Then he would pass again across some media which would reveal no
spoor, to take up the broken thread of the trail beyond.
As the purpose of this remarkable avenue dawned upon me I could
not but admire the native shrewdness of the ancient progenitor of
the Mezops who hit upon this novel plan to throw his enemies from
his track and delay or thwart them in their attempts to follow him
to his deep-buried cities.
To you of the outer earth it might seem a slow and tortuous method
of traveling through the jungle, but were you of Pellucidar you
would realize that time is no factor where time does not exist.
So labyrinthine are the windings of these trails, so varied the
connecting links and the distances which one must retrace one's
steps from the paths' ends to find them that a Mezop often reaches
man's estate before he is familiar even with those which lead from
his own city to the sea.
In fact three-fourths of the education of the young male Mezop
consists in familiarizing himself with these jungle avenues, and
the status of an adult is largely determined by the number of trails
which he can follow upon his own island. The females never learn
them, since from birth to death they never leave the clearing
in which the village of their nativity is situated except they be
taken to mate by a male from another village, or captured in war
by the enemies of their tribe.
After proceeding through the jungle for what must have been upward
of five miles we emerged suddenly into a large clearing in the
exact center of which stood as strange an appearing village as one
might well imagine.
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