Victims of Nimbo Read Online Free PDF

traveled as hard as they could.
    At noon they stopped for a brief break. With her bow, Sarah had brought down a tiny deerlike creature, which they quickly dressed and cooked over a small fire. The meat seemed to put new life into them all.
    Unexpectedly, Teanor suddenly said, “You are a wonderful shot with that bow. None of our people have bows.”
    “How do you fight your enemies, then?”
    “We really don’t. We have no enemies except the Earth Dwellers. And they can’t get at us.”
    Sarah considered that. Then she sat looking up at the trees that towered overhead. “These are the biggest trees I’ve ever seen,” she said.
    He looked at her with surprise in his eyes. “These! Why, these are just saplings!”
    “Saplings?” Abbey cried. “What are you talking about?”
    “These are not big trees,” he protested. “Truly, don’t you have trees this big in your world?”
    “Back in OldWorld, the biggest trees were the sequoias, and these are much bigger than they were.”
    Teanor just shook his head. “I would not want to live in a world that had spindly little trees like this.”
    The two girls looked at each other.
    Sarah said, “Then I’m anxious to see your big trees, if these are small ones.”
    They began their journey again and traveled hard. They stopped only once more, about midafternoon, and Sarah looked about her, surprised. The trees here indeed were bigger! They rose to the sky like towers.
    Teanor saw her looking up. “Well,” he said with satisfaction. “Now you’re seeing something like a tree.”
    “How much farther is your home?” Abbey asked. “I’m exhausted.”
    “It’s not far. We’ll be there in an hour if we move fast.”
    As they trekked through the vast forest, Sarah was more and more astonished. The trees rose hundreds of feet over their heads. And there were no branches for at least fifty feet in the air. She once stopped long enough to touch one and found that the bark was not rough and scaly but smooth and almost moist.
    “It would be hard to climb one of these,” she murmured, looking upward.
    Teanor laughed. “Difficult indeed! And we are safe now, unless we run into a band of wandering Earth Dwellers.”
    “Do they live close to here?”
    “It’s quite a distance to their village, but they come here to hunt the deer and other animals for food. That’s how my people get captured.”
    The ground was level now and covered with fine mosslike grass. Sunshine filtered through the foliage far overhead, and there was a constant murmuring as the wind rustled through the leaves.
    At last Teanor stopped. He took a deep breath, then turned to the girls and smiled. “Well,” he said. “This is my home.”
    Sarah looked about them and saw nothing but the trunks of the enormous trees. “Where is the village?” she asked.
    Teanor laughed again, then pointed upward. “There,” he said.
    Both girls gazed up into the tree. Sarah could see nothing except foliage. Far above them, the first branches grew straight out. The branches were as large as thetrunks of the OldWorld trees she was accustomed to seeing. They spread wide, making a kind of canopy, so that she could not see the branches above.
    “Up there?” Sarah asked.
    “Yes.”
    “You live in a village in the
trees?”
Abbey gasped.
    “That’s why they call us the Cloud People. Sometimes, when the weather is right, the clouds cover the tops of the trees, and we actually live in the clouds. Sometimes above them.”
    “But how do you get up there?” Sarah asked.
    “Like this.” He put two fingers in his mouth and gave a shrill whistle that hurt her ears. It was some sort of a signal, for suddenly a stout looking vine descended from somewhere in the foliage above.
    “This is the way we get up,” he said. He scrambled up the vine as agile as any monkey Sarah had ever seen. But he stopped twenty feet up and smiled down at them. “Well, come on. Are you going to stay there all day?”
    “But—but we