Chapter 12 Chapter 11 Chase in the Woods

I was preoccupied with escaping.Then I remembered that the outer door of my house was still open.I am now convinced, absolutely certain, that Moreau was vivisectioning a living man.Ever since I heard his name, I have been trying in my mind to connect somehow the hideous bestiality of the islanders with his repulsive deeds.Now I've seen it all.Memories of his writings on blood transfusions came back to mind.These monsters I have seen are the victims of some terrible experiments! These disgusting thugs are only trying to keep me, to fool me with their false trust, and will soon begin to lay hands on me, torment me, and give me a fate worse than death.After the torment, the dreadful degeneration, as one can imagine--then I, a damned soul, a beast, were cast out to the company of the beasts at the great feast of their Comussian god .I looked around to see what weapons there were and nothing.I suddenly thought of a good idea. I turned the table and chair upside down, kicked one side of it with my foot, and pulled down the armrest on one side.Coincidentally, there is a nail on the wood of the armrest, which sticks out sharply.It was a little more menacing than other insignificant weapons, and I heard footsteps outside the door. I slammed the door open and found Montgomery still a step away from it.He meant to lock the outer door.

[① Comos God: The young god of the main banquet, the son of the god of wine and the banshee. 】 I raised the nailed piece of wood in my hand and slashed at his face.But he dodged back and jumped away.I hesitated, turned around the corner and fled. "Prandik, hello!" I heard him exclaim in surprise. "Don't be a fool. You!" I figured, with one more minute's delay, he might have locked me in the house, and I'd have to end up like a rabbit in a hospital.He came round the corner because I heard him yell, "Prandik!" Then he started chasing me, yelling something as he ran.

This time I ran blindly, and it turned out that I ran to the northeast, in a direction at right angles to the road I had taken on my previous expedition.As I hurried up the sand, I looked back and saw Montgomery's squire was with him.I sprinted up the hillside, over it, down a rocky valley lined with jungle, and headed east.I ran about a mile in total and my chest was gasping for breath and my heart was pounding in my ears.Afterwards, I too was exhausted when I lost the voice of Montgomery and his squire.I followed my judgment vigilantly, turned around, ran back towards the beach, and lay down in a hut in a dense bamboo and vine forest.

I stayed there for a long time, too scared to move, to be honest, too scared to even plan my next move.The surrounding desolate scenery was quiet under the sun, and the only sound near me was the faint buzzing of some small midges that had spotted me.Soon, I felt a dull and silent drifting sound again, which was the rushing sound of sea water washing up on the beach. About an hour later, I heard Montgomery calling my name, far north.This freed me to concentrate on my plan of action.As I understood it at the time, the island was inhabited by the two vivisects and their animalized victims.No doubt they could coerce some victims into their service against me if need be.Both Moreau and Montgomery, I knew, had pistols; and I was unarmed save for a shabby pine club with a little nail on it--which was really nothing more than a ridiculous mace.

I just lay there like this until I started to feel hungry and thirsty.At this moment, I feel heavily that the current situation is really hopeless.I had no means of getting anything edible; I knew nothing of botany to find any edible root or fruit that might be growing all around me.I don't have the tools to trap some of the unique rabbits on the island.I thought about my future over and over again, and I felt more and more bleak and bewildered. Finally, due to my situation, I had to take risks, and I turned to think of the orcs on the island I had met.I tried to find a glimmer of hope in what I could remember about them.One by one I went over everyone I had ever seen, trying to pick out from my memory what might be a helpful omen.

Presently I suddenly heard the barking of a hound, and from this bark I became aware of a new danger.I didn't have time to think, otherwise they might catch me, so I had to grab the mace and rush from my hiding place in the direction of the sound of the Qinghai sea.I remember that the bushes overgrown with thorns pierced like a knife.I broke free, bloody and disheveled, and emerged on the shore of a long inlet that opened to the north. I didn't dare to be negligent, I went straight into the sea, and walked towards the upper part of the bay. After a while, I found that I was no longer in a creek that was knee-deep. Finally, I finally climbed to the west bank. There was a pounding heartbeat in my ears.I tiptoed into the tangle of ferns again, waiting for the end of the matter.I heard dogs barking - only one dog barking - approaching, and when I came into the brambles it barked loudly.I didn't hear any more movement after that, and I thought for a moment: I escaped after all.

Time passed minute by minute, and there was silence.After an hour had passed in peace, I finally regained my courage gradually. At this time, I was no longer so frightened or so pitiful.As it happened, I was past the limit of fear and despair.Now I feel, in fact, that I have lost my life.It is this kind of belief that enables me to face everything and risk everything; I even have a certain desire to meet Moreau face to face.As I went into the water, it occurred to me that, if I was pursued too hard, at least one way of escaping the torment would still be open to me—they could not prevent me from drowning myself so easily.At that time, I already kind of wanted to drown myself.But a curious desire to see how the whole adventure would end, a curious, impersonal, fascinating curiosity, held me back.Running through a dense forest full of thorns and needle-like thorns, I felt pain when I touched it. It was very painful. I stretched my limbs, looked around, and stared at the forest.Then all of a sudden, as if jumping out of the green floral decorations that surrounded the woods, my eyes stumbled upon a black face staring intently at me.

This, I saw, was the ape-like monster that had greeted the launch on the beach.He is cuddling on a slanted branch of a palm tree.I gripped the stick tightly and stood up, facing him.He started babbling and he said, all I could make out at first was "you, you, you," and suddenly he jumped out of the tree, and in a blink of an eye, parting the leaves of the palm tree, he stared at me curiously .I'm not as disgusted with this monster as I am with other orcs I've encountered in the past. "You," he said, "In the boat." He could talk, so he was a man, at least a man like Montgomery's squire.

"Yes," I said, "I came in the boat. From the galleon." "Ah!" he said. His bright restless eyes surveyed me, in turn at my hands, at the stick I was carrying, at my feet, at the places where my coat had been torn, and where the thorns had pricked and scratched my wounds.He seemed puzzled by something.His gaze returned to my hand.He held out his hand and counted slowly on his fingers: "One, two, three, four, five—huh?" For a moment I couldn't figure out what he meant.I later discovered that most orcs had misshapen hands, sometimes missing three fingers.But at the time I guessed that this might be some kind of greeting, so I imitated it as an answer.He grinned with infinite satisfaction, baring his teeth.Then his eyes, which had turned rapidly back and forth, turned again in a blink of an eye.He jumped swiftly and disappeared.The parted palm-tree leaves between which he stood closed again with a heavy swipe.

I parted the jungle branches, and he came out too.I was startled to see that he was swinging gleefully in one of his long, lithe arms a cord of vine stems that dangled in circles from the foliage overhead.His back was facing me. "Hi!" I said. He jumped, bent over, and landed on the ground, where he stood facing me. "I say," I said, "where can I get something to eat?" "Eat!" he said, "cannibalism now." His eyes returned to the swinging rattan rope. "At the little hut." "But where is the hut?" "Oh!" "You know, it's my first time here."

Hearing this, he turned around, said "Follow me," and set off quickly. All his movements and mannerisms were surprisingly swift.I followed him to see how the adventure would end.I guessed that the hut must be the simple shack where he lived with some other orcs.I might find them friendly and find some opportunity to read their minds.I do not yet know how much they have forgotten of the human nature that I think belongs to them. My ape-like companion, with his hands hanging down and his chin jutting forward, trotted hurriedly beside me.I would like to know what memories he has in his mind. "How long have you been on the island?" I said. "How long?" he asked.He repeated the question again, then held up three fingers.This monster is not much different from a fool.I tried to figure out what he meant by that, but it seemed to bore him.After asking him another question or two, he suddenly left my side and hopped to pick some fruit hanging from the tree.He picked a handful of thorny and shelled fruit, and ate the fruit inside the shell as he walked.I noted this with satisfaction, for it at least pointed to a source of sustenance.I tried to ask him some other questions, but his babbled, quick responses were often comically out of line.A few of them answered more appropriately, while others repeated the question like a parrot. I was so engrossed in these strange phenomena that I hardly noticed the path I had traveled.After a while, we came to the charred and brown woods, and just like that, we came to the barren land covered with a yellow-white crust.Bursts of pungent, pungent green smoke curled up and drifted over the open space.Across a bulge of bare rock, to our right, I saw the azure surface of the ocean.The path spiraled down steeply into a narrow ravine sandwiched between two chaotic mounds of gray-black volcanic cinder hills.We are lost in this deep mountain valley. The passage was particularly dark after passing the sulfurous floor that reflected blinding sunlight.The cliffs on both sides became more and more steep, and even joined each other.Huge blobs of green and bright red floated before my eyes. My guide stopped suddenly. "Home," he said, as I stood at the bottom of a sinkhole chasm.At first it was dark to me.I heard some strange noises, rubbed my eyes vigorously with the knuckles of my left hand, and gradually smelled the nasty smell like a poorly cleaned monkey cage.A little further on, there is another opening in the rock, where the slope is relatively gentle, and under the sunshine, it is full of green branches and leaves.On either side, sunlight streamed down through a narrow slit into the central gloom.