Under the Green Star

The air was fresh and heady with a wine-like tang. My exertions of yesterday had left me aching with weariness and worn with fatigue. But a full belly and a night of deep slumber in the open air restored my vigor, and I rose with an exuberant vitality such as I have never known.

Niamh, too, rose refreshed and looking glorious. Gone was the jewelbox princess in her mandarin robes; in her place stood a lithe, long-legged girl with tousled hair, flushed cheeks, sparkling eyes, and joyous, merry laughter. A wild girl of the worldtall woods, true, in an abbreviated scrap of ragged raiment, but a fitting companion to the half-naked savage I had become, who faced the perils of the unknown forest armed only with a crude dagger!

We bathed in puddles of cold rainwater, breakfasted off the remnants of last night’s dinner, and felt fit and ready to face whatever perils the new day might bring.

The more remote extremities of our branch extended in several directions in leafy twigs as huge as the foremast of a schooner. Some of these twigs brushed a much larger branch above us, and we resolved to attempt the ascent, having exhausted the resources our present milieu afforded us. There was no way of telling what we might find on the branch above us, and we could, of course, always return to our present place, should we wish to.

I think it was the pure, childlike excitement of our situation that urged us to explore as much of our strange new world as we could. This life of hand-to-hand struggle for survival against a savage world was as fresh and new and intoxicating to Niamh as it was to me, for all that she was native to the World of the Green Star. I once read of an emperor of China whose life was so artificial and circumscribed, so bound about by ritual and ceremony, that it was said he never once in his long life saw a bush or tree or field that was as nature had made it and not as it had been trimmed and shaped and grown by generations of gardeners. Niamh’s life, she confided to me in her artless way, had been no less artificial and sheltered. The life of the court was all she had ever known; sleek courtiers, rigid conventions, ornamented surroundings, artificial and sophisticated pleasures, were all that she had ever known. Although we prowled a hostile wilderness teeming with ferocious monsters, every moment pregnant with unexpected terrors, she felt a sense of liberation and freedom that was like a superb and golden wine to one who had for too long subsisted on bland, insipid milk.

It was, I think, this sense of freedom which kept her from worrying about the perils of our precarious position. To be hopelessly lost in this world of giant trees, the prey of unthinkable monsters, all chance of succor or rescue slim, should have plunged so delicately reared a maiden into an abyss of terror. But Niamh reacted to our predicament as if it were a spree, and the novelty of spending a night in the wild, of slaying our own dinner, of exploring a new world of mystery and beauty and savage peril she found exhilarating. As we clambered out onto the extremities of our branch, her eyes were sparkling with mischief, her cheeks flushed with excitement. With her ragged garments, long bare legs, smudged nose and tousled hair, she was absurdly like an adventurous boy—very different from the stiff, brocaded queen surrounded by a covey of suave courtiers!

The upper branch, which we attained with some difficulty, was very much larger than the one whereon we had spent the night. It was as wide as a four-lane highway and it extended from the colossal trunk at a right angle, running parallel with the ground far below. It twisted and turned, curving and meandering away until lost from view in cloud-huge clumps of leaves.

We strolled out upon it for about a quarter of a mile. Again I felt a sense of awe at the enormity of the trees of this fantastic world—trees so immense they would have dwarfed into insignificance even the towering redwoods of my native Earth. And not for the first time did I wonder at the strange disproportion of men and trees on this World of the Green Star. I felt like a midge crawling on the branch of a mighty oak, and I pondered the mystery of the size of these arboreal colossuses. Could it be that these trees were actually of normal size, and that it was the dwellers upon the Green Star planet who were elf-small? It could be: when first I came hither, voyaging in my astral form, I had naturally assumed beings so manlike in their appearance must be manlike in their height. But the more I saw of the gigantic trees and the monstrously huge insects that dwelt upon them, the more I wondered. My astral form had been a mere spark of life—a point of consciousness, without reference of size. Had I perhaps lost all sense of proportion, mistakenly believing the Laonese to be of an height comparable to the inhabitants of my own world? Were they perhaps not a miniscule people, dwelling in trees which, to my physical self, would have seemed but average in their tallness?

To this question I had no answer then; nor can I answer it now. It was but one of the thousand mysteries I encountered on the World of the Green Star, not one of which I am able to explain.

We came suddenly upon a surprising marvel of beauty. It was an immense flower, waxen pale, its voluminous petals as creamy in hue as those of the camellia—but a thousand times larger than any flower that ever bloomed on my own world.