As night came, a warrior slipped from Ja-Luri’s palace into the temple area, going to the lower priests’ residence. His arrival did not arouse any suspicion, for it was not uncommon for warriors to have a case for the temple. He finally arrived at the chamber where several priests had gathered after the evening meal. The sacrificial expenses had ceased, and they were no longer needed for any religious delivery before sunrise.
After all, the warrior, like almost all of Pal-ul-don, knew that there was no strong bond between Ja-Luri’s temple and the palace, and that Ja-don only tolerated the lives of the priests and allowed them to carry out their cruel expenses because they had belonged to Pal-ul-don. to the habons of the Hoonites from ancient times. And the dizzy head should indeed have been the man who had tried to interfere in the affairs of the priests. It was well known that Ja-don never entered the temple and that the high priest never visited the palace; but the people came to the temple with their sacrificial offerings, and sacrifices were offered in the evenings and mornings as in every other sanctuary in Pal-ul-don.
The warrior knew all this, knew perhaps better than an ordinary soldier would have thought he knew. And so he sought here in the temple the help he needed to carry out his inch, whatever it must have been then.
Entering the priests’ room, he greeted them in a Pal-ul-Don way, but at the same time he made a mark with his finger that would have attracted little, if any, attention to the bystander. There were those in the room who noticed it and could interpret it; it soon became apparent that two of the priests got up and stepped right next to the man as he stood in the doorway. And both of them repeated the sign made by the warrior when they came.
The three called for only a brief moment, and the warrior turned, starting from the room. A little later, one of the priests who interviewed him left, and soon after, another.
In the hallway, they met a warrior waiting and took him to a small closet that opened into a smaller hallway a short distance from the confluence of this and the bigger one. Here all three lingered for some time and talked in whispers; then the warrior went back to the palace and the priests returned to their apartment.
The women’s rooms at Ja-Luri Palace were all on the same side of a long straight corridor. Each had a single door to the hallway and, on the opposite wall, several windows on the garden side. In one of these rooms, Jane slept alone. There was a single guard at each end of the corridor; the main force of the guard was in a special protective area near the front door of the female life.
The palace slept, for where Ja-don ruled, there were morning naps. Pal-e-don -sso, the great northern commander, did not celebrate such ferocious riots, the remake of which echoed in the A-luriri king’s palace. Ja-lur was a quiet slave compared to the capital, but there were always guards kept at the entrance of every entrance to the rooms of Ja-don and his household, as well as at the gates opening to both the temple and the city.
These guards were small, comprising only five, six soldiers, one of whom remained awake while the others slept. Such were the circumstances when two soldiers, one at each end of the corridor, arrived at the guards guarding the safety of Jane Clayton and Princess O-lo, and each of the newcomers repeated to them the usual words informing the guards that they would be released in turn. . These others were supposedly sent in their place. It is never disgusting for a warrior to get out of guard duty. While he might ask a number of questions in other circumstances, he will then be pleased to get away with the monotony of a generally hated duty. Without pointing anything to it, the guards thus received the release and rushed away to their sleeping jokes.
Then a third warrior appeared in the hallway, and all the newcomers gathered in front of the door behind which the monkey’s spouse slept. One of them was the foreign warrior Ja-don and Tarzan had met outside the city when they were coming to Ja-luri the day before; and he was the same one who had just stood in the temple, but the faces of his comrades were strange to one another, for the priest seldom removes his horrible masked headgear even in the presence of his fellow officers.
Silently, they lifted the doorway news and gently crawled into the chamber. In the stern corner rested Lady Greystoke in a pile of fur, in a sleeping position. The bare feet of the intruders made no noise as they stepped over the stone perm towards him. A beam of moon glistening close to the window from year to year perfectly illuminated the sleeper, revealing the beautiful contours of the arm and shoulder against the dark fur base and the flawless outlines of the face turned towards the three creepers.
But neither the beauty of the sleeper nor his helplessness evoked in them any such feelings as would have awakened in the bosom of a man. Of these three priests, he was just a lump of clay, and they could not comprehend the passion that had incited others to conspiracy and murder from the possession of this charming American, and was still an influential factor in the fates of the unknown Pal-ul-don.
There were a number of pulleys on the main floor of the room, and as he got close to the sleeper, the leader of the trio stopped to take one of the smaller ones. Standing at the sleeper’s head, he held the spread pulley above his face. “Now,” he whispered, wrapping his waist around the woman’s head, and her two companions jumped to grab her arms and hook her body while the leader suppressed her cry with a hairy wrap. Quickly and silently, they tied his wrist and put a blockage in his mouth, and during the short time they had spent their work, there was no sound that the occupants of the adjoining rooms could have distinguished.
Temming him rudely upright, they tried to force Jane to step toward the window, but the prisoner did it and threw himself on the main floor. In their magnitudes, they would have gladly taken with cruelty to discourage him from obedience, but did not dare, for Lu-don’s wrath might have severely confronted every destroyer of his beautiful prey.
And so they had to lift him from the main floor and carry him. It was not an easy task as the prisoner kicked and rumbled behind his energy. However, they managed to drag him out the window into the garden, from where one of the priests of the Temple of Ja-Luri led their steps to a small gated gate in the south wall of the perimeter.
Immediately behind it, a stone staircase led down to the bank of the river, and at the foot of it were several rafters. Pan-sat really got his thanks when his assistants knew the temple and the palace so well, for otherwise he would hardly have escaped from Ja-luri with his prisoner. Lowering the woman to the bottom of the light boat, Pan-sat stepped into it herself and grabbed the paddle. His comrades detached the small ship and pushed it into the river. After completing their treachery work, they turned back to the temple, with Pan-Sat paddling heavily downstream and thus, as they flew, quickly rushing down the river that would transport him to Jad-ben-lul and A-luri.
* * * * *
The moon silicon had fallen, and the southern horizon had not yet reflected the glow of the approaching day as a long line of soldiers crept into the city of A-Luri. Their plans were carefully calculated, and their success seemed certain. Had been delivered sent to Ta-den, whose troops were waiting on the northwest side of the city. With a small ward, Tarzan was to break through the secret passage of the temple, whose position he knew alone, while Ja-don with the main army of warriors attacked the gates of the palace.
The monkey leading his small ward moved creeping along the winding alleys of A-Luri and arrived unnoticed by the building that hid the mouth of the secret aisle. When this place was best protected because its existence was not known to anyone other than the priests, it had been left unguarded. To facilitate the intrusion of a small crowd through a narrow, winding, and uneven tunnel, Tarzan lit a torch that had been brought in for that purpose, and stepping in front of his soldiers guided them toward the temple.
The monkey was sure he could accomplish much with his small elite, as soon as he got into the temple’s inner shelters, as an attack from that side could easily defeat priests in chaos and allow Tarzan to harass the palace forces from behind while Ja-don surrendered to battle with them at the palace gate and Ta-den and his men would climb the northern walls. Ja-don had placed great importance on the moral influence that Dor-ul-Otho’s mysterious appearance at the center of the temple would have on the enemy, and the old chief had urged Tarzan to make full use of what he considered certain that many of Lu-don’s warriors still faltered their loyalty to the high priest. and Dor-ul-Otho, as they were rather attached to the former by fear,
Elsewhere, the Pal-ul-Don proverb is freely translated: “Even the right path can lead to the wrong destination,” and such a result was now finally the steps of the great northern chief and his divine ally to lead them.
Familiar with the curves of the corridors in advance and receiving the full light of the tumultuous, which was still only a dim and fluttering glow, Tarza was some way ahead of the others and in his devotional fervor to reach the enemy thought too few of those who had to support him. And it was no wonder, since the monkey had been used to fighting life alone since his childhood, so his habit had become to rely only on his own cunning and fitness.
It so happened that long before his warriors he entered the upper corridor, which opened its doors to the chambers of Lu-don and the lower priests, and when he turned to this vault, gloomily lit by dim light flares, he saw another appear there from the corridor opposite — the warrior half-carrying woman with her. Immediately he felt Tarza, a prisoner bound by a rope and muted with a gag, who had thought he was living safely in Ja-don’s palace in Ja-luri.
The warrior had seen Tarzan at the same time. He heard a gloomy, deceptive roar from the monkey man’s lips as he rushed forward to grab his wife and unleash a vengeful revenge against the captor in the wild heart of tarmangan. Near the Pan-Sat was a side chamber doorway. There he leaped, taking the woman with him.
On his hocks blunted Monkey Tarzan. He had thrown his torch away and pulled from the sheath a long knife that had belonged to his father. Eyelessly, like an attacking bull, he plunged into the chamber after Pan-Sat and noticed that after the news had landed behind him, he was in the darkness of a fragment. At the same time there was a bump of stone against him in front of him, and a blink of an eye later followed by a similar bump from behind. Nothing else was needed to reveal to the monkey that he was again a prisoner in the Lu-don temple.
He stood right in his field where he had stopped when he heard the first stone door fall. He would no longer be easily plunged into the pit of Gryf or some other similar danger, as had happened when Lu-don was trapped in the Gryf Temple. His eyes gradually began to get used to the darkness, and he noticed a dim light penetrating the room from some hole, though for a few minutes he could not deduce where it was. At last, at the roof, he invented a small opening, three feet in diameter, and from it penetrated his prison something that was more of a more obedient darkness than a light.
After the doors slammed shut, he had not heard any noise, though he always pinched his sensitive ears to get some hate from the direction the robber had taken his spouse. Now he could distinguish the outline of his dungeon. It was a small room, not fifteen feet more spacious from wall to wall. Resting his hands and knees as cautiously as possible, he examined the entire surface of the heel. Right in the middle, under the roof opening, there was a hatch, but otherwise the permanto was solid. Knowing this, he only had to avoid the point where it was a permanno. Tarzan then turned his attention to the walls. There were only two openings in them: the door from which he had stepped inside, and opposite it was the door from which the warrior had carried Jane Clayton. Both were enclosed by a stone statue which the fleeing warrior had let go on leaving.
* * * * *
High Priest Lu-don slipped his thin lips and rubbed his skinny white hands of satisfaction as Pan-sat carried Jane Clayton to him and lowered the victim to her on the main floor.
“Well done, Pan-sat!” he exclaimed. “You get a good salary for this service. As long as we now have the wrong Dor-ul-Otho in our power, then the whole, Pal-ul-don would soon creep at our feet.”
“Master, he has me!” said Pan-sat.
“What!” exclaimed Lu-don. “You have a Tarzan-jad-guru? You may have killed him. Tell me, my wonderful Pan-satin, tell me quickly! My heart breaks with a desire to know.”
“I caught him alive, master,” replied Pan-sat. “He’s in that little chamber that our ancestors built to capture those who were too strong manly to defeat.”
“You’ve done well, Pan-sat; I…”
The startled priest rushed into the room. “I had to, master, I had to,” he shouted, “the corridors are full of Ja-don warriors!”
“You’re crazy,” roared the high priest. “My warriors own the palace and the temple.”
“I speak the truth, Master,” the priest assured; “There are soldiers in the hallway approaching just this room, and they’re coming from the secret hallway leading to the city.”
“It might be as he says,” Pan-sat explained. “From that direction, Tarzan-jad-guru was coming when I spotted him and brought him to satire. He was currently leading his warriors to the most sacred.”
Lu-don ran quickly to the door and glanced down the hall. At first glance, he saw that the priest was not unduly frightened. Twelve soldiers marched down the aisle toward him, but they looked confused and by no means confident. The high priest guessed that after losing their leader, Tarzan, they were somehow lost in the unknown mazes of the underground vaults of the temple.
Stepping back into the room, Lu-don grabbed a leather strap hanging from the ceiling. He jerked it violently and through the temple the deep chords of metallic gongong stumbled. Five times its punches rushed down the aisles, and then Lu-don turned to the priests. “Bring the woman here and follow me,” he said.
She went out the small door, and the others picked up Jane Clayton and followed her. They progressed through a narrow corridor and up the stairs, turning sometimes to the right, sometimes to the left, and meandering backwards in a maze network, until they ended up on a spiral staircase that rose to the ground in the largest altar yard near the eastern altar.
From all directions there were now busy steps from both the corridors below and from above. The five echoes of the alarm had summoned loyal partisans to help Lu-don in his private rooms. Priests who knew the road guided less familiar warriors to the scene, and now Tarzan was not only followed by a leader, but was confronted by a vast force. They were brave men, but in these circumstances they were helpless, and so they retreated the same way as they had come. After reaching the cramped area of the smaller vault road, they felt safe because only one enemy at a time could attack them here. But their plan had gone to death, and perhaps the whole customer had been lost because Ja-don had built so much on the success of their business.
Hearing the echo of the Gongongs in the temples, Ja-don assumed that Tarzan and his men had begun a fight, and so he launched his attack on the palace gate. In the courtyard of the temple, Lu-don’s ferocious cries of war were heard, informing him of the real contemplation of the forces. Leaving Pan-Sat and another priest to guard the woman, he hurried toward the palace to lead his troops himself, and as he stepped through the temple area he provided a transmitter to find out the results of the melee down the maze and other rumors to spread among his party members the false Dor-ul-Otho prisoner in the temple.
As the heat of the battle rose over A-Luri, Lieutenant Erich Obergatz turned on his soft hoof bed. He rubbed his eyes and looked around. It was still dark outside.
“I am Jad-ben-Otho,” he said. “Who dares to disturb my sleep?”
At Permanto, the crouching slave at the foot of his berth shook and he touched the peranto with his forehead. “Probably the enemy has attacked, O Jad-ben-Otho.” The girl spoke comfortably, for she knew from experience what horrible and mad rage even insignificant facts might provoke a great god.
Elsewhere, the priest suddenly rushed through the door extractor, slammed into his forehead, and rubbed his forehead into the peranto stone. “Oh Jad-ben-Otho,” he shouted, “Ja-don’s soldiers have attacked the palace and the temple. Currently they are fighting in the corridors near Lu-don’s shelters, and the high priest is asking you to come to the palace to encourage your faithful soldiers.”
Obergatz leaping up .. “I am Jad-ben-Otho,” he kiljasi.
“With my lightnings I will destroy the blasphemers who dare to attack the
holy city of A-Luri!”
For a moment he calmed down, running aimlessly along the room, the priest and the slave girl remaining brawled and his forehead on the ground.
“Up,” Obergatz exclaimed angrily kicking the slave girl in the side, “up! Would you stay here to wait all day, meanwhile, when the forces of darkness are besieging the city of light?”
Frightened in direction, like all who must have been to serve the great god, both rose and followed Obergatz towards the palace.
Over the cries of the soldiers still rose the cry of the temple priests: “Jad-ben-Otho is here, and the false Dor-ul-Otho is imprisoned in the temple!” The ever-repeating cries also fell into the ears of the enemies, as intended.
