Free Ecce and Old Earth by Jack Vance

concentrate on what must be done. Shattorak still lay a thousand miles to the west; Glawen could not hope to reach the base before dark, and nighttime would not be optimum for his arrival. He slowed the Skyrie to a hundred-mile-an-hour drift along the river, which allowed him opportunity to survey the unfolding panorama.
    For a time the landscape consisted of olive-green river to his left hand and swamps to his right. On the slime, families of flat gray animals slid about on flaps attached to their six legs. They browsed on young reeds, moving sluggishly until a heavy tentacle with an eye at the tip thrust up from the mud, at which they darted away at astonishing speed, so that the tentacle struck down into the mud defeated.
    The river embarked on a series of meandering loops, first far to the south, then back an equal distance to the north. Glawen, consulting his charts, struck off across the intervening tongues of land: for the most part dense jungle choked over with trees. Occasionally a rounded hummock rose to an elevation of as much as fifty feet. Sometimes the summits lacked vegetation, in which case each was inhabited by a heavy-headed beast with a lithe slate-gray body: a creature similar to the bardicant of Deucas, thought Glawen. As the Skyrie drifted past he noticed that the summit was cropped clean of vegetation by a band of waddling russet rodents, bristling with short heavy spines. The stone-tiger surveyed the troop with a lofty detachment, and turned itself away, evidently without appetite for the: creatures: a surprise to Glawen; on Deucas the bardicant devoured anything which came its way with undiscriminating voracity.
    From the west drifted heavy gray banks of clouds, trailing curtains of rain across the landscape. A sudden squall struck the Skyrie and buffeted it sidewise, rocking and sliding, followed a moment later by a freshet of rain, so that Glawen could no longer see so much as the river below.
    For an hour the rain streamed down upon the land, then drifted away to the east, leaving open sky overhead. Syrene floated low toward a tumble of angry black clouds; Lorca and Sing pursued their own erratic dance off to the side. To the west and slightly north, Glawen made out the silhouette of Shattorak: a dim brooding shadow on the horizon. Glawen took the Skyrie down at a slant to the river to fly close beside the right bank, almost grazing the surface, to make the Skyrie as inconspicuous as possible to any detectors which might be active on the summit of Shattorak.
    Glawen flew on while Syrene sank into a welter of clouds. The river channel, at this point, was two miles wide. Tremulous fields of gray slime to either side supported tufts of black reeds tipped with pompons of blue silk, spongy dendrons holding aloft a pair of enormous black leaves. Along the surface ran multiple-legged skimmers in search of insects and mud worms. Beneath the slime another sort waited, invisible save for a periscopic eye barely protruding above the surface, or sometimes concealed among the reeds. When an unwary skimmer ventured near, the tentacle lifted high and darted down to seize the victim and then drag it below the surface. The torpid interval had passed; the inhabitants of Ecce were out in full force: feeding, attacking, fighting or fleeing, each to its particular habit.
    Troops of mud-walkers climbed through the trees, or strode across the slime on feathery feet, prodding the muck with long lances in order to gaff and retrieve a mud worm or some other morsel. Such creatures were representative of a more or less andromorphic genus prevalent everywhere, in many aspects and species, across Cadwal. These 'mud-walkers' stood seven feet tall on spindly double-jointed legs. Their high narrow heads were surmounted with caste-markers of colored fronds; black fur grew in tufts and blotches from hard hides which shone with a luster sometimes lavender, sometimes golden-brown. Despite a seeming contempt for discipline, they went