Harry Smith clapped his friend Dr. Abraham on the back—who, having drunk a little too much punch, like his friend, nodded approvingly.
“What the Devil did he say, the Divine Master?” demanded the billionaire, a trifle drunk.
Abraham Goldry shrugged his shoulders and said: “Have a round of punch distributed. That’ll remind you.”
But Harry collected himself, sticking to his idea. “The Divine Master said...raise your glasses and drink to peace... There, ladies and gentlemen. We leave tomorrow, the sixteenth of April, at sunrise. Go to bed.”
That brilliant discourse was acclaimed by those who understood any of it, who were not very numerous, but the others, carried away by good cheer and drink, applauded confidently.
Everyone followed the billionaire’s advice and retired to the tents. Soon, sleep came, bringing well-earned rest to all. In the Malay’s huts, calm had reigned for some time; they were to depart in the middle of the night. Indeed, shortly after the feast, the Damned hunters slipped silently into the forest and plunged into it like shadows, after the fashion of apes.
The Malays only set foot on the ground when means of advancing through the branches and creepers were lacking. Thick darkness reigned in the ocean of foliage, but the hunters were like wild beasts. They could see well enough to navigate, and they were careful, while advancing, to leave traces of their passage—broken branches, torn-up creepers, tree-trunks marked with a cut. The three women kept company with their brother and husbands. Among the natives of the Malaysian islands, sex is only distinguished by coiffure, the costume being the same for both sexes.
Without a word, the little troop marched all night. At sunrise, it had covered about two miles without any incident. They had heard tigers roaring, snakes hissing and hectic pursuits beneath their feet, but no attack had taken place. At daybreak the little troop halted and gathered in the low branches of an enormous tulip-tree. The women prepared an uncomplicated meal—a handful of rice, a few bananas and a draught of palm-wine.
Suddenly, To Wang raised his hand and made a sign biding them to listen. Mastication ceased. A clear silvery noise was audible, in a continuous fashion.
“Spring,” said Eg Merh laconically, and turned to his sister. “Rava, would you like to go see?”
The young woman took the palm-wine bottle that they had just emptied drew away, leaping from branch to branch like a squirrel.
To Wang made a sign to his companions bidding them to wait, and retraced his steps; having covered a certain distance he lay down on a branch and listened; after a minute he got up, with a satisfied expression. In the distance, a long way behind, the sounds of the ax-blows struck by the route-clearers were echoing. He went back to his companions.
“Ker Mach,” he said, “go back and guide the masters here, since there’s a spring; they can camp here this evening.”
Ker Mach, having made sure that his weapons were in good condition, was getting ready to leave when a terrible scream rang out from the direction in which Rava had gone. In the blink of an eye they were all on their feet, and bounded like tigers in the direction of the spring.
Suddenly, in the green velvet curtain of the forest, a profound gash broke the ground, interrupting the mass of foliage and creepers. On the other side of the ragged ravine, a rocky wall rose up thirty meters, and at the base of that gigantic wall of rock, a babbling steam of pure fresh water was running through the heaped-up blocks. To reach the bottom of the ravine the descent was easy, the terrain being steep but practicable, and lianas extending from the forest reaching down to the bottom of the abyss, in search of the moisture necessary to their existence.
Insensitive to the marvels of the location and paying no heed to the scenery, the Malays wanted to find out immediately where Rava was, and why she had screamed.
Terrible roars caused them to raise their heads. At the summit of the granite wall, twenty orangutans of large stature were standing. At the sight of the hunters they uttered cries and beat their breasts with their fists, producing a sound like the rumble of thunder.
Soon, their attention was drawn to the bottom of the crevasse, on the far side of the stream; a colossal ape was moving along the base of the rock, searching for a way out in order to rejoin his companions—and over his shoulder, folded in two, as Rava’s body, hanging limply, as if broken. She was undoubtedly unconscious.
Finally, the ape found what he was looking for. An enormous liana descended from the top of the wall to within his reach. He seized it and began to scale the rocks, toward his companions, who were encouraging him with their cries. The Malays could not fire on the orangutan abductor without the risk of killing Rava.
“Fire on the others!” their chief commanded.
The rifles commenced a sustained fire on the apes. Two fell, disappearing behind the escarpment. At that moment, the huge ape arrived at the summit and set foot on the edge. He turned round, drew himself up to his full height and lifted his victim into the air—and the hairy giant uttered a roar, like a cry of war and victory:
“Ouha! Ouha! Ouha!”
Behind him, the great apes reappeared, and there was an immense, quasi-human and guttural acclamation, as if to a glorious leader:
“Ouha! Ouha! Ouha!”
X. The Virgin Forest of Borneo
The virgin forest! Those words generally evoke an idea of vegetative splendor, a place where gigantic trees support leafy foliage and starry lines of corollas. A luxuriant vegetation displays a thick carpet of moss and flowers; the sun, always radiant, illuminates that monstrous paradise, causing the most dazzling colors of fruits and magical birds to sparkle.
There is always a considerable distance between the enchantment of dreams and reality.
On leaving Riddle-Temple, the explorers’ column had moved into a terrain that was fairly hospitable to marching. In the neighborhood of the Temple, the felling undertaken for the construction of the palisade had thinned out the forest. After a mile or so, however, the spectacle changed completely and the Muni-Wali brothers’ woodcutters were obliged to begin the struggle.
Mabel, who had been astonished at first that they were setting out on foot, understood the material impossibility of using horses in the virgin forest—which is to say, a place in which, perhaps for thousands of years, the intense vegetation of the tropical regions has reigned as absolute mistress. The trees, whatever their species, do not grow in soil, but in a humus of plants and dead wood heaped up by time in chaotic agglomeration.
From a tree felled by age or by lightning, which rots on the ground in the midst of a mass of parasitic vegetation, shoots are born, which grow rapidly, reaching as best they can toward the sun, its light and heat—for beneath the virgin forest, the sunlight never penetrates. Infinitely extended toward all parts of the horizon, entangled branches and creepers link the crowns of the trees together, forming a kind of uneven platform of quivering vegetation through the woods, which light does not penetrate.
A greenish-blue penumbra reigns beneath that mysterious foliage. At the feet of centenarian trees, on a litter of decomposing plants, which is sometimes as much as twenty meters thick, enormous mushrooms and poisonous plants grow. Splendid orchids cling to the rough and worm-eaten bark of the trees, hanging down, their form and color indescribably bizarre.
In that abysm of vegetable debris, everywhere the ground offers a steep ravine, the torrential waters of tropical storms create marshes or swamps. There, lurking amid the heaped-up plants, swarms an entire society of horrible and venomous reptiles. The ground, by contrast, forms dry tumescences serving as the abode and realm of terrible red ants whose size sometimes attains three centimeters.
In addition to the reptiles, there are millions of flies of every kind and every size; it is not always the largest that are the most intolerable or the most dangerous. One can see spiders with bodies the size of hen’s eggs scuttling, centipedes twenty centimeters long, cockroaches and superb fireflies that shine like stars by night.
A
ll of that intense, hectic superb and horrible life flies and circles incessantly, in ferocious harassment. Up above, very high, toward the sun and the light, other creatures circulate, including birds of every size, with sparkling plumage shining with every color of the prism. The branches and creepers are heavily laden with flowers and fruits. Up above, there are cries and songs; down below, silence, decomposition and death.
Fortunately, from time to time, in the midst of that mortal desert, a delightful oasis appears.
What has created it? A tornado, or lightning.
A tornado uproots and breaks everything, sometimes over a space of several square miles, leaving nothing in a place where extravagant vegetation once reigned but a flat desert cleared of all growth.
Lightning pulverizes and ignites, after months of dryness; a fire ignited by lightning finds ready fuel; then the forest catches fire; it is a grandiose and terrible spectacle. The giants of the forest, eaten away by the fire from base to summit, explode like shells, projecting veritable jets of sap and resin, which burn like alcohol. Then, everything flees and disperses: insects, large mammals, reptiles and birds all escape, or fall victim to the scourge.
Then, where the formidable agglomeration of vegetable and animal life of every sort once rose up, there are immense plains of ash and scoria. However, a few weeks later, grasses grow, seeds arrive, borne from who knows where on the wind, and sprout in the soil fertilized by the fire. Soon, all that enormous life recommences. For a few years, however, there are veritable Edens, contrasted by their freshness and the light that still penetrates them, with the terrible dreadful forest that surrounds them—but the swarming life, wild and uncultivated, reckless and superabundant, invades them again; and beneath the heavy tropical sun, the frightful Hell of verdure, flowers, poisons, putrefaction and extraordinary beasts with nightmarish muzzles, eyes and paws, begins again.
XI. In the Burned Plain
Through the virgin forest the long column of hunters advanced, marching, sliding or crawling in the midst of that desert of luxuriant fermentations. Mabel, the superb creature of luxury, marched in silence, nauseated, her aching head enveloped in triple gauze, demanding by means of gestures the assistance of her two mendicant of amour: Archibald, red-faced, sweating and breathless but still solid in spite of it; and Silven Gorden, cool, dry, sure-footed and eagle-eyed.
The pioneers were, at any rate, were striving to render the route practicable. The Malays ahead of them were chasing away all the vermin of the bogs, which they filled in with bundles of sticks and tree-trunks felled by the axes of the Muni-Wali brothers’ woodcutters. In spite of that, the column was scarcely moving forward three or four miles a day.
By chance, on the sixth day, they discovered a large plain: a vast area presumably denuded by a fire, of which no trace remained; a clearing without visible bounds, which extended as far as the eye could see to the horizon. That was a relief for the travelers. Harry Smith declared that they would rest there for a day while the Malays scouted ahead.
Since the abduction of Rava the hunters had been crazed with fury, and it had required all of Major Bennett’s authority to prevent them from quitting the expedition in order to chase after the apes without delay.
Suddenly, a stream appeared zigzagging through the tall grass, and the troop of anthropoid-hunters paused to make camp on its banks.
XII. Ouha’s Humanity
Beyond that plain, which extended for a dozen kilometers, the forest recommenced, but differently. The ground, which rose up at the horizon, silhouetted against a cloudless sky, was uneven and tormented, leaving traces everywhere of the volcanic origin of the region. The trees were more scattered, thick bushes alternating with arid, sandy spaces. Numerous springs emerged from the bases of the hills, running away in petty torrents or small cascades, soon forming a stream that hollowed out a bed in a more friable soil, going to join the river Am-Aukang fifty miles away, which flows into the sea a few miles from Imbuk. A sequence of undulations, alternating valleys with the slopes of the mountain chain, formed a long sequence of gradients before reaching the dorsal spine of the highest peaks.
Each of these valleys formed a green grassland, shaded by clumps of woodland, the essences of which were mostly useful or precious. Breadfruit trees, coconut palms, tulip-trees and wild bananas alternated with flame-trees with purple and gold flowers and tamarind-trees. Here and there were lethifers,10 jambosas with refreshing fruits, yams with prodigious alimentary roots, precious sago-tress and durians with a fetid odor but a delicious taste. There were bamboos with tasty pith, and the chatny, a nourishing vegetable that grows everywhere in the Malaysian islands.
It was there that, for centuries, the race of orangutans had propagated, sheltered from the Dutch conquest and the island’s natives. It was there that Ouha, the last offspring of a human hybridization, reigned. The orangs’ quest for woman does not date from our era; at all times, the anthropoids have abducted women and made them their mates. It goes without saying that assimilation was easy with an indigenous people of simian appearance.
Three generations ago, Ouha’s ancestor had succeeded in inducting into his tribe a superb Malabar woman run aground, no one knows how, in Borneo, and who voluntarily abandoned the plantation on which she was employed, in order not to do anything any longer, and follow a magnificent ape into the forest. It was not rare, in that era, when slavery was still prevalent, to see a slave leave her master’s plantation of her own volition for a superbly virile orangutan who took her fancy. The mentality of a native does not, after all, far surpass that of an orangutan, and for women there was a lubricious advantage, apes having a real predominance over humans in the respect.11
From that union, a singular hybrid was born, a mixture of degenerate ape and Oceanian woman. That ape languished and died young, but not without having fecundated a female orangutan, who produced a normal ape. The latter mated with one of his peers, and from that union Ouha was born, who manifested considerable physical similarities with ancestress. His stature was taller and straighter, his encephalum more developed; it was easier for him to walk upright, and his intelligence was more cunning than that of his fellows.
We humans are very proud of our intelligence, but with a little observation, we could see that every other living being also has an intelligence—to which we have given the name of instinct, although, in reality, it is an authentic intelligence that directs and regulates their needs, beyond which it is unnecessary for them to go, since their nature, their appetites and their amours demand no more of it.
Humans have, by degrees, arrived at a superiority, if it is one: a mind that generally tends to do everything that is harmful to their hygiene, their amour and the procreation of their species. Animals, by contrast, never do anything in opposition to good sense. Humans know that alcohol, opium and tobacco are bad for their health, and that they induce degeneration in the race, and yet they are ingenious in their manufacture and use them immoderately. Apes are certainly the animals most similar to humans, and easily assimilate our vices, but they are unfamiliar with them, and in order for them to smoke or get drunk, it is necessary for them to be taught by humans.
There is, moreover, in the mind of an ape, in addition to a tendency to imitation—which is primarily a kind of play—a cunning superior to that of humans, for it is able, thanks to its mask, to conceal itself perfectly. When a man thinks about certain actions or mulls over certain ideas that he would rather hide, in spite of striving to let nothing show, a slight curl of the lip or a gleam in the eye will betray him. An ape, however, offers no evidence at all. Only anger is capable of animating that expressionless face; suddenly without any warning, one of the animal’s four arms strikes or grips.
With regard to Ouha, that was one of the characteristics of his human descent; his mouth had a vague smile, which emphasized the crease of his eyelids. Dr. Abraham Goldry had observed accurately when he had found an anatomical resemblance between Ouha and prehistoric humans. That orangutan was, in t
ruth, almost a man, and considerably superior even to some white, black or yellow individuals of the human species. His incontestable supremacy over the others apes derived from that.
XIII. A Napoleonic Soul in an Ape
The orangutan sovereign Ouha, an anthropoid closer than any of his relatives to humanity, exercised over his ape tribe the absolute authority of a Caesar, Julius or Augustus, over humans tamed by his genius. No one, even among the strongest of those robust and lithe individuals who commanded incursions and led enterprises through the forest, followed by their feebler allies and clients, dared to disobey the orders of the King or oppose any resistance to his desires, no matter how tyrannical and imperious they might sometimes be.
Ouha, an autocrat of genius, knew how to make use of the slightest powers, to attach recognized superiorities to himself by means of prerogatives, genuine missions and even distinctions, grating them genuine simian troops to command, and giving places near to himself to those whose imperious sagacity distinguished them from the crowd. A veritable discipline, a simple mechanism of which the pride of chiefs was the pivot, regulated the thousand and some individuals, males and female, of the city of the apes.
Furthermore, in periods of calm, the dignitaries could indulge their slothful indolence on the reserves of fruits and provisions heaped up in abundance for Ouha, the idle sovereign, fond of hunting in the immense forest, making war on neighboring tribes, and ambitious above all for trophies taken from humans, to whom—perhaps enviously—he strove to get close and whom he pursued with a hatred or admiration, conscious or not, that became characteristic.
Ouha, King of the Apes Page 5
