d. "Boats! Many, many boats!"

Juag and I leaped to our feet; but our little craft had now dropped to
the trough, and we could see nothing but walls of water close upon
either hand. We waited for the next wave to lift us, and when it did
we strained our eyes in the direction that Dian had indicated. Sure
enough, scarce half a mile away were several boats, and scattered far
and wide behind us as far as we could see were many others! We could
not make them out in the distance or in the brief glimpse that we
caught of them before we were plunged again into the next wave canon;
but they were boats.

And in them must be human beings like ourselves.

CHAPTER XIII

RACING FOR LIFE

At last the sea subsided, and we were able to get a better view of the
armada of small boats in our wake. There must have been two hundred of
them. Juag said that he had never seen so many boats before in all his
life. Where had they come from? Juag was first to hazard a guess.

"Hooja," he said, "was building many boats to carry his warriors to the
great river and up it toward Sari. He was building them with almost
all his warriors and many slaves upon the Island of Trees. No one else
in all the history of Pellucidar has ever built so many boats as they
told me Hooja was building. These must be Hooja's boats."

"And they were blown out to sea by the great storm just as we were,"
suggested Dian.

"There can be no better explanation of them," I agreed.

"What shall we do?" asked Juag.

"Suppose we make sure that they are really Hooja's people," suggested
Dian. "It may be that they are not, and that if we run away from them
before we learn definitely who they are, we shall be running away from
a chance to live and find the mainland. They may be a people of whom
we have never even heard, and if so we can ask them to help us--if they
know the way to the mainland."

"Which they will not,' interposed Juag.

"Well," I said, "it can't make our predicament any more trying to wait
until we find out who they are. They are heading for us now.
Evidently they have spied our sail, and guess that we do not belong to
their fleet."

"They probably want to ask the way to the mainland themselves," said
Juag, who was nothing if not a pessimist.

"If they want to catch us, they can do it if they can paddle faster
than we can sail," I said. "If we let them come close enough to
discover their identity, and can then sail faster than they c