"
Pan-at-lee, lulled by a feeling of security, slept peacefully into
the morning while Tarzan stretched himself upon the hard floor of
the recess just outside her cave.
The sun was high in 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.
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