n the heavens when he awoke; for two hours it had
looked down upon another heroic figure miles away--the figure of a
godlike man fighting his way through the hideous morass that lies like
a filthy moat defending Pal-ul-don from the creatures of the outer
world. Now waist deep in the sucking ooze, now menaced by loathsome
reptiles, the man advanced only by virtue of Herculean efforts gaining
laboriously by inches along the devious way that he was forced to
choose in selecting the least precarious footing. Near the center of
the morass was open water--slimy, green-hued water. He reached it at
last after more than two hours of such effort as would have left an
ordinary man spent and dying in the sticky mud, yet he was less than
halfway across the marsh. Greasy with slime and mud was his smooth,
brown hide, and greasy with slime and mud was his beloved Enfield that
had shone so brightly in the first rays of the rising sun.

He paused a moment upon the edge of the open water and then throwing
himself forward struck out to swim across. He swam with long, easy,
powerful strokes calculated less for speed than for endurance, for his
was, primarily, a test of the latter, since beyond the open water was
another two hours or more of gruelling effort between it and solid
ground. He was, perhaps, halfway across and congratulating himself upon
the ease of the achievement of this portion of his task when there
arose from the depths directly in his path a hideous reptile, which,
with wide-distended jaws, bore down upon him, hissing shrilly.

Tarzan arose and stretched, expanded his great chest and drank in deep
draughts of the fresh morning air. His clear eyes scanned the wondrous
beauties of the landscape spread out before them. Directly below lay
Kor-ul-gryf, a dense, somber green of gently moving tree tops. To
Tarzan it was neither grim, nor forbidding--it was jungle, beloved
jungle. To his right there spread a panorama of the lower reaches of
the Valley of Jad-ben-Otho, with its winding streams and its blue
lakes. Gleaming whitely in the sunlight were scattered groups of
dwellings--the feudal strongholds of the lesser chiefs of the Ho-don.
A-lur, the City of Light, he could not see as it was hidden by the
shoulder of the cliff in which the deserted village lay.

For a moment Tarzan gave himself over to that spiritual enjoyment of
beauty that only the man-mind may attain and then Nature asserted
herself and the belly of the beast