2 - Blades of Mars by Edward P. Bradbury Page B

             'Over the sea?'
                   ‘Just so.'
                   ‘And where then?'
                   ‘I do not know.'
                   I went to the port-hole again and looked down.
                   The troubled sea, cold and dark, still lay below us, but through the gloom I thought I could make
out, very faintly, some sort of land-mass.
                   ‘What lies beyond the western sea?' I asked
Hool Haji.
                   'I do not know - a land unexplored, save along
its coasts. An evil land by all accounts.'
                   The land was almost below us now.
                   'Evil? What makes you
say that?' I asked my friend
                   'Legends - travellers' tales
- exploration parties that never return. The Western Continent is a
place of jungles and strange beasts. It was the continent worst struck by the
struggles of the Mightiest War. When the war was over, so they say , strange changes took place in nature - men. animals , plants were all - altered - by something that was
left behind after the Mightiest War. Some say this was a spirit, some say a
kind of gas, other a machine. But, whatever the reason, the continent in the
West has always been avoided by sane men.'
                   'All that seems to indicate is an atomic war,
radiation and mutation.' I mused. 'And in the thousands of years since the war
took place it is unlikely that there is any dangerous radiation. We need not
fear from that.'
                   Some of the words I used were in English
since, though there probably were words to describe the things of which I
spoke, they were not in the current Martian vocabulary.
                   The 'Roaring Death' was beginning to abate, it
seemed, for our movement became slower.
                   I felt that our fate was out of my hands as we
sped deeper inland.
                   The two moons of Mars dashed through the sky
above 191 us, illuminating the sight of strange, waving jungles of peculiar
colourings.
                   I must admit that the peculiar vegetation did
disturb me somewhat, but I told myself that we could come to no harm while we
rode the wind at this altitude.
                   When the wind no longer bore us along we could
land at leisure, fix the engines and, under power, go where we wished.
                   The opportunity did not come for some hours.
Where the wind came from and where it finally died I could not tell -unless it
circled the globe permanently, gathering force as it travelled. 1 was no
meteorologist.
                   At last we were able to escape the airstream
and drift towards the huge trees whose dense foliage seemed to form a solid
mass below us.
                   Great, shiny leaves waved on sinuous boughs
and the colours were shades of black, brown, dark green and mottled red.
                   A sense of evil hung heavily on this jungle
and we did not like the prospect of having to land in it. But at length, by
morning, we found a clearing large enough to take the balloon and we began to
descend.
                   We landed quite neatly for such unskilled
aeronauts. We moored the ship and inspected it for damage. The Yaksha building
materials had stood up to a wind that would have shaken almost anything else to
pieces. There was comparatively little damage, considering the buffeting we had
taken.
                   All we had to do now was spend an hour or so
fixing the driving bands and finding something that would serve as ballast.
Then we'd top up the helium - and be heading for Mendishar in no time.
                   We soon had the engines working well and the
propellers spinning.
                   While we worked, however, we began to get a
definite sense of being