They said something to us. We looked blank. Then they turned as a weak cry came from the other side of the clearing. One of their own staggered out from the bush only to fall flat on his face and lie there unmoving. An arrow, which I recognised as Greystoke’s, projected from his back.
Seeing this, the men became alarmed, though I suppose they had been alarmed all along. One ran out, examined the man, shook his head, and raced back. We were half-lifted, half-dragged along with them in a mad dash through vegetation that tore and ripped our clothes and us. Evidently they had run up against Greystoke, which was not a thing to be recommended at any time. I didn’t know why they burdened themselves with two exhausted old men, but I surmised that it was for no beneficent purpose.
I will not recount in detail that terrible journey. Suffice it to say that we were four days and nights in the jungle, walking all day, trying to sleep at night. We were scratched, bitten, and torn, tormented with itches that wouldn’t stop and sometimes sick from insect bites. We went through almost impenetrable jungle and waded waist-deep in swamps which held hordes of blood-sucking leeches. Half of the time, however, we progressed fairly swiftly along paths whose ease of access convinced me that they must be kept open by regular work parties.
The third day we started up a small mountain. The fourth day we went down it by being let down in a bamboo cage suspended by ropes from a bamboo boom. Below us lay the end of a lake that wound out of sight among the precipices that surrounded it. We were moved along at a fast pace toward a canyon into which the arm of the lake ran. Our captors pulled two dugouts out of concealment and we were paddled into the fjord. After rounding a corner, we saw before us a shore that sloped gently upward to a precipice several miles beyond it. A village of bamboo huts with thatched roofs spread along the shore and some distance inland.
The villagers came running when they saw us. A drum began beating some place, and to its beat we were marched up a narrow street and to a hut near the biggest hut. We were thrust into this, a gate of bamboo bars was lashed to the entrance, and we sat against its back wall while the villagers took turns looking in at us. As a whole, they were a good-looking people, the average of beauty being much higher than that seen in the East End of London, for instance. The women wore only long cloth skirts, though necklaces of shells hung around their necks and their long hair was decorated with flowers. The prepubescent children were stark naked.
Presently, food was brought to us. This consisted of delicious baked fish, roasted pygmy antelope, unleavened bread, and a brew that would under other circumstances have been too sweet for my taste. I am not ashamed to admit that Holmes and I gorged ourselves, devouring everything set before us.
I went to sleep shortly afterward, waking after dusk with a start. A torch flared in a stanchion just outside the entrance, at which two guards stood. Holmes was sitting near it, reading his Practical Handbook of Bee Culture, With Some Observations Upon the Segregation of the Queen. “Holmes,” I began, but he held up his hand for silence. His keen ears had detected a sound a few seconds before mine did. This swelled to a hubbub with the villagers swarming out while the drum beat again. A moment later we saw the cause of the uproar. Six warriors, with Reich and Von Bork among them, were marching toward us. And while we watched curiously the two Germans were shoved into our hut.
Though both were much younger than Holmes and I, they were in equally bad condition — probably, I suppose, because they had not practiced the good old British custom of walking whenever possible. Von Bork refused to talk to us, but Reich, always a gentleman, told us what had happened to his party.
“We too heard the noises and that horrible cry,” he said. “We made our way cautiously toward it, until we saw the carnage in a clearing. There were five dead men sprawled there, and six running in one direction and four in another. Standing with his foot on the chest of the largest corpse was a white man clad only in a leopard-skin. He was the one uttering that awful cry, which I would swear no human throat could make.”
“Der englisch Affenmensch,” Von Bork muttered, his only contribution to the conversation that evening.
“Three of the men had arrows in them; the other two obviously had had their necks broken,” Reich continued. “Von Bork whispered to me the wild man’s identity, and so I whispered to my men to fire at him. Before we could do so, he had leaped up and pulled himself by a branch into a tree, and he was gone. We searched for him for some time without success. Then we started out to the east, but at dusk one of my men fell with an arrow through his neck. The angle of the arrow showed that it had come from above. We looked upward but could see nothing. Then a voice, speaking in excellent German, with a Branden-burger accent yet, ordered us to turn back. We were to march to the southwest. If we did not, one of us would die at dusk each day until no one was left. I asked him why we should do this, but there was no reply. Obviously, he had us entirely at his mercy — which, I suspected, from the looks of him, he utterly lacked.”
“He claims that German officers murdered his wife,” Holmes said.
“That’s a lie!” Reich said indignantly. “More British propaganda! We are not the baby-bayoneting Huns your propaganda office portrays us as being!”
“There are some bad apples in every barrel,” Holmes replied coolly.
Reich looked as if something had suddenly disturbed him. I thought it was a gas pain, but he said, “So, then, you met Greystoke! He told you this! But why did he desert you, leave you to fall into the hands of these savages?”
“I don’t know,” Holmes said. “Please carry on with your story.”
“My first concern was the safety and well-being of my men. To have ignored Greystoke would have been to be brave but stupid. So I ordered the march to the southwest. After two days if became evident that Greystoke intended for us to starve to death. All our food was stolen that night, and we dared not leave the line of march to hunt, even though I doubt that we would have been able to shoot anything. The evening of the second day, I called out, begging that he let us at least hunt for food. He must have had some pangs of conscience, some mercy in him after all. That morning we woke to find a freshly killed wild pig, one of those orange-bristled swine, in the center of the camp. From somewhere in the branches overhead his voice came mockingly. ‘Pigs should eat pigs!’
“And so we struggled southwestward until today. We were attacked by these people. Greystoke had not ordered us to lay down our arms, so we gave a good account of ourselves. But only Von Bork and I survived, and we were knocked unconscious by the flats of their axes. And marched here, the Lord only knows for what end.”
“I suspect that the Lord of the Jungle, one of Greystoke’s unofficial titles, knows,” Holmes said glumly.
Nine
If Greystoke did know, he did not appear to tell us what to expect. Several days passed while we slept and ate and talked to Reich. Von Bork continued to ignore us, even though Holmes several times addressed him. Holmes asked him about his health, which I thought a strange concern for a man who had not killed us only because he lacked the opportunity.
Holmes seemed especially interested in his left eye, once coming up to within a few inches of it and staring at it. Von Bork became enraged at this close scrutiny.
“Get away from me, British swine!” he yelled. “Or I will ruin both of your eyes!”
“Permit Dr. Watson to examine it,” Holmes said. “He might be able to save it.”
“I want no incompetent English physician poking around it,” Von Bork said.
I became so indignant that I lectured him on the very high standards of British medicine, but he only turned his back on me. Holmes chuckled at this and winked at me.
At the end of the week, we were allowed to leave the hut during the day, unaccompanied by guards. Holmes and I were not restrained in any way, though the Germans were hobbled with shackles so that they could not walk very fast. Apparently, our captors decided that Holmes and I were too old to give them much of a run for their money.
We took advantage of our comparative freedom to stroll around the village, inspecting everything and also attempting to learn the language.
“I don’t know what family it belongs to,” Holmes said. “But it is related neither to Cornish nor Chaldean, of that I’m sure.”
Holmes was also interested in the white china of these people, which represented their highest art form. The black figures and designs they painted upon it reminded me somewhat of early Greek vase paintings. The vases and dishes were formed from kaolin deposits which existed to the north near the precipices. I mention this only because the white clay was to play an important part in our salvation in the near future.
At the end of the second week, Holmes, a superb linguist, had attained some fluency in the speech of our captors. “It belongs to a completely unknown language family,” he said. “But there are certain words which, degenerated though they are, obviously come from ancient Persian. I would say that at one time these people had contact with a wandering party of descendants of Darius. The party settled down here, and these people borrowed some words from their idiom.”
The village consisted of a hundred huts arranged in concentric circles. Each held a family ranging from two to eight members. Their fields lay north of the village on the slopes leading up to the precipices. The stock consisted of goats, pigs, and dwarf antelopes. Their alcoholic drink was a sort of mead made from the honey of wild bees. A few specimens of these ventured near the village, and Holmes secured some for study. They were about an inch long, striped black and white, and were armed with a long venom-ejecting barb. Holmes declared that they were of a new species, and he saw no reason not to classify them as Apis holmesi.
Once a week a party set out to the hills to collect honey. Its members were always clad in leather clothing and gloves and wore veils over their hats. Holmes asked permission to accompany them, explaining that he was wise in the ways of bees. To his disappointment, they refused him. A further inquiry by him resulted in the information that there was a negotiable, though difficult, pass through the precipices. It was used only for emergency purposes because of the vast number of bees that filled the narrow pass. Holmes obtained his data by questioning a child. Apparently, the adults had not thought to tell their young to keep silent about this means of exit.
“The bee-warding equipment is kept locked up in their temple,” Holmes said. “And that makes it impossible to obtain it for an escape attempt.”
The temple was the great hut in the village’s centre. We were not allowed to enter it or even to approach it within fifty feet. Through some discreet inquiries, and unashamed eavesdropping, Holmes discovered that the high priestess-and-queen lived within the temple. We had never seen her nor were we likely to do so. She had been born in the temple and was to reside there until she died. Just why she was so restricted Holmes could not determine. His theory was that she was a sort of hostage to the gods.
“Perhaps, Watson, she is confined because of a superstition that arose after the catastrophe which their myths say deluged this land and the great civilisation it harboured. The fishermen tell me that they often see on the bottom of this lake the sunken ruins of the stone houses in which their ancestors lived. A curse was laid upon the land, they say, and they hint that only by keeping the high priestess-cum-queen inviolate, unseen by profane eyes, untouched by anyone after pubescence, can the wrath of the gods be averted. They are cagey in what they say, so I have had to surmise certain aspects of their religion.”
“That’s terrible!” I said.
“The deluge?”
“No, that a woman should be denied freedom and love.”
“She has a name, but I have never overheard it. They refer to her as The Beautiful One.”
“Is there nothing we can do for her?” I said.
“I do not know that she wants to be helped. You must not allow your well-known gallantry to endanger us. But to satisfy a legitimate scientific interest, if anthropology is a science, we could perhaps attempt a look inside the temple. Its roof has a large circular hole in its center. If we could get near the top of the high tree about twenty yards from it, we could look down into the building.”
“With the whole village watching us?” I said. “No, Holmes, it is impossible to get up the tree unobserved during the day. And if we did so during the night, we could see nothing because of the darkness. In any event, it would probably mean instantaneous death even to make the attempt.”
“There are torches lit in the building at night,” he said. “Come, Watson, if you have no taste for this arboreal adventure, I shall go it alone.”
And that was why, despite my deep misgivings, we climbed that towering tree on a cloudy night. After Von Bork and Reich had fallen asleep and our guards, had dozed off and the village was silent except for a chanting in the temple, we crept out of our hut. Holmes had hidden a rope the day before, but even with this it was no easy task. We were not youths of twenty, agile as monkeys and as fearless aloft. Holmes threw the weighted end of the rope over the lowest branch, which was twenty feet up, and tied the two ends together.
Then, grasping the rope with both hands, and bracing his feet against the trunk, he half-walked, almost perpendicular to the trunk, up the tree. On reaching the branch, he rested for a long time while he gasped for breath so loudly that I feared he would wake up the nearest villagers. When he was quite recovered, he called down to me to make the ascent. Since I was heavier and several years older, and lacked his feline muscles, having more the physique of a bear, I experienced great difficulty in getting up. I wrapped my legs around the rope — no walking at a ninety-degree angle to the tree for me — and painfully and gaspingly hauled myself up. But I persisted — after all, I am British — and Holmes pulled me up at the final stage of what I was beginning to fear was my final journey.
After resting, we made a somewhat easier ascent via the branches to a position about ten feet below the top of the tree. From there we could look almost directly down through the hole in the middle of the roof. The torches within enabled us to see its interior quite clearly.
Both of us gasped when we saw the woman standing in the centre of the building by a stone altar. She was a beautiful woman, surely one of the daintiest things that ever graced this planet. She had long golden hair and eyes that looked dark from where we sat but which, we later found out, were a deep grey. She was wearing nothing except a necklace of some stones that sparkled as she moved. Though I was fascinated, I also felt something of shame, as if I were a peeping tom. I had to remind myself that the women wore nothing above the waist in their everyday attire and that when they swam in the lake they wore nothing at all. So we were doing nothing immoral by this spying. Despite this reasoning, my face (and other things) felt inflamed.13
She stood there, doing nothing for a long time, which I expected would make Holmes impatient. He did not stir or make any comment, so I suppose that this time he did not mind a lack of action. The priestesses chanted and the priests walked around in a circle making signs with their hands and their fingers. Then a bound he-goat was brought in and placed on the altar, and, after some more mumbo-jumbo, the woman cut its throat. The blood was caught in a golden bowl and passed around in a sort of communion, the woman drinking first.
“A most unsanitary arrangement,” I murmured to Holmes.
“These people are, nevertheless, somewhat cleaner than your average Londoner,” Holmes replied. “And much more cleanly than your Scots peasant.”
I was about to take umbrage at this, since I am of Scots descent on my mother’s side. Holmes knew both this and my sensitivity about it. He had been making too many remarks of this nature recently, and though I attributed them to irritability arising from nicotine withdrawal, I was, to use an American phrase, getting fed up with them. I was about to remonstrate when my heart leaped into my throat and choked me.
A hand had come from above and clamped down upon my shoulder. I knew that it wasn’t Holmes’ because I could see
both of his hands.
Ten
Holmes almost fell off the branch but was saved by another hand, which grasped him by the collar of his shirt. A familiar voice said, “Silence!”
“Greystoke!” I gasped. And then, remembering that, after all, he was a duke, I said, “Your pardon. I mean, Your Grace.”
“What are you doing up here, you baboon!” Holmes said.
I was shocked at this, though I knew that Holmes spoke thus only because he must have been thoroughly frightened. To address a high British nobleman in this manner was not his custom.
“Tut, tut, Holmes,” I said.
“Tut, tut yourself,” he replied. “He’s not paying me a fee! He’s no client of mine. Besides, I doubt that he is entitled to his title!”
A growl that lifted the hairs on the back of my neck came from above. It was followed by the descent of the duke’s heavy body upon our branch, which bent alarmingly. But Greystoke squatted upon it, his hands free, with all the ease of the baboon he had been accused of being.
“What does that last remark mean?” he said.
At that moment the moon broke through the clouds. A ray fell upon Holmes’ face, which was as pale as when he had been playing the dying detective. He said, “This is neither the time nor the place for an investigation of your credentials. We are in a desperate plight, and...”
“You don’t realise how desperate,” Greystoke said. “I usually abide by human laws when I am in civilisation or among the black blood-brothers of my ranch in East Africa. But when I am in my larger estate, that of Central Africa, when I am in the jungle, where I have a higher rank even than duke, where, to put it simply, I am the king, where I revert to my primal and happiest state, that of a great ape...”
The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Peerless Peer Page 6
