A sudden urge surged
through me to seize her and strain her to my bosom and cover her
hot young lips with the kisses of a real love, but I did not do so,
for I knew that I did not love her; and to have kissed her thus,
with passion, would have been to inflict a great wrong upon her
who had offered her life for mine.
No, Ajor should be as safe with me as with her own mother, if she
had one, which I was inclined to doubt, even though she told me that
she had once been a babe and hidden by her mother. I had come to
doubt if there was such a thing as a mother in Caspak, a mother
such as we know. From the Bo-lu to the Kro-lu there is no word
which corresponds with our word mother. They speak of ata and
cor sva jo, meaning reproduction and from the beginning, and point
toward the south; but no one has a mother.
After considerable difficulty we gained what we thought was our
cave, only to find that it was not, and then we realized that we
were lost in the labyrinthine mazes of the great cavern. We retraced
our steps and sought the point from which we had started, but only
succeeded in losing ourselves the more. Ajor was aghast--not so
much from fear of our predicament; but that she should have failed
in the functioning of that wonderful sense she possessed in common
with most other creatures Caspakian, which makes it possible for
them to move unerringly from place to place without compass or
guide.
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