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The half-mile was covered as swiftly as possible. Ulysses had the honour of being the first to start the climb down. The mists shrouded him, not only from the view of any bat-men who might be coming along soon, but also from view of the others. What with the darkness and the clouds rising from the abyss, he could barely see two feet before, or under, him. The droplets collected over his body and made him cold. They also made the bark and his fingers and toes slippery.
There was nothing to do but go down. If he had been alone, or with people who did not expect him to be a god, he might have stayed outside the mist and taken his chances on being seen by the bat-people. But he could not avoid his obligations or break his word.
"The mist is our protection," he said. "But like all protections, all shields, it has its disadvantages. It exacts a price. It hides us from our enemies, but it also holds its dangers. It will be slippery, and we will be blind."
It was also very slow going, he thought, as he groped with his foot for a protection below him. His hands clung to outthrusts of bark, one foot was half in a fissure, and the other foot moved around for a ledge or crevice. Finally, it found a ledge, and he lowered himself gently, made sure he had a secure hold, and then lowered his foot again. This process went on for an unaccountable time, and then the darkness paled, and he could see just a little more than before.
He had a solid extension beneath him. Carefully, he walked out on it, testing each unseen inch of bark with his toes. The waterfall roared on his left and water swirled against his left foot. He jumped as something touched him, and he whirled with his knife in hand. Dimly, he saw the short, slender, black-and-white figure of Awina. She came closer then, her eyes big round darknesses. He put the knife away, and she clung to him for a moment. Her fur was wet, but after a minute their bodies began to warm each other. He ran his hand over the round top of her head and felt the wet silky ears and then ran his hand down her back. She felt more like a drowned rat than the soft deliciously furry being he had known.
Other figures jelled out of the mists. He moved away from Awina, counting them as they appeared. All were there.
Ghlikh began twitching. He had been as motionless as a bag of meat during the descent, but now he thought it was safe to move and try to get his circulation going again. Ulysses had him removed from his back and the bonds around his legs taken off. The little man hopped around on his ski
Ulysses walked carefully out of the mists. The top of the waterfall was about five hundred feet up. There were no bat-people in sight. Only the bushes and sides of leaning trees broke the edge of the upper part of the branch. He turned and saw that the branch continued on a horizontal plane until it was lost to sight. There was nothing to keep them from building more rafts and continuing on the riverlet. But they must hide in the jungle until nightfall again. They could sleep part of the day, although they had to spend some time in hunting. Their food supply was getting low.
Late that evening, no longer sleepy but suffering from hunger pangs, they organised four hunting parties. An hour later, they butchered a legless crocodile, a hipporat, two big red goats and three large monkeys.
They ate well that evening, and everybody felt much better. They cut down poles and bound them together and then set out on the riverlet. Before dawn, they came to another downward bend of the great branch and another cataract. They climbed down but stayed outside the mists, and by dawn they reached the bottom and another riverlet; after sleeping and hunting again, they made more rafts. The bottom of the third waterfall proved to be also the bottom of The Tree, or, as Awina called it, the Feet of Wurutana.
The vast trunks, branches and other vegetation growing overhead to a height of ten thousand feet formed a complex that barred all but a few of the sun's rays. A deep twilight reigned here at noon, and in the mornings and afternoons a near-night like a storm of ravens' feathers filled the spaces between the gigantic columns and buttresses plunging into the swamp. The ground beneath The Tree received the precipitation of the cataracts and the rainfall that was not caught by the branches and the colossal leaves of The Tree and the vegetation that grew on The Tree. A swamp had formed at the base of The Tree, a vast unutterably dismal swamp. The depth of the water varied from one inch to many feet, enough to drown a man. Out of this water, and out of the mud, many strange, foul- smelling, pale and blotched plants grew.
The twilight showed them nightmare forms. Great pieces of bark, many of them bungalow- sized, had fallen off the sides of The Tree and hurtled downward, striking branches and trunks and knocking off other large and decaying crags of bark. The Tree, like the World- Snake of Norse mythology, shed its skin. Bark was always rotting and then breaking off and either falling onto the tops of the mighty branches, there to decay more, or else coming down like cold black falling stars to splash into the water and the mud of the swamp. There, half-sunk, they decayed, and the insects and vermin that infested this dusky world bored into the great masses and made their houses therein.
These were long thin corpse-coloured worms with hairy heads; beetles coloured a hard blue and armed with huge mandibles; long-nosed shrew-like beasts with saberteeth; pale yellow scorpions; bright scarlet-and-midnight-black snakes with tiny horns on top of their triangular heads; many-legged soft-bodied dozen-ante
Around the jagged slabs grew tall, slender, branchless plants which produced a heart- shaped greenish-yellow berry that sprouted from cracks in the horny shells of the plants. There was also a thick slimy weed that projected a foot or two above the muddy water or the watery mud underfoot. Above this there sometimes flapped a broad-winged insect with body and wings the colour of the skin of a man just dead, and its head was white with two round black markings and a down-curving black mark below the two markings, so that its face was that of a skull. It flew by silently, sometimes just touching a member of the party with the tips of its wings and causing that person to jump. But all motion and noise were subdued. The people talked very quietly, often whispering, and they did not laugh. Their feet sank into the water and the mud beneath and were pulled out slowly, almost apologetically, so that sucking sounds were slow and soft. The people huddled together, and no one wanted to step aside into the bushes or behind the tall pale grey-blue stalks to attend to their needs.
Ulysses had thought, at first, that he would keep to the swamp. Though the going was slow and rough, this place seemed more desirable than the area above, where there were too many sentient enemies. But one day and one night among the Feet of Wurutana were enough for him and more than enough for his people. The next morning, when he almost jumped a foot as a blood-coloured frog leaped off a slab of bark onto his shoulder and then into the ankle-deep water, he decided that he could not take much more. They had tried to sleep on a piece of bark as big as a small chateau. But all night long they had been disturbed by the creatures which crawled out of the holes in the bark and by the weird sounds of the swamp animals.