星球大战 第十一章(5)
Perhaps the latter reason, or both, or a combination of causes still unknown had been responsible for whatever race had once risen from satellite four’s jungles, only to disappear quietly long before the first human explorer set foot on the tiny world.Little was known of them save that they left a number of impressive monuments, and that they were one of the many races which had aspired to the stars only to have their desperate reach fall short.
Now all that remained were the mounds and foliage-clad clumps formed by jungle-covered buildings. But thought they had sunk back into the dust, their artifacts and their world continued to serve an important purpose.
Strange cries and barely perceptible moans sounded from every tree and copse; hoots and growls and strange mutterings issued from creatures content to remain concealed in the dense undergrowth. Whenever dawn broke over moon the fourth, heralding one of its long days, an especially feral chorus of shrieks and weirdly modulated screams would resound through the thick mist.
Even stranger sounds surged continually from one particular place. Here lay the most impressive of those edifices, which a vanished race had raised toward the heavens. It was a temple, a roughly pyramidal structure so colossal that it seemed impossible it could have been built without the aid of modern gravitonic construction techniques. Yet all evidence pointed only to simple machines, hand technology— and, perhaps, devices alien and long lost.
While the science of this moon’s inhabitants had led them to a dead end as far as offworld travel was concerned, they had produced several discoveries which in certain ways surpassed similar Imperial accomplishments—one of which involved a still unexplained method of cutting and transporting gargantuan blocks of stone from the crust of the moon.
From these monstrous blocks of solid rock, the massive temple had been constructed. The jungle had scaled even its soaring crest, clothing it in rich green and brown. Only near its base, in the temple front, did the jungle slide away completely, to reveal a long, dark entrance cut by its builders and enlarged to suit the needs of the structure’s present occupants.
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