Dimly, as from a great distance or through stopped up ears, Ansen heard shouts and cries of torment and fear – the kind of fear that causes a grown man to blubber like a child.
The sounds were so muffled he could make out none of the words. He felt, for the moment, as if he floated, bodiless, without conscious thought or of any awareness of solidity, or form. But that did not last long.
Soon the voices began to take meaning in his mind, as did the pain in his body. He had been beaten hideously by the natives – how long ago he could not say.
He had only survived the ordeal because of Megrodomigran stepping in and beating his warriors away from the American’s unconscious form with the ceremonial staff of his station. This implement, fashioned from a single bone taken from some unknown creature, had been art-carved with spirals of miniature human skulls along its length and ended in a large, jaw-less skull at the top, reddened now by the blood of his own men.
Opening his eyes at last the Norseman looked upon a sight that not many had beheld – and none that did so had lived long enough to tell of it.
Upon all sides were his askarii. Those that he’d believed slain he now learned were in actuality alive, they having been penned in small, wooden cages similar to that in which he found himself ensconced. Everywhere he looked were semi-nude savages such as those they’d fought, each busily engaged in various occupations about the village.
The bodies of the slain were being processed by topless women who were not uncomely, their features regular and their long hair hanging down their backs in intricate braids. The adults of these people seemed to have an affinity for adorning their bodies with various bracelets and piercings of precious metals, there being plenty of gold and platinum displayed in abundance.
Everywhere young children ran amok, occasionally chastised by a warrior or a female of the tribe. Great cauldrons were boiling with steam as chunks of meat, sliced from off the corpses of those who’d perished in the fighting, were tossed unceremoniously into the cook pots. Other corpses, having been field dressed and skinned out, were being smoked in a fashion that would enable the meat to cure. Ansen guessed the smoked meat to be destined for consumption at a later date, while the fresh cuts being boiled were to be enjoyed by the tribe immediately.
But these things were not what at last arrested his attention – and riveted it.
His eyes were drawn, not to the goings on with the tribe into whose merciless hands they’d fallen, but to the massive, black cliffs at their backs. This rocky, vertical face shot sheer into the air for several hundred feet, it being literally covered with the facades of small habitations, each bearing a dark entry way that presumably led within. Up and down the face of the obsidian cliff-face were carved hand and foot holds that gave these people ingress to their domiciles.
While he watched he noted several begin at the bottom, sling a load over a shoulder, and start up that precipitous cliff as if it were a highway or a footpath. Occasionally they would take shortcuts by leaping for handholds or footholds that were beyond reach, leaping over holds that were closer as if from a lifetime of clambering about on this vertical surface. It went far to explain the unusual muscular development of this savage people.
Occasionally faces would peer out of the openings, glance about to see if the path was clear, whereat the individual would climb out with all the surety and agility of a simian, drop over an edge, grasp a handhold, and then descend to the ground in moments. Once he watched as two women, approaching one another along the same path, passed one another by the simple expedient of one pausing while the other went across her body and downward like an insect crawling down a tree trunk.
Now he looked further upward to the top of the cliffs to see another strange and inexplicable sight. Extending outward from the precipice were what appeared to be nothing less than crudely fashioned cranes manufactured of roughhewn timbers. From these contraptions long, braided ropes dropped to the ground.
As he took in these things two husky warriors, their faces made hideous by the awful paint schemes they adopted but possessing handsome features otherwise, approached one of his men. It was Wamibi, whom he thanked God to see alive once more.
But now these men grasped wooden poles attached to the cage for just this purpose. Some of these cages appeared fresh and new in appearance, the wood freshly hewn and newly put together. Bending to their work, they began to carry Wamibi away.
“Bwana!” the headman cried out in alarm as they took hold of his cage and lifted it from the ground.
“Stop! What do you there?” Ansen shouted futilely. “Stand fast, Wamibi!”
But where Ansen thought to see Wamibi carried to a cook pot they instead carried him to the foot of the cliff, to a position below that from which the men above had dropped a braided rope from one of the crane-like structures at the top of the cliff directly above. They attached the rope to Wamibi’s cage and the warriors at the top began hauling him upward. Soon the frightened headman dangled several hundred feet in the air with nothing between him and the hard volcanic floor but thin air.
Grimly, Ansen watched as the men once again approached him and his men.