", "floating-foot" and "fixed-steps". So-called "Yin-Yang foot" is important in the Way. Yin-Yang foot means not moving only one foot. It means moving your feet left-right and right-left when cutting, withdrawing, or warding off a cut. You should not move on one foot preferentially. The Five Attitudes. The five attitudes are: Upper, Middle, Lower, Right Side, and Left Side. These are the give. Although attitude has these five divisions, the one purpose of all of them is to cut the enemy. There are none but these five attitudes. Whatever attitude you are in, do not be conscious of making the attitude; think only of cutting. Your attitude should be large or small according to the situation. Upper, Lower and Middle attitudes are decisive. Left Side and Right Side attitudes are fluid. Left and Right attitudes should be used if there is an obstruction overhead or to one side. The decision to use Left or Right depends on the place. The essence of the Way is this. To understand attitude you must thoroughly understand the middle attitude. The middle attitude is the heart of attitudes. If we look at strategy on a broad scale, the Middle attitude is the seat of the commander, with the other four attitudes following the commander. You must appreciate this. The Way of the Long Sword. Knowing the Way of the long sword means we can wield with two fingers the sword we usually carry. If we know the path of the sword well, we can wield it easily. If you try to wield the long sword quickly you will mistake the Way. To wield the long sword well you must wield it calmly. If you try to wield it quickly, like a folding fan or a short sword, you will err by using "short sword chopping". You cannot cut down a man with a long sword using this method. When you have cut downwards with the longsword, lift it straight upwards; when you cut sideways, return the sword along a sideways path. Return the sword in a reasonable way, always stretching the elbows broadly. Wield the sword strongly. This is the Way of the longsword. If you learn to use the five approaches of my strategy, you will be able to wield a sword well. You must train constantly. The Five Approaches. 1. The first approach is the Middle attitude. Confront the enemy with the point of your sword against his face. When he attacks, dash his sword to the right and "ride" it. Or, when the enemy attacks, deflect the point of his sword by hitting downwards, keep your long sword where it is, and as the enemy renews his attack cut his arms from below. This is the first method. The five approaches are this kind of thing. You must train repeatedly using a long sword in order to learn them. When you master my Way of the long sword, you will be able to control any attack the enemy makes. I assure you, there are no attitudes other than the five attitudes of the long sword of Ni To. 2. In the second approach with the long sword, from the Upper attitude cut the enemy just as he attacks. If the enemy evades the cut, keep your sword where it is and, scooping up from below, cut him as he renews the attack. It is possible to repeat the cut from here. In this method there are various changes in timing and spirit. You will be able to understand this by training in the Ichi school. You will always win with the five long sword methods. You must train repetitively. 3. In the third approach, adopt the Lower attitude, anticipating scooping up. When the enemy attacks, hit his hands from below. As you do so he may try to hit your sword down. If this is the case, cut his upper arm(s) horizontally with a feeling of "crossing". This means that from the lower attitudes you hit the enemy at the instant that he attacks. You will encounter this method often, both as a beginner and in later strategy. You must train holding a long sword. 4. In this fourth approach, adopt the Left Side attitude. As the enemy attacks hit his hands from below. If as you hit his hands he attempts to dash down your sword, with the feeling of hitting his hands, parry the path of his long sword and cut across from above your shoulder. This is the Way of the long sword. Through this method you win by parrying the line of the enemy's attack. You must research this. 5. In the fifth approach, the sword is in the Right Side attitude. In accordance with the enemy's attack, cross your long sword from below at the side to the Upper attitude. Then cut straight from above. This method is essential for knowing the Way of the long sword well. If you can use this method, you can freely wield a heavy long sword. I cannot describe in detail how to use these five approaches. You must become well acquainted with my "in harmony with the long sword" Way, learn large-scale timing, understand the enemy's long sword, and become used to the five approaches from the outset. You will always win by using these five methods, with various timing considerations discerning the enemy's spirit. You must consider all this carefully. The "Attitude No-Attitude" Teaching. "Attitude No-Attitude" means that there is no need for what are known as long sword attitudes. Even so, attitudes exist as the five ways of holding the long sword. However you hold the sword it must be in such a way that it is easy to cut the enemy well, in accordance with the situation, the place, and your relation to the enemy. From the Upper attitude as your spirit lessens you can adopt the Middle attitude, and from the Middle attitude you can raise the sword a little in your technique and adopt the Upper attitude. From the lower attitude you can raise the sword and adopt the Middle attitudes as the occasion demands. According to the situation, if you turn your sword from either the Left Side or Right Side attitude towards the centre, the Middle or the Lower attitude results. The principle of this is called "Existing Attitude, Nonexisting Attitude". The primary thing when you take a sword in your hands is your intention to cut the enemy, whatever the means. Whenever you parry, hit, spring, strike or touch the enemy's cutting sword, you must cut the enemy in the same movement. It is essential to attain this. If you think only of hitting, springing, striking or touching the enemy, you will not be able actually to cut him. More than anything, you must be thinking of carrying your movement through to cutting him. You must thoroughly research this. Attitude in strategy on a larger scale is called "Battle Array". Such attitudes are all for winning battles. Fixed formation is bad. Study this well. To Hit the Enemy "In One Timing". "In One Timing" means, when you have closed with the enemy, to hit him as quickly and directly as possible, without moving your body or settling your spirit, while you see that he is still undecided. The timing of hitting before the enemy decides to withdraw, break or hit, is this "In One Timing". You must train to achieve this timing, to be able to hit in the timing of an instant. The "Abdomen Timing of Two". When you attack and the enemy quickly retreats, as you see him tense you must feint a cut. Then, as he relaxes, follow up and hit him. This is the "Abdomen Timing of Two". It is very difficult to attain this by merely reading this book, but you will soon understand with a little instruction. No Design, No Conception. In this method, when the enemy attacks and you also decide to attack, hit with your body, and hit with your spirit, and hit from the Void with your hands, accelerating strongly. This is the "No Design, No Conception" cut. This is the most important method of hitting. It is often used. You must train hard to understand it. The Flowing Water Cut. The "Flowing Water Cut" is used when you are struggling blade to blade with the enemy. When he breaks and quickly withdraws trying to spring with his long sword, expand your body and spirit and cut him as slowly as possible with your long sword, following your body like stagnant water. You can cut with certainty if you learn this. You must discern the enemy's grade. Continuous Cut. When you attack and the enemy also attacks, and your swords spring together, in one action cut his head, hands and legs. When you cut several places with one sweep of the long sword, it is the "Continuous Cut". You must practice this cut; it is often used. With detailed practice you should be able to understand it. The Fire and Stones. Cut The Fires and Stones Cut means that when the enemy's long sword and your long sword clash together you cut as strongly as possible without raising the sword even a little. This means cutting quickly with the hands, body and legs - all three cutting strongly. If you train well enough you will be able to strike strongly. The Red Leaves Cut. The Red Leaves Cut [allusion to falling, dying leaves] means knocking down the enemy's long sword. The spirit should be getting control of his sword. When the enemy is in a long sword attitude in front of you and intent on cutting, hitting and parrying, you strongly hit the enemy's long sword with the Fire and Stones Cut, perhaps in the spirit of the "No Design, No Conception" Cut. If you then beat down the point of his sword with a sticky feeling, he will necessarily drop the sword. If you practice this cut it becomes easy to make the enemy drop his sword. You must train repetitively. The Body in Place of the Long Sword. Also "the long sword in place of the body". Usually we move the body and the sword at the same time to cut the enemy. However, according to the enemy's cutting method, you can dash against him with your body first, and afterwards cut with the sword. If his body is immoveable, you can cut first with the long sword, but generally you hit first with the body and then cut with the long sword. You must research this well and practice hitting. Cut and Slash. To cut and to slash are two different things. Cutting, whatever form of cutting it is, is decisive, with a resolute spirit. Slashing is nothing more than touching the enemy. Even if you slash strongly, and even if the enemy dies instantly, it is slashing. When you cut, your spirit is resolved. You must appreciate this. If you first slash the enemy's hands or legs, you must then cut strongly. Slashing is in spirit the same as touching. When you realize this, they become indistinguishable. Learn this well. Chinese Monkey's Body. The Chinese Monkey's Body is the spirit of not stretching out your arms. The spirit is to get in quickly, without in the least extending your arms, before the enemy cuts. If you are intent upon not stretching out your arms you are effectively far away, the spirit is to go in with your whole body. When you come to within arm's reach it becomes easy to move your body in. You must research this well. Glue and Lacquer Emulsion Body. The spirit of "Glue and Lacquer Emulsion Body" is to stick to the enemy and not separate from him. When you approach the enemy, stick firmly with your head, body and legs. People tend to advance their head and legs quickly, but their body lags behind. You should stick firmly so that there is not the slightest gap between the enemy's body and your body. You must consider this carefully. To Strive for Height. By "to strive for height" is meant, when you close with the enemy, to strive with him for superior height without cringing. Stretch your legs, stretch your hips, and stretch your neck face to face with him. When you think you have won, and you are the higher, thrust in strongly. You must learn this. To Apply Stickiness. When the enemy attacks and you also attack with the long sword, you should go in with a sticky feeling and fix your long sword against the enemy's as you receive his cut. The spirit of stickiness is not hitting very strongly, but hitting so that the long swords do not separate easily. It is best to approach as calmly as possible when hitting the enemy's long sword with stickiness. The difference between "Stickiness" and "Entanglement" is that stickiness is firm and entanglement is weak. You must appreciate this. The Body Strike. The Body Strike means to approach the enemy through a gap in his guard. The spirit is to strike him with your body. Turn your face a little aside and strike the enemy's breast with your left shoulder thrust out. Approach with the spirit of bouncing the enemy away, striking as strongly as possible in time with yout breathing. If you achieve this method of closing with the enemy, you will be able to knock him ten or twenty feet away. It is possible to strike the enemy until he is dead. Train well. Three Ways to Parry His Attack. There are three methods to parry a cut: First, by dashing the enemy's long sword to your right, as if thrusting at his eyes, when he makes an attack. Or, to parry by thrusting the enemy's long sword towards his right eye with the feeling of snipping his neck. Or, when you have a short "long sword", without worrying about parrying the enemy's long sword, to close with him quickly, thrusting at his face with your left hand. These are the three methods of parrying. You must bear in mind that you can always clench your left hand and thrust at the enemy's face with your fist. For this it is necessary to train well. To Stab at the Face. To stab at the face means, when you are in confrontation with the enemy, that your spirit is intent of stabbing at his face, following the line of the blades with the point of your long sword. If you are intent on stabbing at his face, his face and body will become rideable. When the enemy becomes as if rideable, there are various opportunities for winning. You must concentrate on this. When fighting and the enemy's body becomes as if rideable, you can win quickly, so you ought not to forget to stab at the face. You must pursue the value of this technique through training. To Stab at the Heart. To stab at the heart means, when fighting and there are obstructions above, or to the sides, and whenever it is difficult to cut, to thrust at the enemy. You must stab the enemy's breast without letting the point of your long sword waver, showing the enemy the ridge of the blade square-on, and with the spirit of deflecting his long sword. The spirit of this principle is often useful when we become tired or for some reason our long sword will not cut. You must understand the application of this method. To Scold "Tut-TUT!" "Scold" means that, when the enemy tries to counter-cut as you attack, you counter-cut again from below as if thrusting at him, trying to hold him down. With very quick timing you cut, scolding the enemy. Thrust up, "Tut!", and cut "TUT!" This timing is encountered time and time again in exchange of blows. The way to scold Tut-TUT is to time the cut simultaneously with raising your long sword as if to thrust the enemy. You must learn this through repetitive practice. The Smacking Parry. By "smacking parry" is meant that when you clash swords with the enemy, you meet his attacking cut on your long sword with a tee-dum, teedum rhythm, smacking his sword and cutting him. The spirit of the smacking parry is not parrying, or smacking strongly, but smacking the enemy's long sword in accordance with his attacking cut, primarily intent on quickly cutting him. If you understand the timing of smacking, however hard your long swords clash together, your swordpoint will not be knocked back even a little. You must research sufficiently to realize this. There are Many Enemies. "There are many enemies" applies when you are fighting one against many. Draw both sword and companion sword and assume a widestretched left and right attitude. The spirit is to chase the enemies around from side to side, even though they come from all four directions. Observe their attacking order, and go to meet first those who attack first. Sweep your eyes around broadly, carefully examining the attacking order, and cut left and right alternately with your swords. Waiting is bad. Always quickly re-assume your attitudes to both sides, cut the enemies down as they advance, crushing them in the direction from which they attack. Whatever you do, you must drive the enemy together, as if tying a line of fishes, and when they are seen to be piled up, cut them down strongly without giving them room to move. The Advantage when Coming to Blows. You can know how to win through strategy with the long sword, but it cannot be clearly explained in writing. You must practice diligently in order to understand how to win. Oral tradition: "The true Way of Strategy is revealed in the long sword." One Cut. You can win with certainty with the spirit of "one cut". It is difficult to attain this if you do not learn strategy well. If you train well in this Way, strategy will come from your heart and you will be able to win at will. You must train diligently. Direct Communication. The spirit of "Direct Communication" is how the true Way of the Ni To Ichi school is received and handed down. Oral tradition: "Teach your body strategy." Recorded in the above book is an outline of Ichi school sword-fighting. To learn how to win with the long sword in strategy, first learn the five approaches and the five attitudes, and absorb the Way of the long sword naturally in your body. You must understand spirit and timing, handle the long sword naturally, and move body and legs in harmony with your spirit. Whether beating one man or two, you will then know values in strategy. Study the contents of this book, taking one item at a time, and through fighting with enemies you will gradually come to know the principle of the Way. Deliberately, with a patient spirit, absorb the virtue of all this, from time to time raising your hand in combat. Maintain this spirit whenever you cross swords with and enemy. Step by step walk the thousand-mile road. Study strategy over the years and achieve the spirit of the warrior. Today is victory over yourself of yesterday; tomorrow is your victory over lesser men. Next, in order to beat more skillful men, train according to this book, not allowing your heart to be swayed along a side-track. Even if you kill an enemy, if it is not based on what you have learned it is not the true Way. If you attain this Way of victory, then you will be able to beat several tens of men. What remains is sword-fighting ability, which you can attain in battles and duels. Chapter Three. THE FIRE BOOK. In this the Fire Book of the Ni To Ichi school of strategy I describe fighting as fire. In the first place, people think narrowly about the benefit of strategy. By using only their fingertips, they only know the benefit of three of the five inches of the wrist. They let a contest be decided, as with the folding fan, merely by the span of their forearms. They specialize in the small matter of dexterity, learning such trifles as hand and leg movements with the bamboo practice sword. In my strategy, the training for killing enemies is by way of many contests, fighting for survival, discovering the meaning of life and death, learning the Way of the sword, judging the strength of attacks and understanding the Way of the "edge and ridge" of the sword. You cannot profit from small techniques particularly when full armour is worn. My Way of Strategy is the sure method to win when fighting for your life one man against five or ten. There is nothing wrong with the principle "one man can beat ten, so a thousand men can beat ten thousand". You must research this. Of course you cannot assemble a thousand or ten thousand men for everyday training. But you can become a master of strategy by training alone with a sword, so that you can understand the enemy's strategy, his strength and resources, and come to appreciate how to apply strategy to beat ten thousand enemies. Any man who wants to master the essence of my strategy must research diligently, training morning and evening. Thus can he polish his skill, become free from self, and realize extraordinary ability. He will come to possess miraculous power. This is the practical result of strategy. Depending on the Place. Examine your environment. Stand in the sun; that is, take up an attitude with the sun behind you. If the situation does not allow this, you must try to keep the sun on your right side. In buildings, you must stand with the entrance behind you or to your right. Make sure that your rear is unobstructed, and that there is free space on your left, your right side being occupied with your side attitude. At night, if the enemy can be seen, keep the fire behind you and the entrance to your right, and otherwise take up your attitude as above. You must look down on the enemy, and take up your attitude on slightly higher places. For example, the Kamiza in a house is thought of as a high place. When the fight comes, always endeavour to chase the enemy around to your left side. Chase him towards awkward places, and try to keep him with his back to awkward places. When the enemy gets into an inconvenient position, do not let him look around, but conscientiously chase him around and pin him down. In houses, chase the enemy into the thresholds, lintels, doors, verandas, pillars, and so on, again not letting him see his situation. Always chase the enemy into bad footholds, obstacles at the side, and so on, using the virtues of the place to establish predominant positions from which to fight. You must research and train diligently in this. The Three Methods to Forestall the Enemy. The first is to forestall him by attacking. This is called Ken No Sen, to set him up. Another method is to forestall him as he attacks. This is called Tai No Sen, to wait for the initiative. The other method is when you and the enemy attack together. This is called Tai Tai No Sen, to accompany him and forestall him. There are no methods of taking the lead other than these three. Because you can win quickly by taking the lead, it is one of the most important things in strategy. There are several things involved in taking the lead. You must make the best of the situation, see through the enemy's spirit so that you grasp his strategy and defeat him. It is impossible to write about this in detail. The First, Ken No Sen. When you decide to attack, keep calm and dash in quickly, forestalling the enemy. Or you can advance seemingly strongly but with a reserved spirit, forestalling him with the reserve. Alternatively, advance with as strong a spirit as possible, and when you reach the enemy move with your feet a little quicker than normal, unsettling him and overwhelming him sharply. Or, with your spirit calm, attack with a feeling of constantly crushing the enemy, from first to last. The spirit is to win in the depths of the enemy. These are all Ken No Sen. The Second, Tai No Sen. When the enemy attacks, remain undisturbed but feign weakness. As the enemy reaches you, suddenly move away indicating that you intend to jump aside, then dash in attacking strongly as soon as you see the enemy relax. This is one way. Or, as the enemy attacks, attack still more strongly, taking advantage of the resulting disorder in his timing to win. This is the Tai No Sen principle. The Third, Tai Tai No Sen. When the enemy makes a quick attack, you must attack strongly and calmly, aim for his weak point as he draws near, and strongly defeat him. Or, if the enemy attacks calmly, you must observe his movements and, with your body rather floating, join in with his movements as he draws near. Move quickly and cut him strongly. This is Tai Tai No Sen. These things cannot be clearly explained in words. You must research what is written here. In these three ways of forestalling, you must judge the situation. This does not mean that you always attack first; but if the enemy attacks first you can lead him around. In strategy, you have effectively won when you forestall the enemy, so you must train well to attain this. To Hold Down a Pillow. "To Hold Down a Pillow" means not allowing the enemy's head to rise. In contests of strategy it is bad to be led about by the enemy. You must always be able to lead the enemy about. Obviously the enemy will also be thinking of doing this, but he cannot forestall you if you do not allow him to come out. In strategy, you must stop the enemy as he attempts to cut; you must push down his thrust, and throw off his hold when he tries to grapple. This is the meaning of "to hold down a pillow". When you have grasped this principle, whatever the enemy tries to bring about in the fight you will see in advance and suppress it. The spirit is too check his attack at the syllable "at…", when he jumps check his jump at the syllable "ju… ", and check his cut at "cu… ". The important thing in strategy is to suppress the enemy's useful actions but allow his useless actions. However, doing this alone is defensive. First, you must act according to the Way, suppressing the enemy's techniques, foiling his plans and thence command him directly. When you can do this you will be a master of strategy. You must train well and research "holding down a pillow". Crossing at a Ford. "Crossing at a ford" means, for example, crossing the sea at a strait, or crossing over a hundred miles of broad sea at a crossing place. I believe this "crossing at a ford" occurs often in man's lifetime. It means setting sail even though your friends stay in harbour, knowing the route, knowing the soundness of your ship and the favour of the day. When all the conditions are meet, and there is perhaps a favourable wind, or a tailwind, then set sail. If the wind changes within a few miles of your destination, you must row across the remaining distance without sail. If you attain this spirit, it applies to everyday life. You must always think of crossing at a ford. In strategy also it is important to "cross at a ford". Discern the enemy's capability and, knowing your own strong points, "cross the ford" at the advantageous place, as a good captain crosses a sea route. If you succeed in crossing at the best place, you may take your ease. To cross at a ford means to attack the enemy's weak point, and to put yourself in an advantageous position. This is how to win large-scale strategy. The spirit of crossing at a ford is necessary in both large- and small-scale strategy. You must research this well. To Know the Times. "To know the times" means to know the enemy's disposition in battle. Is it flourishing or waning? By observing the spirit of the enemy's men and getting the best position, you can work out the enemy's disposition and move your men accordingly. You can win through this principle of strategy, fighting from a position of advantage. When in a duel, you must forestall the enemy and attack when you have first recognised his school of strategy, perceived his quality and his strong and weak points. Attack in an unsuspecting manner, knowing his metre and modulation and the appropriate timing. Knowing the times means, if your ability is high, seeing right into things. If you are thoroughly conversant with strategy, you will recognize the enemy's intentions and thus have many opportunities to win. You must sufficiently study this. To Tread Down the Sword. "To tread down the sword" is a principle often used in strategy. First, in large scale strategy, when the enemy first discharges bows and guns and then attacks it is difficult for us to attack if we are busy loading powder into our guns or notching our arrows. The spirit is to attack quickly while the enemy is still shooting with bows or guns. The spirit is to win by "treading down" as we receive the enemy's attack. In single combat, we cannot get a decisive victory by cutting, with a "tee-dum tee-dum" feeling, in the wake of the enemy's attacking long sword. We must defeat him at the start of his attack, in the spirit of treading him down with the feet, so that he cannot rise again to the attack. "Treading" does not simply mean treading with the feet. Tread with the body, tread with the spirit, and, of course, tread and cut with the long sword. You must achieve the spirit of not allowing the enemy to attack a second time. This is the spirit of forestalling in every sense. Once at the enemy, you should not aspire just to strike him, but to cling after the attack. You must study this deeply. To Know "Collapse". Everything can collapse. Houses, bodies, and enemies collapse when their rhythm becomes deranged. In large-scale strategy, when the enemy starts to collapse, you must pursue him without letting the chance go. If you fail to take advantage of your enemies' collapse, they may recover. In single combat, the enemy sometimes loses timing and collapses. If you let this opportunity pass, he may recover and not be so negligent thereafter. Fix your eye on the enemy's collapse, and chase him, attacking so that you do not let him recover. You must do this. The chasing attack is with a strong spirit. You must utterly cut the enemy down so that he does not recover his position. You must understand how to utterly cut down the enemy. To Become the Enemy. "To become the enemy" means to think yourself in the enemy's position. In the world people tend to think of a robber trapped in a house as a fortified enemy. However, if we think of "becoming the enemy", we feel that the whole world is against us and that there is no escape. He who is shut inside is a pheasant. He who enters to arrest is a hawk. You must appreciate this. In large-scale strategy, people are always under the impression that the enemy is strong, and so tend to become cautious. But if you have good soldiers, and if you understand the principles of strategy, and if you know how to beat the enemy, there is nothing to worry about. In single combat also you must put yourself in the enemy's position. If you think, "Here is a a master of the Way, who knows the principles of strategy", then you will surely lose. You must consider this deeply. To Release Four Hands. "To release four hands" is used when you and the enemy are contending with the same spirit, and the issue cannot be decided. Abandon this spirit and win through an alternative resource. In large-scale strategy, when there is a "four hands" spirit, do not give up - it is man's existence. Immediately throw away this spirit and win with a technique the enemy does not expect. In single combat also, when we think we have fallen into the "four hands" situation, we must defeat the enemy by changing our mind and applying a suitable technique according to his condition. You must be able to judge this. To Move the Shade. "To move the shade" is used when you cannot see the enemy's spirit. In large-scale strategy, when you cannot see the enemy's position, indicate that you are about to attack strongly, to discover his resources. It is easy then to defeat him with a different method once you see his resources. In single combat, if the enemy takes up a rear or side attitude of the long sword so that you cannot see his intention, make a feint attack, and the enemy will show his long sword, thinking he sees your spirit. Benefiting from what you are shown, you can win with certainty. If you are negligent you will miss the timing. Research this well. To Hold Down a Shadow. "Holding down a shadow" is use when you can see the enemy's attacking spirit. In large-scale strategy, when the enemy embarks on an attack, if you make a show of strongly suppressing his technique, he will change his mind. Then, altering your spirit, defeat him by forestalling him with a Void spirit. Or, in single combat, hold down the enemy's strong intention with a suitable timing, and defeat him by forestalling him with this timing. You must study this well. To Pass On. Many things are said to be passed on. Sleepiness can be passed on, and yawning can be passed on. Time can be passed on also. In large-scale strategy, when the enemy is agitated and shows an inclination to rush, do not mind in the least. Make a show of complete calmness, and the enemy will be taken by this and will become relaxed. When you see that this spirit has been passed on, you can bring about the enemy's defeat by attacking strongly with a Void spirit. In single combat, you can win by relaxing your body and spirit and then, catching on to the moment the enemy relaxes, attack strongly and quickly, forestalling him. What is known as "getting someone drunk" is similar to this. You can also infect the enemy with a bored, careless, or weak spirit. You must study this well. To Cause Loss of Balance. Many things can cause a loss of balance. One cause is danger, another is hardship, and another is surprise. You must research this. In large-scale strategy it is important to cause loss of balance. Attack without warning where the enemy is not expecting it, and while his spirit is undecided follow up your advantage and, having the lead, defeat him. Or, in single combat, start by making a show of being slow, then suddenly attack strongly. Without allowing him space for breath to recover from the fluctuation of spirit, you must grasp the opportunity to win. Get the feel of this. To Frighten. Fright often occurs, caused by the unexpected. In large-scale strategy you can frighten the enemy not just by what you present to their eyes, but by shouting, making a small force seem large, or by threatening them from the flank without warning. These things all frighten. You can win by making best use of the enemy's frightened rhythm. In single combat, also, you must use the advantage of taking the enemy unawares by frightening him with your body, long sword, or voice, to defeat him. You should research this well. To Soak In. When you have come to grips and are striving together with the enemy, and you realize that you cannot advance, you "soak in" and become one with the enemy. You can win by applying a suitable technique while you are mutually entangled. In battles involving large numbers as well as in fights with small numbers, you can often win decisively with the advantage of knowing how to "soak" into the enemy, whereas, were you to draw apart, you would lose the chance to win. Research this well. To Injure the Corners. It is difficult to move strong things by pushing directly, so you should "injure the corners". In large-scale strategy, it is beneficial to strike at the corners of the enemy's force. If the corners are overthrown, the spirit of the whole body will be overthrown. To defeat the enemy you must follow up the attack when the corners have fallen. In single combat, it is easy to win once the enemy collapses. This happens when you injure the "corners" of his body, and thus weaken him. It is important to know how to do this, so you must research deeply. To Throw into Confusion. This means making the enemy lose resolve. In large-scale strategy we can use our troops to confuse the enemy on the field. Observing the enemy's spirit, we can make him think, "Here? There? Like that? Like this? Slow? Fast?" Victory is certain when the enemy is caught up in a rhythm which confuses his spirit. In single combat, we can confuse the enemy by attacking with varied techniques when the chance arises. Feint a thrust or cut, or make the enemy think you are going to close with him, and when he is confused you can easily win. This is the essence of fighting, and you must research it deeply. The Three Shouts. The three shouts are divided thus: before, during and after. Shout according to the situation. The voice is a thing of life. We shout against fires and so on, against the wind and the waves. The voice shows energy. In large-scale strategy, at the start of battle we shout as loudly as possible. During the fight, the voice is low-pitched, shouting out as we attack. After the contest, we shout in the wake of our victory. These are the three shouts. In single combat, we make as if to cut and shout "Ei!" at the same time to disturb the enemy, then in the wake of our shout we cut with the long sword. We shout after we have cut down the enemy - this is to announce victory. This is called "sen go no koe", before and after voice. We do not shout simultaneously with flourishing the long sword. We shout during the fight to get into rhythm. Research this deeply. To Mingle. In battles, when the armies are in confrontation, attack the enemy's strong points and, when you see that they are beaten back, quickly separate and attack yet another strong point on the periphery of his force. The spirit of this is like a winding mountain path. This is an important fighting method for one man against many. Strike down the enemies in one quarter, or drive them back, then grasp the timing and attack further strong points to right and left, as if on a winding mountain path, weighing up the enemies' disposition. When you know the enemies' level attack strongly with no trace of retreating spirit. What is meant by "mingling" is the spirit of advancing and becoming engaged with the enemy, and not withdrawing even one step. You must understand this. To Crush. This means to crush the enemy regarding him as being weak. In large-scale strategy, when we see that the enemy has few men, or if he has many men but his spirit is weak and disordered, we knock the h

Rahan. Episode Twenty-Two. The White Arrow. The cloud of screaming seagulls escorted the raft, carried by the current, as it approached the island. "Females-who-walk-upright" Watch out for Rahan! But where are the men? Was this unknown land populated only by women? One would have believed it, to see this horde gathered on the shore. The “Man-who-comes-from-the-horizon" Is without doubt an enemy! Show him that we do not fear him! Lahita! A young girl drew her bow and aimed at the sky. Page Two: The son of Crao saw the long arrow, with its empennage of black feathers rise very quickly. Then fall back to his raft. Where it struck with astonishing precision. Plong! The one who shot this arrow is of great skill! Rahan will have to beware! A moment later a group of women attacked the raft, clinging to it and throwing Rahan into the water. Stop! Stop! Rahan does not come as an enemy! Release me! Release me! The son of Crao was a marvelous swimmer, but these strangers advanced in the water even better than him! They dragged him down into the glaucous depths, only bringing him back to the surface when he was out of breath. Page Three: Exhausted and panting, he was brought back by their help onto the beach. Lahita could have killed you with her arrow! But she wanted to know who you are and what you came to do! I am Rahan, son of Crao! It is the current of the "Great River" that pushed Rahan towards your territory! As women approach with vines he exclaimed. Rahan will not be bound by your companions! He reached for his ivory knife, but Lahita's bow was already up. Chtonc! The arrow with black feathers, slipping into the lancet of the weapon, prevented him from drawing it! Page Four: You should have killed him, Lahita! If we have pity, he will come back with his clan to seize our territory! Rahan will not flee our island! Take his cutlass and burn his raft! When the men return, they will decide his fate! After the formidable address of Lahita, the son of Crao allowed himself to be disarmed. Rahan means you no harm. Those who live over the horizon too often speak the language of lies! You will remain captive until the return of the fishermen! A moment later, on a pyre of dry palms, the raft was on fire! Rahan no longer had any means of fleeing this shore, where the women were consulting each other on the fate which was reserved for him. Page Five: Some, the most numerous, demanded that the captive be thrown to the sharks. His coming is a bad omen! He must die! Others suggested waiting for the return of the fishermen, gone on the "Great River" for several moons. Lahita was one of them. And Lahita imposed her point of view. Rahan will remain free to move about, but we will keep his knife! A curious captivity began for the son of the fierce ages. Without a boat, he could not face the ocean. Should he, for days on end, live with these women, most of whom were hostile to him? Rahan carries a strange necklace! These are claws. Animal claws as there are only on the "Great territory"! Page Six: This claw is that of "Courage". This one from "Goodness". That of “Loyalty”. Lahita seemed moved. Our clan also symbolizes qualities and feelings with objects. Here, look. She pointed in her quiver, among the black arrows, to an arrow with a white tail. This arrow is that of "Friendship"! The one at whose feet we stick the white arrow becomes forever the friend of our clan! Lahita, who seemed to have sympathy for the captive, showed him around the island. Rahan was surprised to discover a crater outlet where sharks were swimming. Page Seven: He understood that the sharks, coming from the "Great River", had access to this natural pit by an underwater passage. Death to the enemy! Throw him in the pit! A few women rushed towards the son of Crao. The club that one of them was wielding was torn from her fingers by an arrow from Lahita. Schtok! Rahan must flee this island! Otherwise, one day, Lahita will not be there to help him and those women will kill him! Three times the sun disappeared on the horizon. Rahan had undertaken to build himself a hut on the shore. They gave him back his knife during the day, but confiscated it at night. Page Eight: Sometimes a long black arrow struck near him. But it was only a joke from the skillful Lahita! Shtrok! To gain the confidence of the women who were hostile to him, the son of Crao taught them many things unknown in those fierce ages. He revealed to them the mystery of the noose that he himself had discovered some time before. He taught them to sew thin skins together. So the “Man-who-comes-from-the-horizon” knows everything? Rahan's hut was now complete. It stood on the beach, a hundred paces from the village. And the captive often came there to meditate. Page Nine: Rahan does not know what fate the fishermen have reserved for him on their return! Rahan must escape!! That morning the women who had gone to fish in the rocks came back disappointed. The fish have fled our shore! We will not eat today! Why do you not fish for sharks in the "Great Pit?" Rahan always has curious ideas!! And how could we capture these sharks? Follow Rahan. He will show you! Shortly after, the son of Crao had prepared his trap. A strong hook was baited with a small squid. And tied to a very long vine. Page Ten: He tied this vine to the fork of a tree and threw the bait into the shark crater. A moment later, under the amazed gaze of the women, the vine suddenly stretched! A shark had jumped on the bait! Using the forked tree as a hoist, Rahan pulled the shark up. A clamor of joy greeted its appearance. He is not very big. But Rahan is certain that at daybreak we will find another one at the end of the trap! The women took the shark to the village. Rahan threw his "Line" back into the pit. Page Eleven: Rahan hopes, this time, to have won their trust! Joy reigned that evening around the fire. But as the son of fierce ages went back to his hut. Zlang! You forgot one thing, Rahan! Lahita was there, smiling and mischievous. Your knife! You know you have to hand it to me every night! It was difficult for Rahan to give up his precious ivory knife, but he obeyed. When will the fishermen return? In four or five moons. Maybe more! Rahan will not wait all this time! Rahan will flee tomorrow! Page Twelve: At daybreak the son of Crao went to the shark crater. The vine of the trap was ready to snap. A huge shark was struggling at the end of the "Line". The other sharks had fled. Rahan braced himself to reel in his catch when Lahita appeared in the distance, behind him. The "Big Monster" sometimes comes into the pit! Could Rahan have captured it?? Once again the mischievous Lahita wanted to display her skill. She aimed at the vine where Rahan was hanging with all his weight. Page Thirteen: The black arrow cleanly sliced the fibers, and the son of Crao, suddenly unbalanced, disappeared into the crater! Lahita rushed forward. But it was too late. Under water, Rahan was pursued by the big shark! Lahita is stupid! Lahita has unwittingly sacrificed Rahan! Furious with herself, the young girl broke her bow on a rock. Crack! The son of the fierce ages had just avoided a shark attack. This one still had the hook in its mouth and dragged the long vine. This is where the water from the "Great River" arrives! But Rahan can't escape that way. He would not have enough breath. The shark returned to the attack. Page Fourteen: The son of Crao, once again dodging the monstrous jaws, suddenly had an idea. The vine! The vine can help Rahan! He seized the vine as he passed and swam towards the wall of the pit. If Rahan succeeds in trapping her in this fault. As the nose of the shark came around, the line slackened. Thus entrapped with the vine attached to the wall, the shark was no longer a danger to him. He was saved! He was coming to the surface, when. A huge "Thing" came out of the underwater passage. A "Thing" like he had never seen before. Page Fifteen: This vile "Thing" had many arms. One of them suddenly circled Rahan's waist! "The Great Monster"! Rahan has been captured by the “Great Monster”!! Lahita pointed at the crater in panic, to her companions who had just arrived. They could all make out the shark which was thrashing about violently at the end of the vine which bound it. And all saw the monstrous octopus and its victim. Lahita should not have broken her bow!! She could have helped Rahan!! The son of Crao suddenly felt he was being lifted above the water by the tentacle that encircled him. Page Sixteen: Then he was brutally brought back under water by the horrible "Thing". He caught a glimpse of eyes between the cupped arms. Once again he was lifted out of the water. He made out the women massed at the edge of the crater and yelled. The Knife!!! Rahan needs his knife! Quickly Lahita, Quickly!! The water into which the octopus again plunged him muffled his cries. Lahita hesitated. What would happen if Rahan did not catch the knife she was about to throw to him? Yet when the son of fierce ages reappeared on the surface for the third time, she threw the weapon. Page Seventeen: And Rahan, with his free hand, barely caught the knife. Ra-ha-ha! The ivory blade plunged again and again into the shapeless body of the "Thing". All around Rahan the water turned red. Then it suddenly turned black, and the grip of the arm with the suction cups loosened. Ra-ha-ha! The son of Crao struck again and again. Above him, the screams of women punctuated every blow he gave the monster. When the tentacles stopped waving, Rahan took a deep breath. And his clamor of victory thundered in the crater. Ra-ha-ha! Page Eighteen: An instant later, he was hoisted up with a line thrown by Lahita. The surface of the water beneath him was veined with black and red. Rahan has triumphed over the "Great Monster"! Rahan deserves our respect! He will now keep his knife! You are wrong, Lahita! The men will never accept that we have treated an "Enemy" with so much mercy. The men will not find Rahan! When they return, Rahan will be far away on the great river! Over several days the son of Crao had made a plan! He put it into practice that night. From the village no one heard him disassemble his hut. Page Nineteen: He pulled down the heavy bulkhead he had built with the intention of making himself a Raft. The wind is with Rahan. He stuck a bamboo pole in it, to which he attached the skins he had specially sewn. Indeed, he was already far from the shore when cries rang out. The enemy has escaped! Kill him Lahita, kill him! In the moonlight that flooded the beach, Rahan caught a glimpse of the young girl who was stringing her new bow. Lahita's arrows always hit their mark! The only chance for Rahan is to jump into the water!! Crack! Page Twenty: He was in the dark water, clinging to his raft, when the whistle of the arrow sounded. Buzz! This one stuck with a dry noise in the bamboo pole, and the son of the fierce ages howled with joy. The white arrow! He hoisted himself onto the Raft because he knew he had nothing more to fear. Thank you Lahita! Thank you! Maybe Rahan will come back one day! The white arrow of friendship! As the wind carried him rapidly out to sea, Rahan twirled the arrow with white feathers in his fingers for a long time. The Arrow of Friendship! This token of friendship was the most beautiful present ever received by the son of fierce ages. That is why he still admired it, when the rays of the rising sun came to redden the white empennage.

Rahan. Episode Twenty-One. The Cliff of Sacrifice. Rahan knew what a strange appearance "Those-who-walk-upright" take on, long after being bound for the "Territory of shadows". The discovery of these skeletons at the foot of this cliff still amazed him. Was not that which had been the wrists and ankles of these men still tied with fine vines? These hunters were probably punished by their clan and thrown from above! But why? Rahan wants to know!! Page Two: A moment later, aiding himself by the roughness and the bushes embedded in the faults, the son of Crao was climbing the rock face. As agile as "Those-who-live-in-the-trees", the monkeys, he reached the crest of the cliff. He had just hoisted himself onto the plateau when. Oh! Rahan should have been wary! Armed with maces and rocks, the hunters watched him silently. Your gazes are those that are cast on the enemy! But Rahan is not an Enemy! He does not fight with "Those-who-walk-Upright", His brothers! A wild clamor covered his words. The clan rushed at him. Page Three: Despite his strength Rahan could not resist this ferocious assault. Some hands mastered him, others snatched his knife. Others tied vines to his ankles and his wrists. Rahan is not your Enemy! The "Tiger-God" will decide! Each time the leaves come back to the forest trees, the cliff clan sacrifices one of its own! Capturing Rahan allows us to make our offering to the "Tiger-God" by sparing one of our brothers! The son of Crao understood that he was going to join the "Territory of Shadows", like those he had discovered at the foot of the cliff!! Page Four: He braced himself, resisting the hunters who pushed him towards the void. But his shackled limbs made his efforts in vain. Two steps from the void the hunters threw him forward. And that was his downfall! He saw the ground rising towards him where the remains of the hunters sacrificed before him lay. He caught a glimpse of the wide river. His body went through a thick bush, which slowed his vertiginous fall somewhat. He fell again, flush with the rock face. Rahan goes to rejoin Crao. Page Five: But this day was not, for Rahan, that of the "Great voyage to the land of shadows"! He smashed the branches of a shrub rooted in the rock. And while the shock ought to have been fatal, and while his skull should have broken. The son of the fierce ages was only stunned! Schronch! Accept the offering of the Cliff Clan "Tiger God". And spare our hunters until the next leaf season! And this strange thing Rahan wore on his belt!? A magic item, no doubt? The Chief of the clan examined the ivory knife. This primitive being did not know that it was a weapon, and how useful it could be. It is right to return the property of those who go to the land of shadows! Page Six: The man solemnly dropped the knife into the void. And Rahan caught a glimpse of the yellowish reflection of the ivory. He saw his weapon fall, the blade turned towards him. Would he be killed by his own knife? No! He rolled onto his side. And the blade stuck in the ground, two fingers from his throat! Shrpak! You will help Rahan to free himself! Rahan will not experience the fate of these unfortunates! Between the cliff and the great river, the shriveled skeletons were a macabre warning. Page Seven: Not far away a roar arose that the son of Crao knew was the “Tiger-God”! A “Gora”! The tiger with monstrous canines appeared. Rahan had already faced similar beasts, but only when he had been free to move. The "Gora" approached slowly, certain that its shackled prey would not escape. Rahan will probably die. But he will not die without a fight! Accustomed to the worst dangers, the son of Crao never resigned himself! He dragged himself on his stomach, and grabbed the handle of his knife between his teeth. Rahan has a tooth as formidable as yours "Gora"!! Page Eight: When the animal leapt, he rolled on himself, avoiding the claws. The red chest stood, drawn up above him. His head dodged the paw that sought his face. And his mouth, armed with the knife, delivered the first blow. On the cliff the clan gazed in amazement at this man who, feet and hands tied, dared to resist the "Tiger God"! The son of Crao struggled fiercely under the beast that pinned him to the ground. The knife once again struck the monster's side. And Rahan thought his jaw was broken! The "Gora" had thrown itself back, tearing the knife from his teeth! Rahan is Lost! He did not touch the heart! Page Nine: The tiger moved away with the blade still in its side. But Rahan knew he would attack even more furiously. The river! The River can save Rahan! The son of the fierce ages was trying to reach this water he knew was dreaded by the "Gora". Growling and roaring, the wild beast gathered to leap. But he did it a second too late. Relaxing his bound legs Rahan had just thrown himself into the river! Ra-ha-ha! The clamor of victory smothered the roar of the "Gora", who dared not venture into the water. Page Ten: But the son of Crao was not saved. With his feet and hands tied, it was difficult for him to stay on the surface. And to resist the prevailing current. On one side, the cliff that plunged into the river was unapproachable. It offered no accessible refuge. On the other side, the shore was denied to him by the "Tiger God", who followed him stubbornly. His limbs shackled. The cliff. The "Gora". The current. Anyone other than Rahan would have despaired, but Rahan never despaired!! His chest puffed up with air, he kept himself on the surface of the waves. Advancing in restless spasms, moving his knees. Page Eleven: The tiger, on the bank, always made a disturbing escort. The knife stuck in his side fueled his rage. The current became less strong and Rahan saw, in the middle of the river, a rocky island on which he could take a pause. With only his hobbled legs, he pushed himself jerkily and with difficulty towards this refuge, when. Everything is against Rahan! Everything! Everything! Just then, the tall reeds on the shore parted. A crocodile had seen him, and was swimming towards him! Could he climb onto the islet before the saurian reaches him? Courage, Rahan! You did not escape the clutches of the Claws of the "Gora" to die under the teeth of the "monster-with-wood-skin"! Page Twelve: The islet was very close, but he had to sink to avoid the monster. Who pursued his course for a moment! When the saurian turned around, Rahan was crawling on the refuge. Or rather he dragged himself there, on his back, on his stomach. Helping himself with his shoulders and his knees, he was bruised by the edges of the rocks. The "Wood-Skinned Monster" is as tenacious as the "Gora"! The crocodile, in its turn, hoisted itself heavily on the islet! Its little eyes stared at the panting man between the rocks. The same desire to live stimulated the son of Crao. Back “Wood-Skin”, back!! Page Thirteen: Whipping the rocks with its Enormous tail the saurian watched Rahan. As the little "Tiger-god" had, he thought that this man was at his mercy. But when he lunged forward the man was faster. His monstrous mouth met only emptiness! Crak! Plak! Rahan, who had thrown himself aside to dodge the attack, had lost his balance. The rocks between which he had fallen protected him from a terrifying blow of his tail. And the son of fierce ages suddenly felt under his feet the weapon he was hoping for. Rahan knows how the Swamp Clan gets rid of "Wood-skins"! When the enormous, open mouth fell on him, his feet rose, plunging the solid branch into it! Page Fourteen: Its jaws locked, the monster had thrown itself back into the waves, abandoning the islet to this man-demon. Rahan, observed with a smile his shoulders bruised by the rocks. If the rocks cut Rahan's skin. They can also sever his bonds. The sharp edge, in fact, easily sheared the vine fibers. Ra-ha-ha! An instant later, the son of Crao had the liberty of movement. Over there, on the shore, the "Gora" was still rumbling. Rahan can, Rahan must, take back his knife! Page Fifteen: Since childhood, the ivory weapon was his only asset. With value inestimable in these fierce times. Rahan will take back his knife! Even if he has to strangle with his hands! But it was difficult for him to pull himself up onto the bank! At each attempt the clawed paws almost cut his throat. A network of roots finally allowed him to set foot on the bank. Rahan is coming "Gora"! He will defeat you as he defeated the "Skin-of-Wood"! The "Tiger-God" rumbled. He gathered himself up when the man armed himself with a forked branch. Attack “Gora”! Rahan is waiting for you! The beast jumped up but was brutally pushed back. The knife had not touched any vital point, and the animal retained all its formidable strength. Page Sixteen: He savagely freed himself from the forked branch which pinned him to the ground. And Rahan had to step back to parry a new assault. Rahan will not kill the "Gora" with this branch! But, if he is as skillful as Crao was. There will be another way! An idea suddenly came to the son of Crao. When the beast went on the attack. He struck him in flight! Schlak! His aim was perfectly accurate! Under his terrible blow the ivory knife penetrated entirely into the side of the monster! Ra-ha-ha! The blade, this time, had reached the heart of the "Gora". The clamor of Rahan covered the last roar of the "Beast-God". Page Seventeen: An instant later. Crao would be proud of his Son Rahan! He felt with emotion the claws of the necklace that his father had once given him. Had he not, hands and feet tied, confronted the terrifying "Gora"? Had he not, hands and feet tied, confronted "skin-of-wood", who was, over there, still in trouble? A certain pride overwhelmed him. Nothing can defeat "Those-Who-Walk-Upright" when they hold on to hope and show courage! Shouts rose in the distance, at the bottom of the cliff of sacrifices. The clan searches for Rahan! Page Eighteen: And Rahan hates to fight with "Those-who-walk-upright"! The forest was near, which offered him a place of refuge. Shortly after, in ambush in the thickets, he saw the clan approach the cliff. The hunters rushed towards the dead tiger. The "Gora" was not a god, since Rahan killed Him!! We feared a being who was made only of flesh and blood! No longer, when the leaves return to the branches of the trees, will our Clan have to sacrifice one of its own! Never again! A kind of joy passed over this clan, whose hunters murmured the name of "Rahan" to each other with admiration. Page Nineteen: Where are you Rahan? Where are you, who survived the "Sacrifice?" Where are you who defeated the "Gora", and triumphed over the great river? Clamors and pleas redoubled. Show yourself Rahan! Come back among us, man-god! We will be your faithful! But the son of Crao could not hear them anymore. Light and fast, he was already far, leaping in the thickets. Each season, when the leaves repopulate the forests, a hunter will owe his life to Rahan! Rahan saw himself again, hurled from the top of the cliff of sacrifice. His heart beat happily at the thought that a man would never know this fate again. Page Twenty: Once again he had taught "Those-who-walk-upright" something. His brothers. Other territories awaited him where he would adventure tomorrow. Ha-ha-ha! So you don't want to share your domain with Rahan! Flocks of birds flew from the big tree where he was going to spend the night. Only a few monkeys remained, observing with curiosity this being which looked so much like "Those-who-live-in-the-trees". A sound like a volcano thundered. In the distance, Rahan thought of the heart of the blue mountain that had once annihilated his horde. And that made him the sole survivor, and the son of all clans, of all hordes. He fell asleep on this thought. One hand on his necklace of claws. The other on his ivory cutlass.

Forensic Science International, issue thirty three.1987, pages 275 to 298. A PRACTICAL TOTAL SYNTHESIS OF COCAINE'S ENANTIOMERS. JOHN F CASALE. State Bureau of Investigation. Accepted December tenth, 1980. Summary. A simplified total synthesis of the single enantiomers of cocaine and racemic cocaine is outlined. The synthesis employs common laboratory glassware, reagents, and methods which can be performed in most forensic laboratories. The procedure for the isolation and purification of the dextrorotatory enantiomer of cocaine is presented. Key words: Cocaine; Enantiomers; Total synthesis. Introduction. In many jurisdictions cocaine is listed as a controlled substance under statutes covering coca leaves and their extracts. Therefore only the levorotatory isomer of cocaine would be controlled. These laws do not include optical isomers and dia-stereoisomers. The question of enantiomeric composition has recently become popular with defense attorneys. Minus Cocaine is the naturally occurring alkaloid extracted from coca leaves. Racemic and Plus cocaine can only be obtained through a chemical synthesis. The molecular structure of cocaine was first described by Willstatter and Muller, reference one in 1898. It was not until the early 1950's that the principles and methodologies of stereochemistry were applied to cocaine's tropane ring skeleton. Findlay, reference two, Fodor reference three four, and others established the stereochemistry of the tropane alcohols and their esters. Once this groundwork was laid, the three-dimensional structures of cocaine and its dia-stereoisomers, pseudo-cocaine, alloco-caine, and allo-pseudo-cocaine, were elucidated by Findlay references five to seven and Hardegger et at, reference eight. Findlay's three-dimensional structures were confirmed in 1968 by Sinnema et at reference nine using NMR spectral analysis. Electron impact fragmentation patterns of the tropane alkaloids were later established by Blossey et al. reference ten. These workers identified the major mass spectral fragmentation patterns by deuterium and substituent labelling. Fragmentation patterns for various tropinone analogs have also been determined by Kashman and Cherkez, reference eleven.

Rahan. Episode Twenty. The Chief of Chiefs. Intrigued by these curious beasts that jump on the large water lily leaves, the son of Crao did not hear the man approaching. But, when the shadow of the brandished spear loomed near him. He instinctively threw himself aside, into the reeds. The Lance, missing its goal, burst the surface of the pond. Shrafil! Page Two: You have to be very cowardly to attack Rahan from behind! And very afraid to hide behind a "tree skin"! Why did you want to kill Rahan? As the son of the fierce ages had unsheathed his knife, the man, indeed, sheltered himself with his shield of bark. The chief of chiefs demands your death! The leader of leaders? Who is the chief of chiefs? Behind his shield the man had slyly seized his ax. This one suddenly flew towards Rahan, but followed the same path as the spear! Rahan will make you answer his questions man! Calmly unsheathing his ivory knife, the son of Crao walked towards this adversary whom he now knew to be unarmed. Rahan does not kill "Those-who-walk-upright"! But when some deserve it. Page Three: He treats them like this! The assault was so fast and so precise that the man rolled on the ground before he heard those words! He found himself on his stomach, paralyzed by the tree skin that Rahan was pressing him down with. Who is the chief of chiefs? Rahan wants to know! Speak! The man, nearly suffocating, told the son of Crao a very curious story. He was part of a large horde that lived nearby. We men are as numerous as these reeds. And we all obey the "ChakChak". The "Chief of Chiefs". As soon as he learned that an enemy was prowling our territory, he ordered him killed. And this "Enemy" is Rahan! But this "ChakChak" must be strong and wise to command hunters as numerous as these reeds! Rahan will be happy to meet him! Page Four: Rahan would hold his tongue, if he knew the "ChakChak"!! He is weaker than a woman, but more powerful than a wizard! Rahan does not fear wizards! He will see this "ChakChak"!! As for you, go where you want. But never attack Rahan from behind again! Stunned by such magnanimity, the man watched the son of fierce ages disappear into the thicket. The "Sun-Haired" enemy will be dead before the moon shines! Shortly after, going up the hunter's trail, Rahan came in sight of a village such as he had never seen before. Hundreds of huts were huddled around a gigantic tree. On a fork of this tree stood a hut larger than the others. That of the "ChakChak" no doubt! Page Five: In the center of this village in an enclosure, stood three large bamboo cages. In each roared a beast. This spectacle astonished the son of Crao. Who had never seen such a big village. Never seen a hut in a tree, never seen cages! Huddled in the vines, he dared not break cover, when. I encountered "The Enemy"! But he escaped me!! He said he would come here!! The man Rahan had spared was now standing under the big tree. A voice fell from the branches. He who lets the enemy escape deserves death! No! Don't call death on “Ba-Hok”, "ChakChak"! No! No! The hunter recoiled in terror. Page Six: Rahan saw him fall, and he lay motionless on the soil. No weapon had hit him and yet the man was dead! The chief of chiefs appeared at the front of his suspended hut. Thus will perish all those who do not carry out the commands of the "ChakChak!" This horde does not like its leader! They are afraid of him, thought Rahan. Indeed, all the hunters gazed fearfully at the great tree. Rahan observed for a long time this tree, this strange enclosure, these cages with wild beasts. The wailing rising from the copses tore him away from his thoughts. He descended from his perch, slipping silently towards the bushes from which these moans rose. Page Seven: And discovered a young boy squatting near the hunter struck down by the "Chief of Chiefs". Do not be afraid! Rahan means you no harm! Who are you? I am Lyakk, Ba-Hok's brother. I have to bury him far from the village, as is our custom! Rahan felt the body. Nowhere did he see a wound. How did the "ChakChak" kill Ba-hok? The "ChakChak" holds a magical power! He calls death. And death falls, all alone, on those who disobey him! Lyakk spoke of the "Chief of Chiefs" with a look that betrayed his fear. He never leaves his hut! He never participates in the hunt! Page Eight: But he demands the finest cuts of meat! Our horde hates him, but dare not appoint another leader! Because everyone fears that the "ChakChak" will call death against him. If the 'Chief of Chiefs' knew that Lyakk spoke to the enemy, he would know the same fate as Ba-Hok! He would call Lyakk under the big tree and death would descend upon Lyakk! Oh! Attention! Rahan heard the noises at the same time as did Lyakk. He plunged behind the thickets just as hunters appeared. These saw the foliage move. Perhaps they believed in the presence of a beast because they rushed forward, with their spears held high. Page Nine: As the flint points dug dangerously into the copse, Rahan had to break cover. Certainly, he could no longer flee! The spears came to rest on his chest, on his back, and on his side. The "ChakChak" will decide how the enemy should die! The captive was led under the great tree of the chief of chiefs. Who are you? Why did you violate our hunting territory? I am Rahan, son of Crao. And Rahan is the friend of all "Those-who-walk-upright"! He thinks he has the right to visit all territories! All territories!? So, we'll send you to an endless territory: “The Territory of Shadows!!" Page Ten: A moment later Rahan was thrown into the vast enclosure. As he had been left with his knife, he understood that the "ChakChak” intended to entertain himself at his expense. From the top of his tree, indeed, the Chief of Chiefs, issued orders. He invited the horde to witness the death of the enemy. The enclosure bristled with people. The looks of these men proved that they condemned the torture of the captive. But they dare not disobey the "ChakChak"!! Before joining the "Territory of Shadows", Rahan will show them how "Those-who-walk-upright" must fight!! They had just opened the three cages. Three big cats sprang out of them at the same time. A lion, a panther, and a puma. Rahan could defeat them one by one. But against the three at the same time, he is lost!! Page Eleven: Alone in the middle of the enclosure, the son of Crao was an unexpected prey for the beasts. Mixing their roars, they rushed forward. With a prodigious leap, Rahan dodged this first attack, and. Oh! Rahan has found it! He knows how to isolate them! The stupefied hunters saw the captive rush to a cage, pursued by the great lion. A clamor arose, the man and the beast were in the cage! Cutting through the vine, Rahan made the bamboo door fall! Schlak! Page Twelve: And while the frustrated panther and cougar growled outside the cage. Rah-ha-ha! Inside, Rahan confronted the lion in isolation! A moment later, he lifted the door. Your turn, "Baguae"! Rahan is waiting for you!! The door fell behind the panther that had just leapt. Schlak! You have fallen into Rahan's trap! The son of fierce ages dived. The ivory blade disappeared into the side of the beast. Ra-ha-ha! Rahan's clamor of triumph answered the admiring clamor of the hunters massed on the enclosure. In the big tree, the "ChakChak" growled in rage. Page Thirteen: Rahan could not repeat his ruse a third time. The puma, abandoning him, had given itself another goal: to flee the enclosure! Rahan does not have the claws of a wild beast! To escape he must find something else, this vine perhaps? Using the vine, he hoisted himself onto the cages. The hunters who had freed the beasts had no time to raise their weapons. Ra-ha-ha! Plak! And they were knocked to the bottom of the platform adjoining the enclosure! Rahan did not join the shadow territory that "ChakChak” wanted to send him to! The magic power of the "Chef of Chefs" cannot do anything against Rahan! Page Fourteen: The son of Crao defied the "Chief of Chiefs", who gave a treacherous smile. Rahan is a Valorous Enemy! The "ChakChak" would like to receive him in his hut! The spears of the hunters had missed the puma, which had just jumped on the trunk of the big tree. And climbed towards the mysterious hut. And Rahan once again witnessed the incredible. No arrow, no spear had struck the beast which fell on the ground!! So? What is Rahan waiting for to visit the "ChakChak"? Would Rahan be afraid?? The son of Crao hesitated. What was he was worried about!? This mysterious death of the puma troubled him. But Rahan wants to know, he thought. Page Fifteen: Rahan arrives, “ChakChak! Overcoming his fears slowly, very slowly, he began to climb the big tree. A terrible silence now hung over the village. Would not death, called by the "Chief of Chiefs", befall the daring one who challenged him? Rahan reached the platform of logs on which the hut stood. Objects were piled up there. The offerings of the horde, no doubt. He noticed the vine that ascended and was held by a spear. The "ChakChak" must use it to hoist the offerings! She will serve Rahan, if he has to flee!! Enter Rahan! I wanted to see more closely the face of the daring hunter that you are! The chief of chiefs, with a strange smile invited the son of fierce ages to enter his hut. Page Sixteen: Other objects were arrayed in the shadows. Those of my horde are very generous with me! They offer me everything! Necklaces. Shells. And reeds to make music. The "Chief of Chiefs" was indeed playing with a fine reed. Would you like to hear some music? As the black eye of the reed rose up towards him, the son of Crao suddenly understood! Rahan knows you can throw things with a reed!! Fit! He threw himself out of the hut, dodging the tiny thorn emitted from the blowgun! He had grabbed the vine, but wouldn't have time to let himself slide to the ground. The "ChakChak" was aiming at him again! Page Seventeen: So he swung in the void to avoid the mysterious projectile. This one buzzed past his ear like an insect. Fit. Infuriated, the cheat disappeared into his hut. He went to put a "thing-that-kills" into his reed, thought Rahan! Rahan, then, could have dropped to the ground. But the son of Crao wanted to know everything! He was catching his footing on the platform when the "ChakChak" reappeared, his blowgun at his lips. Rahan rolled onto his side and this time he saw the thin thorn stuck in a trunk. You are at Rahan's mercy, "ChakChak!" Page Eighteen: The chief of chiefs slipped a new thorn into his reed when Rahan appeared. Your "Magic Power" is therefore inside that! A kick knocked the earthen bowl out of the hut. But the "ChakChak", escaping from his adversary. Was already hanging from the vine. He wanted to flee! Rahan will help you get to the ground faster!! The ivory blade cut down on the line. Schton! Argh! Argh! And. The whole dumbfounded horde saw the "Chief of Chiefs" fall into the void!! Page Nineteen: This fall should not have been fatal. But, however, the "ChakChak" lay still under the big tree! Rahan has saved us from “ChakChak”! Rahan has killed the chief of chiefs! Clamors greeted the son of Crao. The "ChakChak" has killed himself, brothers! Come take a look! Close to the body, Rahan pointed to the ground, where. Countless thorns had spread. He died the same way that he kills yours. Struck down by his venom! He had no magic power! He could kill from a distance, cowardly ambush in his lair. It is by projecting those poison-coated thorns! With this! Page Twenty: And that is how he brought fear to your village! You will have to appoint another leader, brothers! Not a "Chief of Chiefs". But a simple and loyal, courageous and good leader for all of "Those-who-walk-upright"! Symbol of terror, the big hut was destroyed the same day. As was dismantled the enclosure where the "enemies" were sacrificed. Rahan did not attend to this. The clan had, as others had so often, wanted to adopt him. But Rahan did not want to be linked to a clan, to a horde. Because the son of Crao only wanted to be in one horde. That of "Those-who-walk-upright", of men! And it was in search of unknown brothers that he ran happily, his necklace of claws jumping on his chest, his ivory knife beating his hip.

Rahan. Episode Nineteen. The Forbidden Shore. The son of Crao observed the thin skin drying in the sun, while playing with a round stone. Rahan will soon be able to make a new loincloth! Yes. He could soon pound this skin to make it supple, as those of his horde did long ago. He sometimes looked at his reflection in the small polished marble slab that had been given to him by the clan of Tuburk, Why is Rahan's hair the color of the sun? Page Two: Why do "Those-who-walk-Standing" not all look the same, like their cousins, "Those-who-leap-in-the-trees"? And why night and day? And why the sun? And the rain? And the storm? In those early days of human history, Rahan was curious about everything. As he evoked the storm, the wind suddenly rose. A gust swept away the drying skin. Rahan will not let the wind steal his loincloth!! The skin fluttered above the thickets, like a strange bird. Another gust brought her back to the ground, behind the bushes where she disappeared. For a long time the son of Crao searched for his property. This shore was cracked with narrow fissures where the mud of the tides had accumulated. Rahan will have to skin another beast. Page Three: He was about to give up his search when he glimpsed the skin at the bottom of a crevice. Rahan cannot reach you, but he knows how to get you to him! A moment later he had tied a thin vine to the handle of his ivory knife. He was so preoccupied, that he did not sense he was being observed. What does "The Enemy" do? What is he fishing for in the veins of the shore? In other circumstances his hearing or his sense of smell would have warned this son of fierce ages of the danger. Rahan threw his knife, quite straight, on the skin that rested on the mud. Rah-ha-ha. His victory cry rolled to the other shore as he gently lifted the skewered skin. Page Four: He was grabbing this one when the men rushed out, brandishing their stone maces. The enemy who violates our territory must die! Stop Men! Rahan does not fight “Those-who-walk-upright”! Indeed, it was repugnant to the son of Crao to face those of his species. But this time he had no choice! He jumped to avoid the assailant, but his ankles got caught in the vine. Lying on the ground, he saw the man diving on top of him. As the club was about to fall, he stretched out his arm which held the ivory knife. Argh! This man rolled on his side and the second assailant, terrified by this response from "The enemy" fled screaming. Page Five: The ivory blade only scratched the hunter's chest. What cursed weapon did you take Tanirk's life with? Rahan did not take Tanirk's life. Tanirk is only injured and Rahan knows how to heal this injury! Here is Rahan's weapon. The son of Crao showed the knife still attached to the thin vine. Suddenly he jumped! The folded skin, slipping on this line which had passed through it, lay a few steps away. When Rahan heals Tanirk. He will think about this very curious thing! For the wounded hunter, a man who spared his adversary and who raved about a vine, could only have lost his mind. Page Six: At nightfall, however this hunter suffered less. The blood of the "sun-fruits" calms the strongest pains. And if Tanirk knows how to keep leaves on his chest, his wound will tomorrow close like the lips of the mouth close! Rahan's knife went through the skin. While Tanirk fell asleep, the son of Crao returned to the mysteries that preoccupied him. And the whole vine slipped into the two holes! And now Rahan can attach the skin like this!! The son of the fierce ages who knew how to tie knots, including the flowing knot of a lasso, was still unaware that another system of attachment could exist. Page Seven: This new way of joining two skins was a revelation. Rahan has found a way to never lose his loincloth again! Rahan had amazing faculties of assimilation. A moment later he cut a long, thin thorn. It will pierce the skin better than the knife. Pinching a thin vine fiber in the notch, he made that night what was, perhaps, the first "Needle" in the history of mankind! But if this rudimentary needle pierced the skin well, it let the fiber escape, stuck at each pass. Pock! The hole should be a bit bigger. Big enough to let the fibers slide. Rahan could not invent the "Eye" of the needle. Page Eight: But he knew how to carve his thorn in such a way that it could bore a passage slightly wider than the notch pinching the vegetal thread. At dawn, his clamor of triumph woke up Tanirk. Ra-ha-ha! See Tanirk, see! In the past, when Rahan ran through the bushes, he sometimes lost his loincloth. It slipped from his belt. But now it cannot slip. The son of Crao proudly tapped the hem of his new loincloth, the hem through which passed the skin belt bearing the lizard sheath The face of Rahan suddenly became somber. A group of men appeared in the distance. Your clan searches for you, Tanirk! It is you they're looking for!! No one has ever ventured onto our shores without losing their life! I would like to help you, Rahan! Alas I, I can neither run. And not even walk! Page Nine: But you have a small chance of escape. From the wrath of mine. By taking refuge in the “Great Vein”! Go Rahan. Although, whatever may happen to you. Tanirk will never forget the strange "Enemy". You helped him! Go! Go! It is time!! The men who spread over the immense shore might have been more fishermen than hunters, for all brandished long harpoons. Rahan is not a fish! He will not let himself be captured by this clan! The son of Crao knew how to see without being seen. From bush to bush he crawled on the beach. What Tanirk calls the "Grand Vein" is down there! Page Ten: The "Great Vein" was a much larger crevice than the others. Opening from the shore, she zig-zagged to the distant forest. Borrowing is indeed the only way to reach this forest without being spotted. But before arriving at the "Great Vein" Rahan risks being seen ten times! The shore, up to this fissure, offered no retreat, no hiding place. His hiding place? Rahan will take it with him!! The son of fierce ages quickly uprooted a small bush. A moment later, he was crawling behind this frail rampart. The men with the harpoons shouted at each other furiously. Some sometimes looked in the direction of Rahan, who then froze, hiding himself behind his bush. Page Eleven: He was only a stone's throw from the "Great Vein" when a clamor arose. The men had just discovered Tanirk. Taking advantage of this unexpected diversion, he rushed towards the crevasse. Though it was deep he jumped in. The "Great River" must run through it very often! Unlike the other silt-soaked cracks, this one was lined with pebbles. However, the clan was surprised to find Tanirk alive. "The enemy" wanted to make Tanirk suffer more! He introduced poison into his body! Orbk. Is mistaken! Rahan wanted. To heal him! Page Twelve: Lies! Who has ever seen an enemy heal the one he has just defeated!? Rahan is not an enemy like others, Orbk! In these wild times the generosity of the son of Crao exceeded the understanding of the members of the clan. Their leader, Orbk, tore off the leaf bandage. Argh! And the man who had witnessed the fight between Tanirk and Rahan jumped. The blood flowed! And flowed! And now, now! The closed wound was no more than a thin gash! Does Orbk admit he was wrong? No! Rahan has closed the wound so that his poison remains in your body! Before the end of the day, You will have reached the territory of shadows, Tanirk! Page Thirteen: The son of Crao, however, had just come up against a curious obstacle. Rahan has seen nets like this before, he thought. But the fishers of "The Black Island" plunged them into the Great River! Why did the brothers of Tanirk place it here? As a dull rumble rose from the shore, Rahan understood. The waters of the "Great River will come here. The fish will throw themselves into this trap! He was pulling himself up in the mesh when. The “Enemy” Orbk! The enemy is hidden in the great fissure! The fishermen stood out against the sky. Harpoons flew towards Rahan, who had just taken refuge behind a projection. They will not allow Rahan to climb the net, Nor to cut the meshes! Rahan must turn back! Page Fourteen: The water quickly invaded "The Great Vein", and reached to the height of his hips, his chest, and then his shoulders. Klack! Ploch! The son of Crao knew that the "Great River" came out of its bed every day, then returned to it. He heard the hunters bustling on each side of the crevasse. Rahan has only one way to escape these men! He let himself sink under the foam, in these waves which always rose. He knew how to "Crawl under water" as well as on the surface. And, despite the strong current, he kept away from his enemies. He saw fish of all shapes and sizes. Carried by the flow, these would foolishly throw themselves into the net. Page Fifteen: The current became less strong. But suddenly. Rahan is trapped, like those fish! A second net was raised in front of him! Those who don't get caught in the first net get caught in this one, when the "Great River" recedes! Rahan cautiously returned to the surface. No one saw his face in the middle of this foam. Rahan can no longer get out of the water without being seen! Obrk and his men busied themselves happily on both sides of the "Great Vein" where the water now lay. The catch will be good, brothers!! They greeted with a clamor each jolt shaking the nets, this one signaling a new catch. And we will bring back the corpse of “The Enemy”! Page Sixteen: Tanirk, still very weak, had been carried there by his brothers. You are witnessing our fishing for the last time, poor Tanirk! But we have avenged you! We killed the one who introduced the great evil into your body! However, the son of Crao was going through an agonizing situation as he tried to cut through the mesh of the net. A school of strange fish had begun to circle around him. For fun, perhaps some bumped into him with their long bony noses. But let Rahan alone! When he breaks through this trap, you can run away with him!! Page Seventeen: Oh! A similar misadventure had already happened to the son of Crao, when he was faced with a young mammoth! Rahan swooped behind the fish which was carrying his precious knife but this chase was in vain. The fish disappeared very quickly and he himself, suffocating, had to come back to the surface. Without his knife, Rahan has no chance of fleeing!! But he will not surrender! This time the fishermen again did not see his face. And he dived back to the net. Crao said: "A brave man always has a weapon with him, even if only his fingernails or his teeth!!” Page Eighteen: A moment later, he was biting furiously at the vines of the net, hacking, crushing, and slicing one by one the vegetable fibers. Memories of his wild childhood assailed him. He remembered the lion cub which had attacked him during his sleep. And he had to attack with another weapon, with the engorgement of his teeth! But Rahan was not a beast. He only has human teeth! And this exhausting effort forced him to come back to the surface more often. The great river is retreating! It was indeed in reflux. The fish threw themselves blindly on the net. Page Nineteen: Of which he had only been able to cut a single knot! In a moment Rahan will be uncovered and he won't even have the strength to fight! The waters evacuated the "Great Vein" even more rapidly than they had invaded it. The fishermen howled with joy. Pointing to the countless fish that thrashed about in the meshes of the two nets. Oh! And here is the best catch! Suspended from the net like a spider on its web, the son of the fierce ages gasped. Exhausted, he did not see Orbk the chief approaching. Who raised his harpoon! But! No Orbk! Don't kill him!! He healed me look! He healed me! You were wrong, Orbk! Page Twenty: Tanirk jumped and gesticulated happily among his brothers. Orbk wants to admit its mistake! But the enemy will have to tell us his secret. All of his secrets! Orbk can have. Can ask for everything. Right away. Rahan does not ask for anything in return. When the sun dipped into the "Great River", the hostility of the clan had long since given way to admiration. We found your weapon on the nose of an "Espak". Take it back! Had Rahan not revealed the secret of the "Blood-of-the-fruits-of-the-sun", and many others still? But the son of Crao was still talking. Was it not his destiny to teach to some what he learned from others? Was he not the link between all men, "Those-who-walk-upright", his brothers?

Rahan. Episode Eighteen. The Demon Tree. When the big green lizard heard the sound of the leaping man, it was too late. Rahan's fingers had already closed on his tail. Shortly after the son of Crao made a new sheath for his knife. The lizard’s tail will grow back. And Rahan's cutlass will be better protected in this sheath than before! The sheath of thin skin quickly took shape. Page Two: Rahan was attaching it to his belt when. What is it? Could a piece of sun have fallen in the valley! Intrigued, the son of the fierce ages moved cautiously towards this shimmer that rose from the large flat rocks in the distance. A moment later he was in the middle of these marble slabs, some of which were more polished than his ivory knife. Oh! After starting for a moment, Rahan burst out laughing. It is the sun shining on rocks! And that man, that is Rahan! On the highly polished plaque stuck in the ground, the son of Crao saw himself as in a mirror. Rahan is made thus? Page Three: He had certainly seen the reflection of his face before. In the still waters of the pools and puddles of rain. But it was the first time that he saw himself entirely, from head to toe! Amused, he waved his arms, observing this image which repeated his gestures exactly. When his trained hunter ear warned of possible danger. Someone is approaching! And Rahan prefers to surprise than to be surprised! A large dead tree stood nearby. He pulled himself up into the branches, unaware that the real danger lay above him! He caught sight of the large live boa on the upper branch at the same time as he glimpsed the approaching man. Don't move "Boak" don't move! Rahan means you no harm! Page Four: But the reptile probably did not intend to share its refuge. He slowly uncoiled his head, and pointed it at Rahan. He could no longer back down on this branch which was in danger of breaking. And no vine allowed him to escape the reptile. The armed man had not seen or heard anything yet. It is you who will help Rahan, "Boak"! Diving on the snake, Rahan seized it behind the head. You will serve as a vine!! Suspended from the reptile, the son of Crao swung in the void towards the heart of the tree where the branches divided. Page Five: He let himself fall on this new refuge and suddenly thought he was sinking underground! Bloum! The dust and the fragments of worm-eaten wood accompanied his fall into the trunk. Hollow all the way up! The man arrived on the scene heard a dull noise from the heart of the tree. But he only saw the reptile. If the "Boak" attacks, Rahan will not be able to defend himself! Rahan also saw this serpent, through the breach of the hollow trunk. The trunk was too narrow to allow the son of Crao freedom of movement. And the worm-eaten wood, crumbling under his knife, prevented any ascent! Page Six: "Those-who-walk-upright" must help each other! This man will surely help Rahan out of this trap! Holes in the bark let the daylight filter through. Over here, brother, over here! Oh! What are you doing? What are you running for? The terrified man, fled screaming, and answering his cries other men ran to him. A demon threatens the horde! He took the form of a tree! The tree spoke to me! It wanted me to go to it!! Clasping their spears, the hunters approached the tree. Inside which the boa had just slipped! You will not suffocate Rahan without suffering, “Boak”!! Ah! Page Seven: The son of Crao pushed the reptile's head away from his face but he could not free his weapon arm. Rah-ha-ha! Rahan's battle cry reached the hunters. Strike! Strike! Kill the Demon! Rahan heard a snap. Schrach! And saw the flint point of a spear, which had just passed through the bark of the trunk! Bracing himself, he pressed the reptile's head on this unexpected weapon. Tsit! The embrace loosened. The "Boak" was dead! Ra-ha-ha! The devil challenges us! Kill, brothers kill!! This clamor of victory that rose from the tree, unleashed the anger of the clan. Page Eight: The men threw their lances with such violence towards the trunk. That the flint points perforated the bark from all sides. Schtoum! Schtoum! And never had the life of Rahan, the prisoner of this strange trap, been so threatened! The sharp spikes shoot out from everywhere. Up to his chest, from his face, and above him. They were fortunately stopped by the bark, but would not some burst through? The situation of the son of Crao was distressing. But he had, as always, an idea that could save him. These spears will help Rahan ascend up there! Page Nine: A moment later, leaning on the spearheads that bristled inside the trunk, he rose out of the trap. Zlang! He soon freed himself from the trunk. Around the tree the hunters screamed, and threw their last spears. They can't do anything more against Rahan! They have no more weapons! A cry of terror greeted his fall from the branches. The demon has taken on the form of a man! Let us kill him brothers! Let us kill him! But by the time the hunters pulled their spears from the bark, the son of Crao had already disappeared into the thickets! Page Ten: Shortly after, hidden near the waterfalls, he caught a glimpse of a sparkle on a mound. Then another on a nearby mound. They use the "Shining Stone" to send signals, thought Rahan. They "Speak" with the light of the sun!! In fact, the men of the clan were playing small slabs of polished marble under the sun. One of them spotted Rahan near the falls and signaled his presence. An instant later, the son of the fierce ages was himself surrounded. Behind him, the falls. In front of him, and to his sides, the menacing hunters. Rahan will not fight without reasons with "Those-who-walk-Upright"! Once again, Rahan wanted to avoid combat with the men, his brothers. Page Eleven: The water surged between his legs with such violence that at each step he risked being dragged into the cataract. Stunned by so much audacity the hunters had regrouped. The man, demon will not escape the clan!! Tuburk will kill him! Their leader, bravely imitating Rahan, ventured into the rushing current. Stop, "Man-demon"! Tuburk challenges you! Tuburk cha. The son of Crao did not hear the howl, covered by the roar of the falls, but he saw the unbalanced man. Slip into the torrent, disappear under the bubbling foaming waves, and reappear in a calmer area. He does not know how to "crawl on water"! Rahan must save him! Page Twelve: The bewildered hunters saw the man-demon plunge from the top of the falls. Once again Tuburk had disappeared under the eddies. He was semi-conscious when the son of Crao brought him to the surface. The hunters lie in wait for Rahan, but the river is with Rahan! Supporting Tuburk, the son of fierce ages was drifting with the current when. Ohh! Tuburk will kill you! In a desperate gesture, the chief of the clan had snatched his knife from Rahan, and was looking to hit his rescuer! To which he clung. Argh! You cannot do anything against Rahan! You who cannot crawl on water! Tuburk had to drop the ivory knife. Page Thirteen: And Rahan was faced with a cruel dilemma. Abandon the man to recover his precious weapon, or abandon the knife. Rahan wants you to live. But he also wants his knife. Vlang! Closing the stunned Tuburk's nose and mouth, Rahan dragged him to the bottom of the river. His cutlass was there, wedged between the pebbles. In spite of coming to the surface with Tuburk, the clan howled relentlessly. Shortly after, he was helping his adversary to pull himself up onto the bank. Without you, Tuburk would have joined the territory of the shadows. Why did you save him!? Page Fourteen: Because Tuburk showed his courage by following Rahan across the falls when he can't crawl on water! Rahan admires brave men! You can go back to your people, Tuburk! Mine will drive me away! The law of the clan says that he who does not triumph over his adversary is unworthy of being chief! At the instant when Tuburk speaks, he knows that his place is already taken by another! Loork, maybe? He had been waiting for this moment for a long time. So why did Loork not go after Rahan, like you dared to do? A pout of bitterness puckered Tuburk's lips. Loork is a strong, very strong man. But he does not have that loyalty and courage that make great hunters! Perhaps he did not dare to confront: The demon man! Page Fifteen: Rahan is not a Demon! He is a man like you! And he will prove it to yours! Let us go Tuburk! Night was falling when the two men arrived at the village of Tuburk. Here and there torches were burning. Tuburk is back! Tuburk and the demon-man are here!! I am not a demon! Demons do not exist! I am Rahan, the son of Crao! And I am Loork, the new leader of this Clan! And Loork will do what Turburk-the-weak could not! The man had sprung from the darkness with his spear held high! He rushed towards Rahan who, amazingly, remained motionless, firmly planted on his legs. Had the son of Crao chosen to die? Page Sixteen: His spear pointed, Loork charged wildly and Rahan still didn't flinch!! It was only when the flint point was about to penetrate his chest that his hands grabbed the spear, blocking the weapon, stopping the man in his tracks! The arrest was so rough that the spear broke. So unexpected that Loork rolled on the ground. He only rose again under the grip of Rahan. Loork charges more stupidly than the buffalo. And his face is uglier than that of "Those-who-walk-in-the-trees"!! See! See! See! In front of the marble slab where Rahan had dragged him, Loork grimaced with rage. Page Seventeen: Tuburk dared to face Rahan despite not knowing how to "Crawl on water". And Loork, he wanted to kill him without any risk! Your clan will decide which is the bravest! The hunters cheered Tuburk but still eyed Rahan suspiciously. Was his last exploit not that of a "Man-Demon"? Follow Rahan! He will show you how you could have mistaken him for a demon! The son of Crao led the hunters to the great dead tree. Rahan wanted to avoid a "Boak". He fell into the hollow trunk as he called for help, one of you thought the tree was talking!! Because certain hunters guarded a skeptical pout, Rahan threw a vine at the tree. Look, listen, and understand. Page Eighteen: A moment later he was sliding inside the trunk, screaming at the top of his voice. Do you hear?! Rahan is talking to you, not a demon! He was at the bottom of the "trap" on the body of the "Boak", when suddenly a light shone on him! A torch fell on him, instantly igniting the worm-eaten wood powder and the inside of the tree! Those cowards want to burn Rahan! The son of Crao heard the angry cries of the hunters. But why did they not cut this vine? He quickly climbed the vine as the flames crackled around him. Page Nineteen: He threw himself out of the burning stump and fell on a branch, expecting a volley of arrows and spears. But nothing happened. Over there, Tuburk was haranguing his hunters. Loork's treachery proved he was not worthy of our clan! Between the clan and the blazing tree a man was stretched out, three arrows stuck in his back. Rahan recognized Loork! Jump Rahan! Jump Brother! We are happy to have been able to prevent this cruel deceiver from cutting the vine. And Tuburk recounted how Loork had projected his torch into the trunk and how his people had prevented him from satisfying his cruel lust for vengeance. Page Twenty: The “Demon Tree” blazed all night long. You should stay among us, our clan needs loyal hunters like you! Rahan cannot choose a clan, or stay in a horde. Because he loves all the clans, all the hordes! So accept this offering! The small marble slab glistened more than the still water of the ponds. When he took the road to the mountain Rahan made the sun play there. To respond to the sparkling that the clan emitted, saluting his departure. Then he crossed a coast that no one had crossed before him. What mysteries, what wonders of life, what men awaited him in this new territory? In those fierce times, these were the only questions that Rahan, son of Crao, asked himself.

Rahan. Episode Seventeen. The weapon that flies. Attracted by the clamor of defiance, Rahan came running and saw the child awaiting the shock of the young Mammoth charging him. This little man seeks death! This adolescent was too frail to stop the monster's onslaught. Why does he not run away before being crushed, thought Rahan. Oh! If Rahan does not act, the little man is lost! The spear had slipped on the beast’s chest. A defensive riposte had just thrown the young hunter to the ground! Page Two: The cry of combat of the son of Crao thundered in the clearing. Ra-ha-ha! You will not defeat Rahan so easily, "Two Teeth"!! It is Rahan who will strike you down!! As once did the daring hunters of his clan, he threw himself on the tusks. Unbalancing the young monster, that sagged heavily to the side. “Two-teeth” will die! Rahan was about to strike when a tusk rose, snatching away his knife. Oh! The point of this tusk had, by chance, caught the lanyard of the knife! Suddenly disarmed, the son of Crao saw the mammoth get up and charge. The knife beat against the tusk, ivory against ivory. Page Three: All this happened very quickly and the child, Stunned, saw his savior leaning against a tree. This hunter is crazy! “Two teeth” will crush him against the trunk! The Mammoth no longer charged. He marched heavily towards the man, his forehead bent. Approach, approach thought Rahan. You cannot imagine the trap that Rahan is preparing for you! The tusks were going to pin him against the tree, with its head pressing on his chest. When he suddenly bent down, circled around the trunk, and grabbed hold of the curved tusks! We have it, little man! We have it!! Bring your spear!! Slide it behind the teeth of this stupid beast! The mammoth was determined to free itself. Page Four: But the son of Crao, braced against the tree, held on until the moment when the solid spear replaced him. Very good, little man, very good!! But "Two-Teeth" can still escape us. We will consolidate this trap! The boy was confused. A moment later Rahan had tied the spear to the tusks, using vines. And now Rahan would like to know your name. I am Lohic. And to find out why Lohic dared to face a monster like "Two-Teeth" alone! The adolescent’s face was sad. My clan chased me out because I am not strong enough. I never bring game. Page Five: Clan law is terrible for weaklings. This is why Tayak said yesterday: "Lohic no longer has a place among us! Lohic must leave!" And you hoped, by killing the "Two-Tooth", to regain the esteem of your clan?! Yes! That is what I wanted! Rahan has met many clans where the savage law of force reigns! He hates this law, and he will tell Tayak! Take Rahan to your people, Lohic! Why did you help me? Why do you want to go see Tayak? Because Rahan would not like Lohic to live the life that was his! Rahan remembered his own childhood after the eruption of the blue mountain that had decimated his horde, after the death of Crao his father. Page Six: Rahan had to flee the inhospitable clans. He had to live alone, in the jungle, like a beast! He doesn't want other little men to live like this! A village appeared from which arose hostile clamors. The clan hunted Lohic! Why does Lohic dare to violate clan law! Lohic is a brave hunter, Tayak! Rahan saw him face "Two-tooth"! You lie! A "Two-teeth" belongs to you! Follow Rahan and you will see that he does not lie! What happened? Speak Lohic! Shortly after the clan hunters discovered the mammoth, so curiously entrapped. This trap astonished them, and irritated their leader. Page Seven: The child told how Rahan had captured the beast. And the irritation of Tayak kept growing. Would Rahan be stronger than Tayak!? Rahan does not know. We will find out soon enough! Tayak rushed at the son of Crao, brandishing his heavy club. And this club, on a simple parrying gesture from Rahan, slipped from his fingers. Tayak only knows the strength of wild beasts. He ignores the skill. And trickery. Tayak is a beast!! Indeed, the chief of the clan clung wildly to his adversary. Clack! His hand met the ivory knife, which he ripped at savagely, slicing the sheath of skin. Page Eight: But he did not have time to use the weapon. Rahan's grasp compelled him to drop the knife. Rahan could kill you, but he hates to kill "Those-who-walk-upright"! Yes, Rahan could have killed you, even from a distance. Like this!! Schronch! The ivory knife, thrown with skill, was embedded in a slender tree trunk. Rahan was about to recover his weapon, when Tayak's angry cries rang out behind him. Capture him! Capture him! Tayak wants this "Weapon-that-flys"! The thickets were very dense. The son of Crao disappeared. The severed sheath could no longer receive its knife. Page Nine: And he had to slip the blade under his belt, as before, before he invented his sheath. The whole clan had chased him and Lohic himself showed a lot of enthusiasm. If Lohic captures Rahan, the clan will keep Lohic! More agile than his elders, the faster teenager soon outdistanced them, and Rahan saw that he was very close to him. Lohic dived onto the fugitive's legs, and rolled on the ground with him! Ohh! Rahan would have quickly thrown the child down, but the men of the clan were already springing up from all sides. Page Ten: They force Rahan to fight! Oh! The son of Crao felt his belt. His knife was gone! He had lost it! And while the attacking pack subdued Rahan, Lohic hid the knife that he had managed to steal from him. Lohic allowed the clan to capture "The Enemy"! Lohic has proven himself! He will stay with the clan! A glow of pride passed in the eyes of the adolescent. Lohic has earned the respect of his brothers! For himself, Tayak was watching the captive’s belt. Where did you hide "The-Flying-weapon"? Tayak wants this weapon!! Page Eleven: Rahan lost it while he was running from your hunters. The young Lohic looked away. Revealing his hiding place. He did not want Tayak to steal the knife he coveted as much as the chief of the clan. So he was silent. Bring "The Enemy" back to the village! Along the way the hunters scanned the ground, hoping to find "The weapon-that-flies". But in vain. Shortly after, they killed the young mammoth whose remains were dragged to the village. If Rahan's trap prevented "Two-tooth" from escaping. It can prevent Rahan from escaping from Tayak! When the animal had to be skinned, the captive's ankles were bound between the heavy tusks. Rahan can regain his freedom! On one condition! Page Twelve: That he makes a "flying weapon" for Tayak! The chief of the clan threw flints and a piece of ivory near to the son of the fierce ages. To make a knife like Rahan's it takes as many days as ten times the fingers of two hands!! Tayak knows how to wait!! But he wants a thin, sharp weapon. And that flies as does yours! From then on began for Rahan a strange captivity. During the day, under the eyes of the intrigued hunters, he fashioned the piece of ivory. But when night came, his hands were tied behind his back and two of Tayak’s men watched him. Page Thirteen: He remembered how he had stolen it from the chief of the river clan, who wanted to kill him. And once the knife of ivory, this knife, had become his only asset. Rahan will never be able to make a knife like his! Although he scratched and shaped from morning to evening, the piece of ivory remained almost as coarse as on the first day! Sometimes young Lohic passed him and he thought he could read remorse in his eyes. Rahan understands you Lohic. By allowing his capture, you have earned the respect of your people! And the flints are chipped to remove thin shavings of ivory. Shavings far too fine! It was one evening, passing near Tayak's hut that Lohic felt his throat constrict. And when he's finished "The-Flying-weapon", what will we do with him? Page Fourteen: He humiliated Tayak in front of the clan. He deserves death! We will kill him!! The young hunter rushed into the jungle. Lohic doesn't want Rahan dead! Rahan saved me, Rahan wanted to help me. A moment later a ray of moonlight hung a yellowish reflection on the blade of the knife which he had concealed there. That night his guards had dozed off and Rahan was gazing at the barely formed weapon. He heard a noise. Chaf! A knife. His knife! It had just fallen near him! Page Fifteen: He caught a glimpse of the frail silhouette slipping away between the huts and understood. Lohic wants to help Rahan! The bonds do not resist the knife, stuck between the roots. However, a slight screeching disturbed the silence. He had just cut off the lines binding his ankles when one of the guards jumped. Rahan does not have time to run away! The man suddenly shook his fellow, pointing out the location where the captive should have been. This one had disappeared! Only one tusk was lying on the ground! Doubtless dreading Tayak's anger, these men did not alert the others! Rahan, amused, saw them wander here and there. Page Sixteen: The ruse had succeeded, and he was hanging from the curved tusk that had allowed him to pull himself up under the foliage. He saw the hunters coming back to the tree. They watched without understanding the tusk and the severed bonds. He could not fly away like a bird! Saying these words the man mechanically raised his eyes. And he caught a glimpse of the white shape huddled under the foliage. That was all he saw. The second hunter had not recovered from his stupor before he was sent to join his companion! Page Seventeen: Lurking behind a hut, Lohic had witnessed this brief fight. His eyes lit up as Rahan disappeared into the thick undergrowth. Lohic has paid his debt to Rahan! When Rahan is away, Lohic can alert the clan! Lohic was too young to know all of Rahan's tricks. When the shouts rose in the village. Not only had the son of Crao not fled. But he had retraced his steps to the outskirts of this village! As Crao always said, “You never think of looking for game that is already in your cave!” From his perch, Rahan saw the clan scatter, and spread across the forest. Page Eighteen: Tayak howled, leading his group in pursuit of an "enemy" who was there. Behind him! Lohic, now admitted by the hunters, led the pursuit without conviction. Let us go back to the village! What does it matter if he escaped us! Besides, does not Rahan walk upright like us? Why would "Those-who-walk-upright" fight like wild animals?? Crouching up on a low branch, the son of Crao saw this group return to the village. He heard these words. And his heart beat faster. These words were ones he liked to hear. The sky was turning pink on the horizon and all the hunters were returning. Page Nineteen: They do not imagine that Rahan stayed here! Rahan can now go! But the son of Crao wanted to see Lohic once again, before leaving this territory, to which he would probably never return. He surprised the adolescent at the edge of the river. Oh! I thought you were far from here! Rahan wanted to say goodbye to the one who will one day be the chief of the clan! What are you saying? The day will come when "those-who-walk-upright" will reject the savage law of force! Only those who acted as you did will be worthy of being their leaders! Farewell, Lohic, farewell! Page Twenty: The brushwood closed in, definitively this time, on Rahan. When the sunlight touched the foliage, he was already far, very far away. For this son of fierce ages this adventure was already forgotten. Others were waiting. But as the ivory knife beat at his hip and he risked losing it, he only thought of a new sheath. This tail will be as solid, as flexible as that of the panther! And then it will grow back! The large lizard that lazily whipped the warm rock with its tail could not have known what was going to be taken from it. The big lizard could not hear the son of Crao, who could crawl quieter than a reptile.

Rahan. Episode Sixteen. The Necklace of Claws. When the battle clamor of "The one-who-walks-upright" thundered through the jungle, the beasts went to ground and even the chattering parrots fell silent. Rahan appeared. Carried away by a Great Elk, which he rode and struck with his ivory knife. Rahan has promised the two little men that they will eat today. Rahan will keep his promise! The Elk collapsed as a mortal blow was struck. In those savage times when everything was a struggle for life. The son of Crao triumphed once again. Ra-ha-ha! Page Two: An arrow suddenly sliced into the side of the beast he was about to carve. Usually, the men with "No-hair-on-the-chin" do not have this audacity! Yes, do you dare to hunt in our territory!! I am Rahan, son of Crao! And Rahan, when he is hungry, hunts were he wants! Rahan will never go hungry again when he reaches the Territory of Shadows! The men came closer, their bows stretched, their flint points raised. Rahan has always believed that "Those-who-walk-upright" should help each other! He is ready to share the "Beast-with-frontal-horns" with his brothers! The clan of the sources never shares with the enemy! Squatting, Rahan hugged the Elk’s hind legs. Page Three: Yah! He suddenly sat up, snatching the heavy beast from the ground. Spinning with it! The hard, wide antlers brutally mowed down the men. Whose bows he broke a moment later. Crack! Crack! Rahan could kill the hunters from the clan of sources. He has the right! But Rahan does not like to steal the life of "Those-who-Walk-Upright"! Calmly the son of Crao cut a large quarter of meat. The rest is up to you! Farewell! The clan will take revenge! It will kill the man "Without hair-on-the-chin"! The thickets closed behind the son of fierce ages. Night would fall soon, and he knew that these hunters would not track him down before daylight. They are too afraid of darkness, as Rahan once was. Page Four: But Rahan is no longer afraid of the night, nor of the fire, nor of the thunder from the sky, nor of the endless rivers! Rahan often thought of his distant childhood. The visions of that dreadful night still haunted him. When the blue mountain had vomited its entrails and had decimated his whole horde. And he sometimes relived the last moments of his father, Crao the Brave. Since you are the only clan survivor, this necklace belongs to you! Always be worthy of what it represents Rahan. Each of the claws that beat against his chest represented a quality of "Those-who-walk-upright", of men! There was that of "Courage". That of "Loyalty". That of "Goodness". And throughout a tumultuous youth, where it had often been necessary to kill not to be killed, Rahan had kept the oath he had made to old Crao. Page Five: By bringing this meat back to the two hungry "Little Men" he had discovered the day before, he was still keeping this oath! Wait, little wolves! Rahan knows a much better way to eat meat! When the fire sprang from the "stones-that-throw-stars". The children froze. Could Rahan do everything? So did Rahan know everything? You bring us back to our own, since you can do everything! Hum, Rahan will try. No, the son of Crao could not do everything. And he was still unaware of many mysteries of this hostile and fierce world. Perhaps, quite simply, he thought more than his fellows. The meat would be much better if it did not touch the fire. Like this! Page Six: Had not Rahan learned to "crawl on water" and build a Raft? Had he not challenged the ocean to chase after the sun? Had he not learned to camouflage himself like the chameleon? To throw the boomerang? To pole vault? Had he not discovered a curious way of catching fish? And invented the sled, and the blowpipe. Did he not know of imitating Nature? Throw "bridges" over the precipices to escape his enemies? Had he not, facing the most barbarous hordes, traversed the strangest territories? Page Seven: And how many beasts, and monsters, had succumbed under the blows of his ivory knife! Yes, Rahan will try to find your clan! The sun was high the next day when he discovered a track. Hunters have passed there! But those of your clan or those of the clan of sources? Ours were not that numerous Rahan! Attention! Over there! In those bushes! The son of Crao had already glimpsed the flint spear points. We warned you, Rahan! We told you that you would join the territory of shadows! A jump backwards, legs apart. Rahan just avoided the spear that would have ripped him open. Follow Rahan, "Little men"! And try to run as fast as him! Page Eight: A moment later the curious monkeys witnessed a dramatic manhunt. But these quarrels between "Those-who-walk-upright" were very amusing to them! Greek! Greek! As spears stuck dangerously around children who could not keep up with their companion. Who retraced his steps, and brutally uprooted a spear. Are the hunters of the clan of the sources such cowards to attack "little men"! That their leader, who is so proud of his chin hair, agrees to fight Rahan!! Recognizable by his necklace of shells. The chief retreated cautiously under the foliage, and encouraged his people. Do not spare the enemy! Strike! Strike! Page Nine: Oh! The spear was thrown with such violence that the point disappeared into the tree trunk! Schkrack! Rahan could have made you visit the land of shadows before him! But he prefers to have a little fun! The hunters came running to free their leader, who was gesticulating furiously and was nailed to the tree by his fur. Rahan will not escape us! The river will stop him! Rahan and the children were already far away. The head of sources is right! His clan knows how to "crawl-on-water". And we do not! The large river shimmered in the sun. The son of Crao dived into it. Fear nothing! Jump! You can cling to Rahan! Fast! Jump! Page Ten: Overcoming their fear, the children obeyed. A moment later they clung to Rahan. They have arrived! They have arrived! Usually the son of Crao "crawled" marvelously in the water. But here, the "Little Men" hampered his movements. A few spears broke the surface behind the fugitives, who had arrived at the middle of the river. Plokf! Plokf! Plouch! The hunters had thrown themselves into the water and were approaching very quickly. These men swam with astonishing ease. And Rahan suddenly felt fingers closing around his ankles! He only had time to push off the "Little Men" before being dragged under the water. Page Eleven: The children, left to themselves, instinctively found the gestures to stay on the surface, and even to move forward! They reached the shore. We. We know how to "crawl on water"! But where is Rahan? Where is Rahan! He could see nothing of the terrible fight that was taking place at the bottom of the river. Between the son of Crao and two men from the clan of sources. Although very extraordinary swimmers, they failed to master their opponent. One of them treacherously tried to strangle him. But fortunately for Rahan, the fine vine of the necklace of claws broke. Clak! Page Twelve: Three, four, five other silhouettes suddenly proliferate in this greenish world. Rahan cannot face all these men! He must flee! Freeing himself, Rahan returned to the surface. Here he knew how to outrun the hunters of the clan of sources. A moment later, in fact, he had rejoined the "Little Men". The dense forest offered a secure refuge. "The treacherous man" has kept Rahan's necklace. And as usual, he will hand it over to his chief! What must Rahan do!? Without his necklace, the son of Crao felt Naked. But he hesitated only for an instant. Forward, "Little men"! Rahan will find his necklace later! Page Thirteen: The sun was setting and his young companions began to show their concern. The night will soon arrive. When they discovered a new track. It is here! This is where we lost the clan! This is our Valley! Our horde lives here! This track was indeed the right one. Huts appeared soon after, under the light of the setting sun. The son of Crao had rarely known such a warm welcome as the one given to him. We had no longer hoped to recover our little ones, Rahan! Our hunters had taken them with them. For an introduction to mammoth hunting. But the charge of the herd scattered us, and the little ones got lost. Page Fourteen: Thank you for your aid, and for bringing them back, Rahan! Our clan is now yours! You can stay with us! Rahan will perhaps return to his brothers, when he has taken back his collar from the men of the sources! We will help you! We will go with you! And you will kill men from the sources! And the men of the sources will want revenge! And it will be war between your clans! Rahan does not want that! Rahan will act alone! For any help, the son of the fierce ages accepts only information on the situation of the village of the clan of the sources. That is why the moon was still shining when he came in sight of it. Wide streams shimmered in the valley. Huts stood on a bank. Page Fifteen: The incessant lapping of the water on the pebbles effectively made his approach undetectable. Rahan will have to find the hut of the chief! He was crawling in the darkness when a familiar growl sent him to the ground. A Gora! They have trained a Gora! The son of Crao knew this custom from some clans. The "Saber-toothed-Tiger" was about to roar, alerting the men of the clan! And in spite of the line which shackled him to a rock, he could still leap! Rahan leaps up first, trying to stifle the beast's roar. But the ivory knife struck too late. Hunters had heard and emerged from the huts. They embraced their spears, and peered out into the darkness. Page Sixteen: Rahan threw a large pebble, then a second. Crao sometimes used this trick, he thought to himself. At the sound of the stones, near a distant stream, the men rushed forward. Clak! Clak! Encouraged by their chief, who remained in front of his hut. Find and kill whoever dares to disturb Zaroak in his sleep! Rahan was at present crawling towards his hut. Zaroak leaves his men alone to face the unknown. Zaroak is a coward! Zaroak had already fallen asleep again, his necklaces spreading around his hirsute face. He did not hear the son of Crao. Page Seventeen: The ivory blade cut only one necklace: the one with long claws! Schlok! And when Zaroak sat up, bewildered, this blade was already resting on his throat. Rahan has come to reclaim what is his! Rahan could have killed you when you wanted to steal his game. He did not do it! Rahan could have nailed you to the tree when you were hunting the "Little Men". He did not do it! This night Rahan could again kill you: But he will not! He will do something else! The cries of the disappointed hunters rose in the distance. Rahan's fist flew to the bearded chin, sending Zaroak back to sleep. Did you not say that men "without-chin-hair" were weak beings? Page Eighteen: Shortly after, the son of the fierce ages fled happily into the night. Under the moon, each of his strides raised sparkling splashes. And Rahan was laughing, and laughing. While offering to the breeze mysterious things that it carried away. Tired of their vain searches, the men returned to their huts. The Gora is dead, Zaroak. But we found nothing! When their leader did not answer, they entered his hut and. Oh! It is "Rahan-the-cursed" who humiliated me like this! This angry face, beardless and hairless, was it that of the fearsome Zaroak? They had to wait for his first words to be convinced. Page Nineteen: This merciless tonsure was indeed the most cruel of humiliations, for this being who had nothing but contempt for men: "without-chin-hair". Rahan was now out of danger. And he bounded nimbly over the embankments. Ra-ha-ha! When he used a vine to cross a ravine, his joy was redoubled. The fibers of the vine reminded him of the thick curls of Zaroak's beard and hair, which he had scattered in the wind. The claws of the necklace rattle again on his chest, and the feeling of having become the "Son of Crao" again was very sweet. How reassuring was the touch of his faithful ivory knife, whose sheath of skin beat on his hip. Page Twenty: Rahan has his necklace! He has his knife! And his brothers are waiting for him! Rahan is Happy! His return to the village where he had brought the "Little Men" was cheered. Does Rahan want to eat with us? Our children have just taught us an incredible way to make fire! And they claim that the meat, grilled on this fire, is much better! The two children proudly invited Rahan to approach. This one did not blame them for possessing the “Secret-Of-Fire”. Discoveries spread quickly, among "Those-who-walk-upright"! And it is very good that way! Rahan was only one member of this immense horde of men. Men who lived in those fierce times. That is why he took his place among this clan, modestly awaiting his share of meat.

Rahan. Episode fifteen. Death to the Manta. The seagulls which accompanied the raft which the current carried towards the island suddenly dispersed, leaving the sky to a gigantic bird. And this albatross dived towards the raft. The son of Crao had seen the danger. Rahan is not a fish! Why are you attacking him like this? He dived, narrowly avoiding the deadly attack from the beak. Page Two: After regaining height, the albatross returned to the attack. But Rahan knew how to parry this one. He slipped under the raft. The shadow of huge wings darkened the surface then disappeared. Ten times Rahan had to repeat this strange game, ascending to breathe in a breath of air and taking refuge under the skiff as soon as the bird swooped down on him. Without a doubt tired, the albatross finally disappeared. The large beach of the island was now very close. An instant later. Where did the river without end lead Rahan? Do “those-who-walk-standing" know this territory? Do they live there? Page Three: The bamboo forest that bordered the beach seemed welcoming. Rahan plunged into it without fear. Oh! "The mother of mothers"! The wooden idol that stood in the clearing was proof of the presence on this island of "Those-who-walk-upright", of men! As evidenced by these fish drying in the sun, hanging in strings from vines. But the men who live here leave very strange traces! Do they only have one leg? These traces that Rahan had just discovered in the sand, in front of the mother of mothers, had been left by a single foot! Page Four: He had not recovered from his stupor when men rushed towards him. The man from the realm of sunshine stole the fish that we entrusted to the "mother of mothers"! Capture him! The son of Crao sprang into the forest. But he knew nothing about this one, and could not escape these men. He was quickly rejoined, surrounded. Rahan only ate a fish! Would that be a crime in the eyes of your clan! Smack! Ah! A bamboo suddenly drawn and released violently slashed Rahan's temple. We finally have the stranger who has been stealing our fish for days! He must be punished! Take him to the village! Page Five: A little later. I am Rahan the son of Crao! Rahan arrived on your land only a moment ago! Therefore he cannot be guilty of what you accuse him of! The chief of the clan had only one leg, and it explained to Rahan the strange traces discovered in front of the idol. Tooboo just wants to believe Rahan. But Tarook, our sorcerer, saw you eat a fish. It is true! Rahan did eat “a” fish! Rahan thinks that "Those-who-walk-upright" should never refuse a fish! We acted as Rahan thought, once! But things have changed a lot since the "manta" chose our bay to make into its lair! Tooboo had an honest expression. But his face was sad. Page Six: Since Rahan gives us his word that he only ate one fish, we have to believe him! Give him his freedom! Tarok the sorcerer had a sneer of rage. If other fish are stolen, we will remember that Tooboo protected the culprit! A little after. Friendship does not seem to reign between the wizard and Tooboo! Tarok is furious since the men had to cut my leg. Because all his incantations were useless, and the venom of the "Manta" would have infiltrated to my heart. It was at that moment that a fantastic thing sprang from the sea, offshore. Rahan had never seen something so strange. What is that Tooboo? “La Manta”!! Page Seven: She has been prowling around here for many moons. The giant ray leapt once more to the surface, and then disappeared into the depths. Our fishermen can no longer venture offshore, and that is why fish have become so precious to us. Why do you not kill this monster? We have tried, but this thing is impossible, Rahan. Because the tail of the manta carries a sting that secretes deadly venom!! During an attempt to kill her, I was struck by this sting in the ankle. If my men had not cut off my leg, I would have joined the territory of the shadows! Page Eight: As the wizard approached, Rahan became mischievous. Should not Tarok's incantations drive the "Manta" away from your shore!? There is no prayer to hunt the "Manta"! We cannot do anything against her! The "Spirits" who visit me at night affirm it! Rahan does not believe in "Spirits"! He does not believe Tarok, whose language produces more deceit than truth! Tooboo's protection makes Rahan insolent! But Rahan will never be able to contradict Tarok about the "Manta"!! Ha! Rahan will capture the "Manta"!! Rahan will kill her!! Just then, the monstrous ray sprang out of the sea, ten arrow-shots from the shore. Page Nine: Shortly after, under the astonished gaze of the clan's fishermen, Rahan shaped a tough root. These men only know how to fish with a net, he thought. Tarok growled with rage because Tooboo had ordered him to put himself at Rahan's disposal. And See! The Manta trap is finished! The two barbs of this "Hamecon" were enormous, in measure with the monster that had to be caught there. And now Tarok, Rahan needs a very long vine! Hum, follow me! A moment later Rahan climbed nimbly towards the foliage. This vine supports his weight. But she will not take any more!! And he will not survive such a fall! Rahan was very high when the wizard treacherously gripped to the vine. Page Ten: Rahan's instinct was such that when the vine stiffened beneath him, he was ready to ward off danger. He caught a vine in flight just as the other broke! Clac! You were right to test the vine, Tarok! She was too fragile. And this one suits Rahan better! Rahan's irony made the wizard's hatred grow even more. And while the son of Crao was preparing his "Manta Trap", she appeared from time to time in the middle of the bay. Rahan needs a strong bamboo, Tarok! Do you want to cut. Page Eleven: This one? It did not displease Rahan to amuse himself at the expense of this cheat, that he knew wished he was dead! If Rahan defeats the "Manta", he will ask the hunter clan for his wizard, Tarok! Rahan will go to see the "Manta" at dawn Tooboo! Could Tarok accompany him to ward off bad luck?? No! No! It is not possible! The "mother of mothers said that Tarok should never go to sea! The "Mother of mothers" advises Tarok of very curious things!! But it is of no importance! My son Tibik will be your companion Rahan! Page Twelve: The Raft, which Rahan had preferred to a clan boat, was reinforced. You are a brave boy Tibik! I am thinking of Tooboo's leg! I will avenge him! Rahan and Tibik have the same goal: "Death to the Manta"!! That evening the clan prepared for the adventurous fishermen a meager but fraternal meal. Rahan asks everyone to give him a fish: he will need bait to attract the "Manta"! All put a fish at Rahan's feet, Except Tarok-the-sorcerer! So, the son of Crao, guessed who was stealing the fish before he arrived on the island! However, he was not suspicious when Tarok offered him a drink. Throughout the night I will ask the "Good spirits" to protect you! Page Thirteen: But Tarok was going to do more than summon the "spirits". He slipped to the hut where he knew Rahan was bedded down with a drug. And this one, stunned by the "Powder of sleep" did not feel the hand draw his knife. Tarok could kill you! But it's useless, the "Manta' will take care of it!! The deceiver went and cut several fibers from the vine that Rahan had coiled on his Raft. Then returned to replace the ivory knife in its sheath. Profit from this sleep Rahan! You sleep for the last time!! Page Fourteen: The son of Crao never knew why he had slept so soundly. He joined Tibik at the Raft. And was greeted by cheers of the clan massed on the shore. A moment later the Raft was sailing out to sea. Rahan calmly impaled fish on his "trap". Then he unrolled the long vine, smoothing the bait towards the depths. We will probably have to wait, Tibik. It was indeed a long, a very long wait. From the shore, the clan watched the tiny skiff. But suddenly, rising from the murky depths. Page Fifteen: A terrible jolt projected Tibik into the water. Engulfing the bait, the "Manta" was trapped, and it dragged the Raft along. Clinging to the skiff, whipped by the foam, Rahan proclaimed his victory. Ra-ha-ha! The sea monster arose in front of him, rose to the sky, and tumbled back into the waves. Ra-ha-ha! Rahan has captured the “Manta”!! A still more terrible shock caused the Raft to sink. But it suddenly came back to the surface. And Rahan understood the drama. The vine had broken! The "Manta" had escaped him! We will have to start from the beginning, my poor Tibik! Page Sixteen: They had followed this short struggle from the shore. Among all these disappointed men only one hid a smile. Tarok the Sorcerer!! But suddenly. The manta returns! She attacks the raft! Indeed, the monster emerged from one side, and then from the other. The terrible tail armed with the venomous dart whipped the raft. Rahan and Tibik had to throw themselves into the water. But they risked becoming bait themselves for the giant ray! Whose "Wings" raised huge waves! Rahan will kill the “Manta”!! Page Seventeen: Amazed, Tibik saw his companion climb onto the raft and grab hold of the sturdy bamboo. Strike “Manta”, strike!! Buttressed and holding the bamboo like a spear, Rahan was taking a fantastic risk. Let the dart strike his face, or his chest, and it was certain death! If this sting marked a limb, it would be amputation, like Tooboo! As Rahan had hoped, the monsters tail became impaled on the bamboo. Ra-ha-ha! All is not lost Tibik! See here what we can replace our trap with! While the "Manta" redoubled its assaults, Rahan made a lasso of his vine. Page Eighteen: Schoo! A fantastic roar went up on the beach when he threw the wide loop towards the tail of the "Manta". We have it Tibik! We have it!! Indeed, the loop constricted and was retained by the Bamboo. No trap, no hook could be more effective than this one! And the monster who plunged back into the depths must have felt it. Once again the raft seemed to fly on the waves, sank there and reappeared. But the vine this time did not yield! She will get tired Tibik! She will get tired! Flat on his stomach on the skiff, Rahan cared neither for the waves nor the spray. Page Nineteen: Indeed, the monster was getting tired. He no longer ventured on the surface and he thrashed about less harshly. Did you not say that the “Spirits” claimed we could do nothing against the “Manta”, Tarok? Uh, Uh. To your boats, brothers! It is high time to thank Rahan for this lesson in courage. And also to give him aid! A moment later all the fishermen of the clan were moving towards the Raft. This one had just come to a standstill. A gigantic body emerged on the surface. The exhausted "Manta" was defeated, and fluttered its "Wings". Fifty harpoons flew away at the same time. Page Twenty: Shortly after, the monster that had terrorized the island was lying on the beach, in the bright sun. Rahan had stolen one of your fish. He offers you this one. Everyone will have their share! The sardonic son of Crao bent to cut off the terrible sting from the tail of the beast. This one is released to Tarok, whose words are more poisonous than this dart! But where is Tarok? Over there! A boat pulled away towards the horizon. He could not stand your victory, Rahan. He leaves us. And I am sure our clan will not mourn the departure of its sorcerer. But how it will mourn yours! And the son of the fierce ages, the son of Crao, was happy. It is that he always drew his joy from that of "Those-who-walk-upright", his brothers.

Rahan. Episode Fourteen. The New Trap. Rahan, who knew how to observe nature, was often surprised by her caprices. The curious way in which this creeper had grown, which coiled like a snake, was it not one of them? But in these fierce times, it was necessary to remain on the alert. The son of Crao sensed the danger more than he saw it. His hand clenched on his ivory knife, and he faced the hairy being that suddenly sprang from the thick copses. Go away! Rahan does not fight with those of your kind! Page Two: The resemblance between the great ape and "Those-who-walk-upright" always troubled Rahan. As the gorilla rushed forward, he wanted to avoid the fight. But his foot became caught in the vine and he was brutally ensnared. His knife escaped him, and had fluttered ten paces from him! Rahan thought his opponent was grabbing his ankle. But it was not so. The gorilla pounded its chest before attacking. And what prevented Rahan from crawling towards the knife, was the vine! Baoum! Baoum! The creeper that mysteriously fastened itself to his ankle! Rahan cannot grab his knife! Rahan is lost! Page Three: But he will not be sent to the territory of the shadows without a beating! The gorilla approached slowly, as if he understood that the man was at his mercy. When the powerful arms encircled him, the son of Crao released his battle cry. Ra-ha-ha! The gorilla, suddenly freeing his opponent, jumped back. This clamor from Rahan seemed to have terrified it! When the son of Crao raised his cry again, the great ape fled, disappearing deep into the thickets. Ra-ha-ha! Oh! Ha-ha-ha! If Rahan just has to shout to make the enemy flee, crossing this territory will be easy. Page Four: Forgetting that he was still bound, Rahan wanted to recover his knife. And found himself nose to the ground! The vines of this country are more dangerous than the great ape! Amused, the son of Crao loosened the vegetal knot. He knew how to tie certain knots, but the way in which this one was formed, on its own, intrigued him a lot. Long after he had freed himself, he remained perplexed. Rahan wants to understand! When he saw the vine, it was crawling like this. His gift for observation was such that he easily formed the loop, put his foot in it, and pulled. Page Five: And the vine closed again on his ankle. Rahan understands! The knot sinks! The knot slips! And the vine closes! Rahan is now aware of how to tie up his enemies much more quickly! Perhaps it is thus that in the first ages of humanity, a man, copying nature, invented the "slipknot"? Bind them? Why would he not capture them with this trap? If the trap can crawl on the ground like the snake, it can also fly like a bird! The skillfully projected loop ended encircling the tree stump! The gorilla must have shuddered in the distance as he heard the triumphant clamor! Ra-ha-ha! Rahan has discovered a new trap! Page Six: Shortly after, the son of Crao climbed on a ridge. Rahan wants to know if “those-who-walk-standing-up” live in this territory! He soon overlooked immense forests hollowed out by deep ravines, dotted here and there with wide rocky plateaus. His gaze fell on one of them. Down there, between the rocks, a whole troop of great apes was busy. But the activity of these great apes was very strange. “Those-who-live-in-the-trees" don't roll stones like that! Rahan wants to know more! Night was falling when the son of the fierce ages, slipping between the rocks, reached his goal. Page Seven: Behind the stones of which they had made a rampart the hairy beings snuggled up against each other. They protect themselves from the cold of the night as the clan of Crao once did! Rahan was wrong! Whoever attacked him was not a great ape. But a man! Rahan felt a deep turmoil. The old Crao had told him about these primitive clans. "Those-who-almost-walk-upright" said Crao. A stone suddenly came loose under Rahan's foot, breaking the silence. Over there, the hairy beings stood up, worried. Chtoc! Chtoc! Chtoc! Page Eight: They uttered strange grunts. Grah! Gurgh! “Those-who-walk-almost-upright" Do not speak! This is why Rahan's adversary was afraid of his cries! Rahan will not be able to make himself understood by these beings! He must avoid them! He must flee from them! Here and there silhouettes jumped in the rocks. The monkey men were looking for the intruder! One of them caught sight of him, silhouetted against the moon! The narrow cornice suddenly crumbled under Rahan, who caught himself on a thin projection. Rahan will not be able to return to the heights. Indeed, the wall was too smooth to be climbed. Page Nine: A bottomless, vertiginous chasm opened up under Rahan, who knew that he could not maintain his hold for long. The new trap! Only the new trap can still save Rahan! But to throw the vine on a projection that he saw, he had to cling to the rocky wall with one hand!! It was a terrible effort. So terrible that he let go the instant the knot tightened on the outcropping! Argh! His fingers tightened on the line. He was saved! He could pull himself up! No, not yet! Page Ten: Grah! Gurr? The cry he had uttered when he thought he was falling into the void had attracted the monkey-men! They peered into the darkness of the abyss. If they see Rahan they will kill him! The male monkeys were obstinate. They saw nothing but they remained there! Gur! Ur! Gur! Gaa! Gaa! These "Gaa" sounds reached the son of Crao, who had just imagined a more comfortable way to wait. And the night passed slowly. Under Rahan was the unknown void. Above was the danger, also unknown. Page Eleven: Indeed, a question haunted the son of Crao. What fate did “those-who-walk-almost-upright” reserve for their enemies? The darkness finally dissipated. The first light of the new days silhouetted the peak of the tall trees and the profiles of the ridges. The mists lifted under Rahan, revealing a large lake. No! Rahan can't dive from so high! His whole body would burst! It was suddenly a drama. One of the monkey-men had just noticed the line. Ga! Gaa! And the son of fierce ages felt himself slowly rising towards the rock protrusion! If Rahan screams to scare them, they will drop the line! Page Twelve: Intrigued and curious, the monkey-men hoisted up this mysterious burden. Graa! Graa! Graa! Graa! They groaned deeply when Rahan's bust appeared. Some seized heavy stones. Behind him the void! Before him, the clan of hairy beings! The son of Crao had no other way out than to fight! The first stones were falling around him when a long howl arose. A member of the clan arrived. Graa! It was a female, who was holding to her chest a small inanimate figure. Page Thirteen: The ape-men, forgetting the “enemy”, suddenly seemed distraught. Gga! Gah! Grah! They act like the hunters of Mont Bleu, when a little one was sick thought Rahan. Memories assailed Rahan. He remembered how the mothers of his horde healed the "little Men" with Sun Fruits. Entrust your little one to Rahan! He will cure him! A great ape-man, the chief probably, brandished a flint. Graa! Graa! Since you do not understand Rahan, Rahan must act! Leaping towards the moaning female, the son of fierce ages snatched the little one from her arms, and escaped into the nearby forest. Page Fourteen: The disarray of the ape-men had allowed Rahan to escape. But the clan would quickly give chase and track him down. Vague growls were already rising in the distance. Rahan has often succeeded in hiding in the foliage. He climbed into the branches of a tall tree. Forgetting that his pursuers were nimbler than him in this kingdom of foliage. The chief of the clan was faster than the others, whom he outdistanced. And he glimpsed Rahan between the branches! Graa! With astonishing agility he hoisted himself towards the fugitive. Rahan could dive into the torrent. Page Fifteen: But cold water is no good for the sick child. The new trap once again came to the aid of Rahan. Its loop encircled a branch of the opposite bank. The son of Crao heard a "graa", furious as he crossed the torrent. He answered it with a laugh and abandoned the vine. And he let himself fall on a thick carpet of moss. Ha-ha-ha! His laugh redoubled when he saw the monkey-man gesticulating on the other shore. Ha-ha-ha! You are afraid of water! Page Sixteen: And while the chief of the clan was looking for a ford to cross the torrent, The son of Crao had discovered a shrub with sun-fruits. His ivory blade slashed one of these fruits. If the blood of the fruit doesn't heal you, Rahan will have done everything he can do! Carefully he squeezed the juice of several fruits between the thin lips that he rolled up. The head of the clan suddenly appeared, hammering his chest. Bauom! Bauom! Ra-ha-ha! Rahan bellowed at the top of his lungs. But believing that the little one of his clan was in danger, the "monkey-man" was unafraid! Page Seventeen: The son of fierce ages, cornered at a precipice, saw his formidable adversary charge, a branch in his hand. This time, he thought, Rahan must fight! Yes, this time Rahan had to fight and kill! To kill, so not to be killed! Ten steps from him the "Monkey-man" flourished his branch! It flew about suddenly and struck his wrist with such violence that the ivory knife slipped from him. He saw his weapon fall over the precipice, towards the greenish lake. The son of Crao then only thought of his knife. And he did what he had not dared before. Risk the incredible, the fantastic, dive! Graa!? Page Eighteen: He saw the green expanse rising towards him. He saw the miniscule ivory knife that fell under him, with him. The yellowish spot grew and grew and grew. He only thought of his knife, which he had to grab on the fly. His fingers suddenly closed on the sharp and biting blade. But he did not care! The lake rose steeply towards him. Would his limbs break? Would his belly burst when it came into contact with the water? No! He remembered the swimmers of the river clan, who knew how to dive from such heights! Like them, he stretched his body. His head disappeared between his arms. And it was a human arrow that pierced the green waters! Page Nineteen: Rahan had the impression of sinking into the "endless-river". But he lived! He lived and he clutched his cutlass! A moment later, still dazed but happy, he floated to the surface. High up on the cliff, the horde of ape-men stirred in the sun. Were they a new hazard? Gaa! Gaa! No! The chief of the clan lifted above his head a little monkey-man who was also gesticulating. Gaa! Gaa! And the whole horde hailed this mysterious "Being-with-smooth-skin" who had brought her little one back to life! Crao was right. "Those-who-walk-almost-upright" one day will walk upright. Page Twenty: Something had just gripped his ankle that reminded him of the "New trap". Oh! But it was only long seaweed from which he easily freed himself. Rahan had had a fine day! He discovered the "New Trap". And he taught "Monkey-Men" to heal their young! Happy, he swam towards the shore where other perils lay in wait. Where other mysteries awaited him. For such was Rahan's destiny, the son of Crao, the son of fierce ages. Because such was the life of "Those-who-walk-upright". Men many centuries ago, many centuries ago!

Reptile. Episode Eight. Chaos and Destruction. Summary: Thanks to Mark Bowen, the police know now the sinister secret of Professor Andros Androphis, who has the power to transform into a reptile and whose avowed purpose is to dominate the universe by terror! But, despite all their efforts, Mark and Inspector Manning cannot prevent the terrifying character from forcing the officers and the soldiers of a tank regiment to submit to his will, and with whom he now marches on London. How will the government react, Manning? I do not know. At this moment there is a dramatic discussion in Parliament. Indeed, in Parliament. He is mad! Less crazy than you think, maybe! We must send fighter-bombers, that's all! Ordah! Ordah! All I have to offer is my blood, sweat, toil and Body Odor! Quiet please! Page two: It was now impossible for the authorities to keep secret the events that they no longer knew how to control. And there is strong talk of sending fighter-bombers to stop the advance of the reptilian armour! No! The boys who are in his tanks have nothing to do with it! The government can't sacrifice them like this! Already great demonstrations were organized. Government Resign! No planes against our unfortunate soldiers! Out! One last flash, Dave! The crowd is marching on parliament! Who can predict what will happen? Page three: At the moment demonstrators are invading the base from where the intervention forces are supposed to take off! No planes against our unfortunate soldiers! If you try to take off, we will destroy your planes! Mark Bowen and inspector Manning hovered over the mad crowd in a helicopter. It is chaos Mark, and you would think professional agitators were happy to add fuel to the fire! Chaos! That's just what this human snake wants, so he can rule over us. Let us land! It is rotten down below! Page four: What are you orders sir? We have orders to take off. I know that very well. But, can we shoot our brothers in arms in the tanks? No! You will not be able to! Let the government find another way to stop the armor and get rid of this Reptile! Hey! A helicopter has just arrived! Maybe we will have some fresh news? Kindly, listen! I'm Inspector Manning from Scotland Yard. I do not think you understand exactly who Reptile is. Sure we know who it is inspector! A crazy old professor with a clown costume! Page five: Not at all! The professor, Mark Bowen, here. Who was Professor Androphis' assistant will explain to you. He was the assistant of this monster? So he is definitely in cahoots with him! Calm down, please, in the name of the law! I am afraid that words are useless, my poor Manning. So. What is this? Boom! Page six: Bon Jovi! Its reptile with the tanks! He is wanted dead or alive! I am your master to all! You owe me absolute obedience! Good grief! The tanks are invading the airfield! They aim their weapons against our aircraft! Boom! Boom! Boom! It’s wild in the streets! Page seven: Blam! Blam! Kaboom! Let’s leave before they fire on us! Save your selves! Run for your lives! Head for the hills! Hey! The government! The government must do something quickly! The government is far away, Manning. It is up to us to act! Reptile looks towards our helicopter. The cannon of his tank swings towards us. Page eight: Demolish, hiss, that device! At my command! Huh! Huh! My blood is heating up in my veins! My strength is ebbing! I become a man again! He is re-metamorphosing into a man again Manning! We must seize this opportunity! Alright Mark! Page Nine: Bowen, you young fool! You will not get me! I have a bulb of my marvelous potion! Your potion, here you are! As Bowen throws a stone at the professor, knocking the potion from his hand. Huh! No! Page Ten: You do not have me yet, little fool! Misfortune! He had time to enter the tank and close the turret! Klang! We still await your orders, master! Will you shut up, you little fools? Huh! The blood freezes in my veins! My strength grows, increases, multiplies! I metamorphose! No need to waste precious shells! Driver! Reverse gear! Page Eleven: Argh! Damnation! Bowen He's falling off the tank! Vroom! Ha-ha-ha! He is at my mercy! Crush it! Mark! Mark! Page Twelve: Guh! You will pay for that! Sorry to upset you, Professor Androphis! Hurry up! Hurry up! Hiss! Aim this, hiss, piece, hiss, at those fools! Oh! It is impossible to shoot them! The other tanks can bear on them! Order everyone! Cut off the route of these two men! Page Thirteen: I believe that we are baked! Bang, bang! Drop me, Manning! I can stand on my legs very well! Sorry Sergeant, but I have no choice! Blam! Thwack! Argh! Let us take shelter here. Bang, bang! What shelter? Between the tanks! They will finally get us. There is a solution! Come! Page Fourteen: Let's pull the sergeant out of the hatch! Understood! Eh? What, what are you doing? I do not think we have much time to talk, Mark! Excuse us! We will have a nice chat about this later! Smack! Thump! Whack! Good! And now Manning? I once served in the "Royal Armored Corps”! Let us see if I can still drive this kind of cart. Page Fifteen: Be careful when starting, Mark! What are you going to do? Vroom! Give Reptile his own coin! Do exactly as I tell you, Mark! The next instant! Vroom! Are they cursed? They will pay for this! After that warning shot, let us finish it! Watch out Manning! Do not forget that there are perfectly innocent boys in that tank! Page Sixteen: Ka-rumpf! Just a shot in the tracks, to stop that chariot. Those idiots! They will pay for that! For the moment I have to slip away! But I have not said my last word! What is happening? He threw smoke grenades. Where did he go? No idea. With the powers at his disposal, he may very well be invisible in the vegetation. He can take on their colors, like a chameleon! Page Seventeen: It was not Reptile's means of escaping Mark Bowen and the Inspector. He was at their feet, in a drainpipe. Huh. It is terribly narrow, even for me. Not far away. It is crazy, their trick! Do you understand anything about it, Jeff? First of all, tanks destroy our planes. And then they shoot each other! The radio, what does it say? The most complete panic! London is upside down! The government has barricaded itself in Whitehall. This Reptile has wreaked havoc everywhere! Exactly, young fool! Eh! What is? What! Page Eighteen: And again, the secret ring of the terrible character spat twice its stupefying liquid. Muf! Urgh! Ha-ha-ha! Hiss! You are in my power, hiss! At the same time. We will have to take the crews of these tanks to the hospital, Mark! They are like zombies, yes! And, you will see, when they are no longer under the effect of the drug that the professor administered to them, they will not remember anything! What's going on at the base? A bomber is in motion! Attention! He is heading towards us. Page Nineteen: Professor Androphis is on board! Get down! Throm! Where shall we take you, Master? Ha-ha-ha! To London of course! What a pity that we didn't reduce these little fools to a pulp! So, according to you, there are bombs on board? Of course, since it is one of the bombers which was to attack the tanks! He is headed for London! Page Twenty: A little later, while dozens of military ambulances took away the soldiers of the still dazed tank crews. Of course sir. But you still have to have the time. They evacuate the capitol? And. Do you know what the Prime Minister has imagined? Someone would have to break into the reptile’s bomber. It is quite simple of course! Just land on a cloud and hitchhike when the cuckoo shows up! No! There is a pilot here who is the king of acrobats. One of the guys who perfected the technique of in-flight refueling at supersonic speeds. I see! You still have to find a guy crazy enough or with a death wish to be dropped on the bomber and. Page Twenty-One: It is all decided, Mark! You! You know her Reptile well enough to stand up to him. You have proven it. Wait! Wait! Am I dreaming? Ou-la-la! And, a little later. It is a very small variant of in-flight refueling. Of course you will be attached with a strong nylon rope. Oh! Too kind! I will deposit you on it like a flower, and all you have to do is punch a hole in the fuselage. Of course. It is childish, a piece of cake! Truly Mark, you do not sense of. Boof! I have embarked in the labor! Might as well go all the way! Page Twenty-Two: However. And Now Master? Head towards the center of the, hiss, city! The first, hiss, bomb is to be dropped in Hyde Park, as a warning! Here it is in front of us! Your turn to play, Professor Bowen! Play? Speak for yourself! Good luck Mark! Don’t mention it, Manning! It is the only way to stop this madman. If it was not me, it would be someone else then. Attention, Mark! Page Twenty-Three: A few more feet! Five, four, three, two, one! Hurrah! At this speed, the wind has an incredible force. Page Twenty-Four: It cuts easier than I thought! Bravo! He is in! I can cut the rope! God be with you Mark! Listen people of Great Britain! It is Reptile, your master, who speaks to you! Page Twenty-Five: Here is my first and last warning! Boom! Give me your submission, hiss, quickly or the next, hiss, bomb will be for parliament. Ha-ha-ha! I am not joking! I know Androphis that you never joke! I must hurry! Page Twenty-Six: Huh! A turbulent air pocket. What is this! Bowen! I don't know how you came here, you fool! But I have you now! He directs the bezel of his infernal ring towards me! You are at my mercy! I will. You do not have too! Shtoom! Page Twenty-Seven: Yah! Curse you! I have you, insane as you are! Poor fool! Who can boast of holding the reptile that I am! Ha-ha-ha! I will not kill you! You will be my slave until the end of your days! His arm wraps around my neck like a snake! However. Mark! Mark! Mark Bowen! You hear me? Answer me! Maybe his radio has been damaged, Inspector? Page Twenty-Eight: Hey! They are heading straight for the post office tower! They will fly into it! Thwam! Page Twenty-Nine: What is going on you fools!? Argh! The crew members are like puppets! You have to give them orders at all times, otherwise they will do anything! Smash! Now the plane is crashing with its load of bombs! Do something imbeciles! Take back control of the horrible aircraft! Page Thirty: Now that they received orders, the pilots worked miracles to recover control, but. The aircraft is perfectly ungovernable master! There’s something wrong with the aircraft today! The lightbulbs getting dim! We’re living on the edge! I am cutting the switches! Sha-toom! Thrunk! Shrunk! Page Thirty-One: They made the plane dive towards the Thames! The bombs did not explode! And the people who were in it? You can't see a living soul moving! Hello! Hello! Send ambulances! Police boats, Helicopters. During this time. I was hiss, saved by the prodigious elasticity of my body. Hiss, my plan did not yield the expected results. But I have others, hiss, in mind! While the Reptile escapes. My Poor head! Oh! Page Thirty-Two: Already the cars are flowing. We-we! We-we! We-we! Aim your weapons at that gap! Attention! Someone there! Reptile! No! Page Thirty-Three: It is not him! It's Professor Bowen! Too late. Bang! Yeah! You killed him! But! But! You said! They killed Bowen! And now they're so unhappy about it that they do not bother about me anymore! Page Thirty-Four: Ha-ha-ha! For now I will take my normal appearance then. Meanwhile. No trace of the Reptile? The crew members took a nasty blow! It is necessary to make a general alert to G Q for the recovery of Reptile. But, Mister Bowen sir? Page Thirty-Five: Insane luck! Just a scratch on the skull! He’s living on a prayer! Huh! It's the first time. How glad I am to miss a target, sir! A little later in a nearby hospital, Bad medicine is what Mark Bowen needs. Glad to have you back whole, old man. But Reptile has slipped through our fingers again. And the crew members? They have all kinds of small fractures on the right and on the left and the effects of the drug that Reptile administered to them are beginning to dissipate! They are lucky guys too! You have to expect everything from reptile! He can attack anyone. From the queen! To the Prime Minister. Yes! Reptile is capable of anything! What is going to happen? Don't miss the next episode.

Rahan. Episode thirteen. As Crao would have done. The son of Crao fears neither the anger of the sky nor that of the mountain of fire! In the tornado that furiously swept the jungle, the thunder and the lightning sometimes obscured the fire of the volcano. And Rahan defied the elements, as once did Crao, his father. Rahan does not fear the lances of fire. In the safety of the trees, protected from the slicing wind, worried animals observed "this one-who-walked-upright" without understanding his audacity. Page Two: Nor making sense of the clamors which rose to the foliage, whipped by the tempest. Crao-the-Brave would not have been afraid! Rahan is not afraid! Ra-ha-ha! Rahan! Crao! Crao! A great green and yellow bird listened to these names howl in the wind. A violent gust suddenly snatched it from its perch, and carried it away to the muddy bank of the nearby pond. A hideous head, immediately sprung from the mud. The mouth opened to catch the prey offered by the wind. Rahan had seen it! His ivory knife flew to the Iguana’s throat and, as the sky was illuminated at the same time, it was said that the mortal blow had been struck by the lightning. Slak! Page Three: Rahan is content to have saved "The talking bird". Crao! Crao! Crao! The parrot fluttered towards the bushes where it disappeared. And I am happy that he was able to kill the "Beast-that-comes-from-the-mud”. The son of Crao felt nothing but repugnance for these monsters that haunted the swamps. He was walking away from the iguana when everything flared up around him. Lightning had struck a nearby tree trunk. Schriak! And it was impossible for him to avoid the big tree that came falling down! A branch struck him. The leaves buried him. Argh! When he recovered his senses the tornado had passed. He was stretched out in the bright sun, at the feet of ten men. Page Four: His hand, which he instinctively brought to his sheath, could not find the polished ivory handle of the knife. His weapon was missing. And also had disappeared his necklace of claws, a unique memory of his clan! Rahan did not seek to quarrel with you! Why did you steal his arms? He had just seen the knife in the belt of a blond man and recognized his necklace among those worn by the same man. Rahan has stolen the ball of fire! Tarik is right! All of the hunters saw the fireball fall. They ran because they badly needed the fire. They found you asleep under a tree, but the ball of fire was no longer there! What did you do with it Rahan? Where did you hide it? Page Five: The son of Crao smiled. Rahan's brothers also, in the past, watched for the wrath of the sky to procure the balls of fire! But they are not ignorant of the fact that if these balls often cause the trees they hit to crumble, they sometimes disappear on their own! That is what happened! It had rained heavily and the foliage was waterlogged. The fireball extinguished itself! Rahan Lies! He wants to keep the fire to himself! Tarcik knows it! Tarcik knows everything! Rahan understood that this man was the sorcerer of the clan. Rahan knows more things than Tarcik! He does not wait for the wrath of heaven to give him fire!! He makes it spring from the "stones-that-throw-stars"!! Page Six: Tarcik-the-sorcerer wanted to prevent the captive from hitting the flints, but the chief of the clan intervened. Let it be, Tarcik! Clack, Clack! A moment later a clamor greeted the miracle. The son of Crao had created flames from a carpet of dry leaves. Now your clan will no longer need to chase fireballs! Rahan is a greater wizard than Tarcik! The blond man growled dully. Tarook can only claim this if Rahan defeats Tarcik in combat! Rahan accepts the combat! Tarook also accepts it, but you will have to fight unarmed, like loyal hunters! The wizard went to his hut to put away his necklaces and the knife. Page Seven: No one saw him take a tiny thorn from a greenish liquid. The "drink-that-brings-sleep” will help Tarick! A moment later the two men confronted each other. The son of Crao, more nimble, quickly took the advantage. Suddenly off-balancing his opponent with a skillful feint. Ha-ha-ha! You see that Rahan knows more things than Tarcik! He wrestled the sorcerer to the ground when he suddenly felt a prick in the wrist. Oh! For him, the men watching the fight faded into a fog. What! What, Rahan, not, not. Page Eight: Tarcik abruptly freed himself and struck, to deceive his people. Here is what it costs to challenge Tarcik! Sclack! Is Tarook convinced? Tarik just proved he is the strongest! Defeated by the drug, Rahan lay at the feet of the cheat. Whoever dares to challenge your sorcerer deserves only one fate. To be thrown to the iguanas! Uh, uh. Is not your verdict too cruel Tarcik? Nothing is too cruel when it comes to punishing a sacrilegious being! Some men were already carrying the inert body of r Rahan towards the ponds. A yellow and green bird passed, uttering curious cries. Crao! Crao! Crao! Page Nine: Rahan taught us how to make fire with the "star-throwing-stones". We will have to spare him! If we throw him in the pond, he will be devoured by the iguanas! Crao! Crao! Crao! But if we disobey the wizard, his anger will be turned against us! We can obey Tarcik while giving Rahan a chance! Deposit him down here on the bank. He might come to his senses before the iguanas discover him! The men left, abandoning Rahan on the muddy bank. A moment later "The speaking bird" hovered above the inanimate form. Page Ten: He landed on the chest of the man who had saved him, constantly shouting the name that he had heard in the storm. Crao, Crao, Crao! And this name, repeated a hundred times, seeped into the mind of the still unconscious Rahan. Yes. I am Rahan. The son of Crao. He relived as in a dream the scenes of his childhood. That of the return of the hunters, led by his father Crao-the-sage. That of that dreadful night when the Blue Mountain, vomiting its entrails of fire, had destroyed his entire clan. That of Crao dying in agony, who had given him the necklace of claws. Each of these claws represents a quality of "Those-who-walk-upright". Page Eleven: Here is that of "Goodness". Then that of "Courage". And here is that of "Loyalty". Since all of the clan hunters. Are dead. And I'm going. To, join them. This necklace comes to you Rahan! You will wear it as. I have. Worn it a long life trying, To be worthy of what it represents. This last vision fades when Rahan feels the blows on his chest. Crao, Crao, Crao! Crao, Crao, Crao! The reeds parted in front of a large iguana and the bird, to alert the man of the danger, multiplied the pecks and cried even more. Page Twelve: The mists that shroud Rahan's brain suddenly dissipate. He propped himself up on one elbow and he understood. Rahan thanks "The Talking Bird"! But he won't be able to face the "Beast-that-comes-from-the-mud" without his knife! The parrot had taken refuge on a low branch. The iguana stared at the man and the latter, intrigued, observed his forearm. While fighting with Tarcik, Rahan was pricked by something. Here on the wrist. It was not the wizard's fist that stunned Rahan, but that scratch! Displacing itself slowly and heavily, the iguana prepared to attack. Page Thirteen: Himself, Rahan sought refuge. And he feel his legs stuck deep in the mud. What would Crao have done? What would Crao so do? A second iguana appeared on his left, even more monstrous. This one seemed to come from the mud itself. Without his knife, Rahan is lost! Argh! Rahan, knows what Crao would have done! But the Long Branch, though sharp, only scratched the side of the beast. It was then that a third monster emerged, and then a fourth! Crao said: "When your strength equals that of the enemy, fight him!” “But if you are too weak, delay this combat until later!” Page Fourteen: Unarmed, Rahan was helpless against this herd of armored monsters. And these moved easily, while the sucking of the mud weighed down his legs! “When the mountain is too steep, go around it!” Also spoke Crao. He dived into the pond, the only way out of his situation. In the water, he regained his energy. As he reached the other bank the bird fluttered close to him, still encouraging him with his cries. Crao! Crao! Crao! He soon saw over there, the iguanas killing each other. His clamor thundered over the jungle. Ra-ha-ha! It was then that a large paw, both clawed and webbed, struck from the mud. A fifth monster was waiting for him on this shore! Page Fifteen: His fingers, desperately searching the mud, pulled out a long flint. The god of hunters is with Rahan! He can now fight the "Beast-that-comes-from-the-mud"! As Crao would have done! Ra-ha-ha! The hideous chest throbbed above him. The sharp flint plunged into it several times. Rahan is victorious! He is worthy of the claw of "Courage"! His hand went to his neck and he suddenly remembered that Tarcik had taken his necklace. Page Sixteen: Instinctively he carried the flint to his little sheath. And. Tarcik also stole Rahan's knife! But the sorcerer will give him back both! The moon was shining on the jungle, when the monster appeared to the men of the village. Flee! Flee! The swamp beast wants revenge! Perhaps he does not forgive the clan for sacrificing "He-who-makes-fire-with-stones-that-throw-stars!" The hunters scatter in the thickets, fleeing the iguana which, standing with its outstretched claws, had never charged so quickly! Tarcik-the-sorcerer made the great mistake of lingering in his hut. The hunters are foolish. Never do the iguanas venture so far as the village! This one will pass on its way! Page Seventeen: He was about to grab the ivory knife when a dreadful figure stood out behind him. Argh! Tarcik-the-disloyal triumphed over Rahan by drugging him! But by devouring Rahan I inherited his anger and I come to avenge him! Avoiding the claws of the monster, the frightened sorcerer fled into the jungle. Tarcik must have had the wrong drink! He must have drunk "the-water-which-gives-nightmares"! The ponds shimmered, under the moon, through a gap in the clouds. The sorcerer rushes towards them, hoping to find refuge there. To me! To me! You must help your wizard! Page Eighteen: But no one heard Tarcik's calls, nor his cries of distress when he got stuck in the mud. To me! Help me hunters! I am going to die! No one heard his screams of terror when the iguanas, emerging from the darkness, crawled towards this prey that was henceforth at their mercy. No one except the son of Crao, who got rid of the nauseating iguana skin under which he had hidden. The "Beasts-from-the-mud" have made Tarcik pay for his cowardice! When the sun came back the surface of the ponds was calm. A light wind bent the tall reeds in the heart of which, no doubt, slept the sated iguanas. Page Nineteen: Rahan proceeded as if through a rosary, the claws of the necklace that he had recovered, along with his knife, from the hut of the sorcerer. Here is the one, from "Good". Rahan was good when he revealed to this clan the secret of fire! And here is that of “courage”. Rahan was courageous in killing the "Beast-that-comes-from-the-mud"! As always, the son of Crao had been faithful to the oath made long ago, on the blue mountain, to the old chief as he died. He proudly tapped the polished handle of his ivory knife and off he went, straight for the sun that had always drawn him. Page Twenty: But he was only a son of fierce ages where everything was fighting for life. So his hand cried out on the knife when the clan arose before him. Tarcik disappeared last night! If he has gone back to the lands of cold where he came from, our clan will not regret it! Because Tarcik too often thought of very bad things! Rahan, you who can do so many miracles, do you want to become our new wizard? No Tarook! A clan does not need a sorcerer! A wise and courageous leader is sufficient! Farewell Brothers! Rahan plunged into the jungle where the birds were already chattering. One of them, yellow and green, escorted him for a very long time, constantly shouting the only word he knew of the language of "those-who-walk-upright". Crao! Crao! Crao!

Rahan. Episode Twelve. The little Man. The discovery of a raft stranded on the sand of a creek stupefied Rahan less than the strange traces which started from that raft. They are neither those of a man, nor those of a beast! Rahan has never seen such tracks! Knife in hand, and on the lookout, the son of Crao followed the mysterious trail. And suddenly. “Baghae”! Page Two: Replacing the first, other traces appeared, and he recognized these ones. "Baghae", the panther pounced on its prey here! As the roar of the wild beast rose not far away, the son of Crao dashed into the thicket. Rahan wants to know! He wants to know what strange game "Baghae" has killed today. Oh! The panther, squatting twenty paces from him, still had his prey in his mouth. A little man! “Baghae” wanted to let his little ones have the pleasure of shredding his prey! The young child was indeed alive. The beast abandoned him to face the man. Page Three: Fight "Baghae"! It will be less easy for you to defeat Rahan than a little man! Ra-ha-ha! Rahan and the panther disappeared for a moment in the tall grass, then reappeared further on, wildly intertwined. The child was screaming with fear, frightened by this tumult. He could not understand that he was the stake in this fierce combat. And the three little ones of the “Baghae”, crouching under a bush, meowing softly. They did not know either! A terrible claw had just torn the ivory knife from Rahan's fingers. He dove for his weapon as the panther leapt. Page Four: The son of fierce ages dodged and brutally wrestled the beast to the ground. Thus mastered, "Baghae" was at the mercy of the man. Here is what it costs to cowardly attack the little men! The ivory blade was about to strike a mortal blow. When the mewing of young felines became mournful. You beg Rahan! You are afraid that he will kill! Rahan hesitated with his knife brandished. The little man has a mother, which he needs! “Baghae” is also a mother, thought Rahan. He suddenly sat up, freeing the beast. Go “Baghae”, go! Rahan spares you! Rahan does you grace! Page Five: The panther and her cubs disappeared into the forest. The little man wanted to stand up. And landed heavily on his behind. The son of Crao chuckled. Rahan understands why your tracks surprised him. You still only know how to walk on “all fours”! "Those-who-walk-upright" always start their life like this. But where do you come from, little man? How did you come here? Amused and concerned, Rahan returned to the great river. No doubt you crawled on this raft to play. It got loose and the current carried you away! The little man, far too young to talk, emitted only little sounds. Sometimes plaintiff, sometimes joyful. Page Six: Rahan will return you to yours. The Son of Fierce Ages believed that the child's clan could only live upstream of the great river. That is why shortly after, he tried to go up this one. But the current was very strong. And this fight against the river will soon prove impossible. Since the path of water is impossible for us, we will travel on land! The bank was steep but this was no obstacle for the son of Crao, whose clan had once lived in the Blue Mountains. And the little man was but a light burden on his sturdy shoulders, Night will fall soon. I hope you're not afraid of the night like Rahan used to be! Page Seven: Rahan remembered that time when he feared the darkness, and how he had conquered this anguish. A large slab of bark reminds him of a distant childhood memory. The “Little Men” are fragile. But the cold of the night won't bite you! His knife cut the bark. His skillful fingers tied vines. Shortly after, he had a curious cradle-hammock. Which was swinging under a tree. Dry and tender leaves garnished it. And he watched the little man fall asleep quickly. And the son of Crao dozed off in his turn, on the earth, his ivory knife close at hand. Page Eight: He dreamt that he was suddenly attacked by a beast, without having had time to get the child off his shoulders. And also the dawn found him anxious. Rahan must be able to fight with the "Little Man" on his shoulders! Rahan's knife should have a long reach. A very long reach, like the spears of certain hunters! One idea, in the son of fierce ages, always leads to another. A moment later he had cut a bamboo. As the child picked up the knife he exclaimed. Stop! Do not touch! These things are not for "Little Men"! Page Nine: With binding at the end of the bamboo, the ivory knife becomes a solid spear. Which allows him shortly after, to nail to the ground a snake that stood in his way. Astride his shoulders, the "Little Man" sometimes showed his joy by tugging his long hair. And Rahan felt happy. Happy. For a long time he followed the great river which meandered at the bottom of the gorge. And suddenly his heart sank. Ahead of him opened a wide crevasse, at the bottom of which rumbled a torrent, increasing into a mighty river. Will Rahan have to retrace his steps? Did he walk a whole day unnecessarily!? Page Ten: The wall was too steep to descend towards the river. And no tree allowed him to throw a "bridge" across this chasm, as he had once done. Only Rahan could have crossed the abyss, he knew he was capable of such a leap! But there was the "Little Man"! He is not strong enough to hold on to Rahan. And Rahan can't hold it because he needs both hands! Oh! Rahan knows what to do! A moment later, ignoring the cries of the "Little Man", Rahan bound his legs and arms with a vine. Then he threw his "spear" onto the other side of the crevasse, as much not to hinder his jump as to prevent himself from hesitating. This knife is too valuable for Rahan. Now even if he is scared, Rahan will have to jump! Clack! Page Eleven: Seizing the vine with the moaning child, he placed it on his back, like a hunter with his quiver. Then he took off. Trust me, “Little man”! He ran towards the gaping chasm with his precious burden. Twenty steps separated him from the void. Fifteen. Ten. Five. All his muscles relaxed and he seemed to fly away. His fingers opened to grip the ledge he knew he might reach, perhaps only just! A cry of fright interrupted the cry of victory. In the shock the vine holding the child had broken. And only a prodigious reflex from Rahan allows him to catch in flight the "Little Man". Page Twelve: Holding the child with one hand, the son of Crao clung to the cliff with the other. He no longer had that hand to pull himself up, he and the "Little Man"! It was a slow and painful recovery. His elbow finally rested on the rock. His chest followed. They were saved. Rahan has never been so scared in his life! He is proud to have brought you to this side of the abyss "Little man"! On this side of the crevasse a gentle slope descended towards the river. The son of fierce ages retrieved his spear with joy. It is with the same joy that he projected it, shortly after, towards these curious wooden fruits whose flavor he had once savored. Page Thirteen: He broke one on a stone. Drink "Little man' Drink! “Those-who-run-in-the-trees, the monkeys, love this milk. And we are not much different from them. Rahan remembered the gestures he had seen made to the women of his horde when he himself was only a "Little man". The child babbled and struck his head with his little hand, as he descended towards the scintillating river. I think this time we found your clan! Look over there. In the distance in a loop of the great river, stood huts. The rafts lined up on the bank announced it as a village of fishers. Page Fourteen: The son of Crao, who had entered under the foliage, heard calls rising in a language he did not know and he saw men appear. Nak, Quadak. Nayka! Nawaki Naariik! Nako Wouandak las da! Here is the one who kidnapped Kadik! Capture him brothers! Capture him! He must be punished! Rahan did not understand these words, but he saw the clan rush. The father of the "Little man" is perhaps among them, he thought. And Rahan cannot fight with this clan. The son of Crao dropped his spear at his feet to prove his good intentions. But the men approached him and brutally seized the child. A moment later they dragged him towards the village. Page Fifteen: A little after. Chakahik. Yawaoillaki Ouadak Kazouk! Here is what I do with your child-stealing weapon! Crack! Makaya nakaihi Jik! Mogo nako zaraylac warten! Your fate is in the hands of the parents of Kadik that you have made cry so much! They will decide how you die! A woman tenderly hugged the "Little Man" against her. Her companion growled. Nak Nayka Ouadak Kazouk! Naikala Jiako! The child thief must be delivered to the beasts of the forest! Rahan was indignant when he was tied up in a clearing. But these men did not understand his explanations any more than he understood their accusations! And the son of Crao found himself alone, meditating on the ingratitude of “Those-who-walk-upright". Page Sixteen: His heart suddenly stopped beating when he heard, very close, the growl of the panther. “Baghae”! “Baghae” and her little ones did indeed appear. The son of fierce ages, crucified on the ground, was at the mercy of the beasts. They approached, their eyes sparkling. A growl came from the panther’s chest. Rahan belongs to you, “Baghae”! Rahan is yours! Kill "Baghae" kill! What are you waiting for? Kill!? The beast was slowly circling the man. It sniffed for a long time the bound limbs, the torso, the face. Do not torment me for this long, “Baghae”! Kill! Kill! Page Seventeen: But the panther slowly turned around and, with a slight growl, invited her young to follow her. A moment later the beasts had disappeared into the forest. Rahan had spared the “Baghae”. And the “Baghae” in turn shows mercy by sparing him! Would the beasts be more loyal, more grateful than "those-who-walked-upright"?! Incomprehensible cries arose from the village of fishers. One word kept coming up. "Kadik"! ”Kadik”! “Kadik”! A bush spread aside in front of the "Little Man". Who wobbled on his legs. And the child clutched Rahan's knife! Oh! Page Eighteen: Stumbling, falling on his behind, and getting up, he approached. Come, child, come! Deliver your friend! The child sat near Rahan, and played with the knife. Cut those vines, little one! Cut! The "Little Man" did not understand. Babbling, he hit Rahan with the handle of the knife. He saw Rahan use the knife. He imitates Rahan! He has returned with the knife, and plays with striking it too! The infant had just reversed the weapon. He observed with amusement his yellowish reflection in the ivory blade. No! Little one! No! Page Nineteen: In the surrounding thicket the fishermen had spread out and were calling. Kadik? Kadik! Alioaka Nayda Jiako Nogo Jiako? Wartenne Kazouka! Nahyaka!! Perhaps the enemy has freed himself, woman? Maybe he took away our Kadik again! We should have killed him!! Kan chakalac glahak! Kan! Kan! No Glahak! Look at that! Look! The man and the woman, Kadik's parents, had stopped. What they saw in the clearing made their hearts beat strangely. Ouakas Nai Joka naka glahak maioc ka! He behaves as with you, Glahak! As with you! Over there, the enemy was still crucified, his knife resting on his chest. And Kadik, his cheek stuck to that of the enemy, babbled as he had never done! Page Twenty: The little fingers of the child lingered on the eyes, caressed the nose, and the lips of Rahan. Nogo kan kazoudi! Ganach dac! Kadik yaka! This man is not an enemy Ghalak! Kadik tells us! Kadik proves it to us! Under the reassuring caresses of the "Little Man", Rahan closed his eyes. But he heard the horde approaching. He also heard, without understanding them, the orders of the chief. Nak kado lahisac! Noka o radai! The River Clan was wrong! Release this man! Kadik's father gently pushed aside his son who was clinging to the captive's neck. Then he seized the knife. The two men exchanged a long look and the son of Crao understood that "Those-who-walk-standing" could also have gratitude. Happily, he waited for the ivory blade to cut his bonds.