The old ape woman chattered from that vine where Kwa himself had swung:
"Kwa! Kwa! Big brother!"
There was hysteria in her voice; yet a certain joy, an unmistakable hope. To all animals death, after all, is merely something incidental to living. The living's the thing. Kwa was still alive.
His position had hardly shifted from the very beginning of the fight. You could see the same muscles straining in his back, the same bulges in his shoulders and upper arms. He rode like a cowboy in a rodeo and the horse he rode was a killer, an outlaw of outlaws.
But then it was seen that his right arm was no longer engaged in merely holding on. With his left hand he still kept his grip on the lethal snout of the big saurian. Not once had Sobek been able to slip that hold, shake itself free. But now with his right hand Kwa was otherwise, engaged. His right arm jerked and jerked again.
Slowly, Sobek was seen to yield his head—fighting, bucking, lashing; but turning up at last the yard-wide pallor of his throat. And only then could the watchers see that the throat was cut, that it was pulsing blood.
In a final flurry, Sobek whipped the pool into a geyser of bloody froth—so thick and high that Kwa completely disappeared. He was gone—for a second, then another, of straining suspense.
While Sobek, meantime, spun in a tightening whirlpool.
It was the small blue kingfisher that discovered Kwa first. Kwa may have been flung for a long dive under water.
IN any case, he'd come up out of sight of most of the gallery. He was still in deep water, but he was close under one of the banks where there was a considerable scour; and where, at the same time, there was a heavy overhang of brush and of broad-leaved creepers.
Kwa was pawing at this growth in an effort to pull himself out and was making poor play at it when the kingfisher set up her racket again. First to Kwa, then up and around, clamoring that help was needed now if it ever was.
As by an inspiration she was drawn to the big Tembo standing there. To the tusker she may have been, at that, like a messenger from some higher plane. The kingfisher flashing about him—scolding him; telling him what to do—the elephant chief lumbered forward into the pool.
The water was deep. It was getting deeper. But the bottom was sound.
The elephant bent his trunk at last under Kwa and supported him.
Down at the other end of the pool, by this time, the buffalo were crowded up, pawing and snorting, while they watched that which had been Sobek stranded on a sandbank.
There were already a dozen jack crows—the jungle undertakers—on a nearby snag—
By and by, Kwa found himself seated on the edge of the little river above the pool. He wasn't sure how he'd got there. But there he was, and his scarred legs were in the healing water where they ought to be.
All around him, on both sides of the stream, which was narrow here, he could sense the presence of much company.
Kwa spoke up—in the language of the Ape Men, the Mu.
"Wah!" he said. "I am Kwa. Kwa of the Ape People. Do you know me?"
There was a whisper: "You are Kwa. You are our big brother."
CHAPTER IV
MENACE
IT was good to rest here in the shade of the jungle at the side of the little river and renew acquaintance with the jungle tribes.
Like most of the streams coming down from the vast and complicated folds of that great mountain-mass known as Sango Lobango, this stream was warm; and the water of it, while palatable, had curative qualities known to the dwellers in the Devil Bush since the world began.
Deer that had been wounded by a poison arrow would race miles against death to find the healing water. Buffalo, elephants, antelope, leopards—gored and otherwise lacerated in the annual mating festivals—would come here to lave their wounds.
Kwa knew this, as did all the friends of the Mu—the Ape People. Kwa kept his wounded legs in the little stream. The wounds would be healing fast.
Meantime, there was an abundance of food. The old ape-woman—the Engl-eco, or chimpanzee—saw to that. Her name was a faint whistling sound, soft as the lisping of a young honey-bird just learning to sing. So "Faint Whistle" was what Kwa called her in his thought. She was his nurse—bright-eyed, concentrated, understanding.
In jungle interchange, almost all animals, of the more highly developed strains, had two forms of speech. One of these would be tribal, articulate and often noisy. But, underlying the tribal speech, there was always that other, mostly silent, or soft as the stir of a breath in the branches. This was the oldest speech of all—the universal speech—the speech that went back to the first great Truce of the world when the Mu—the Ape People, were the leaders—and the hope—of the world.
KWA spoke and understood this older speech. In a general way he also understood most of the jungle dialects—of birds and cats, of grass— eaters great and small—from elephants down to the tiny dik-diks, the antelope people no larger than rabbits; of fruit-eaters and other vegetarians, from the great apes—the Engl-ecos, who were chimps, and the Engl-enas, who were gorillas—on down to the tiny "tree-rabbits" whose only form of tribal speech sounded like the ringing of a little bell—
The elephant and buffalo mothers furnished milk from unstinted fountains. There were piles of wild bananas, pawpaws and custard apples, leaf-cones of wild honey.
The black panther even showed up with a white heron it had caught—so delicately—and so delicately carried, that the bird was still alive and strong.
"I'd do my share in feeding you," the panther grinned.
THERE was always a suggestion of the tempter among the lesser cats. Kwa released the bird. He put out a hand and touched the panther's head of black plush. Kwa looked into the panther's jade-green eyes.
"You also come from a race of killers," the panther said.
They used the purring and the sometimes silent universal speech.
"Some are killers and some are not," said Kwa.
"I kill to live," the black panther said.
"Some day," said Kwa, "this may not be necessary."
"Here in the Devil Bush," the black panther went on, still holding Kwa with its jade-green eyes, "there are spirits that live on blood and still others that live on the breath of certain trees. Who can say which are good and which are evil?"
"Who can say?" Kwa replied, while his own blue eyes held steady.
"Your paw kills. So does the skyfire."
"So does your steel-claw of a knife," the black panther said.
In a way, the conversation was getting nowhere; but it served the purpose of promoting thought, which, after all, was something.
To Kwa, at any rate, it served the purpose of recalling the principal reason for his being here.
The jungle peoples came and went. There was a business of the jungle as pressing as that of the peoples of any great city. It was a business of every day. The business of life. Food. Shelter. Sleep. Eternal vigilance. Here in the jungle there were no people living on their incomes. There was no leisure class. There was a rhythm that seemed at times as leisurely as that of the tides, or the rise and movement of the stars, yet driven by forces no less compelling.
Still the jungle peoples found time to come and linger, to listen and wait and watch, while Kwa—Kwa of the Ape People—watched his wounds close up and felt his strength come back.
HE'D come from a Far-Far country. Why? This was his We-Country—his native land—it was true. But he had another. He'd told them so. It was a land of Great Magic. He had told them so. In this Far-Far country, beyond the Black Water, over beyond where the sun went down, the people of the tribe to which he belonged could make thunder and lightning; they built sky-canoes; the voices even of their children could carry around the world.
Tembo, the great tusker, whispered from the green shadows: "They are, then Baobasi; makers of peace and happiness!"
Kwa said nothing.
But all this time he was thinking of the errand that had brought him here. It wasn't peace
and happiness that the Far-Far country promised to send to the Devil Bush.
So early one evening, as soon as he was strong enough—when there was a good moon and more than the usual number of jungle people were on hand, Kwa said:
"Lo, I will do a dance!"
THIS wasn't a regular or ordinary dance. The only music was that furnished by the crickets and the frogs—especially the frogs. But, as anyone may know by listening, there is a cadence to this music. It has a beat—one that sounds complicated at first, but which sings and throbs into a regular pattern.
Kwa, standing erect, but with his head bowed, and with no other preparation than a twist of fresh vines about his loins, raised one bare foot, then another.
He'd found that rhythm of the invisible, million-pieced orchestra of the Devil Bush. One could have said that the orchestra was now setting its time to Kwa's own movements, as a concert-orchestra might when following the lead of a prima donna.
Kwa swayed. He stepped about. The moonlight showed the play of the muscles under his shining gold skin, and all these muscles were dancing as if of their own accord in perfect time with the stroke and throb and shiver of the silver music.
"Wah!" he said. "Yes, I come from the land of the Great Magic. But I come as a herald of disaster. Unless we, my brothers, act together. There, I had news of a great prince. The great prince had learned something concerning the place of my birth. He is curious about the Ape People, the Furry Tribe, the Not Yet Men. He is coming to seek them. Some he would kill. Some he would take alive. He is powerful He will come with many men."
There is one thing about the radio of the bush—the wireless of the jungle. Everyone—from cricket to vampire-bat, from black panther to the white spirits of the trees; everyone!--is eternally tuned in.
And now this dance and song of Kwa's—although coming unannounced— was, as you might say, "on the air," traveling far, circling wider and wider, all the time that his moonlit audience swelled and swelled.
CHAPTER V
PRINCE OTTO
A SCANDINAVIAN prince; a pleasant fellow, young and clean and healthy; blue-eyed like Kwa. A Prince Otto, connected by blood-lines with practically all of the royal families of Europe. But with a confessed preference for various things American. At least, so he pretended.
It may have been this, or it may have been that; but he'd spent a winter at Palm Beach and there become acquainted with a youth of his own age named Nathaniel Rahan—Nathaniel Rahan, 2nd, to be exact; since the original Nathaniel Rahan was young Nat's grandfather, millionaire and former big-game hunter.
The prince was something of a big-game hunter himself. On a specially conducted tour into the Belgian Congo he had shot—and killed—no less than seventeen gorillas; not to mention those he may have more or less painfully wounded.
He would admit to this with a certain playful shyness. He was a modest young man. Yes, seventeen! Gorillas! Young and old, male and female. The gorillas—some of them, at any rate, had been furious. They had shaken their fists at him. They had howled and shrieked. Some of them had moaned—had pointed to wounds of their own or of the very young and had quite manifestly tried to argue.
But a shot from a high-powered modern magazine rifle, followed by another and another—bang! bang! bang!--and the beasts would be off again into the thick of the jungle—where, most likely—they had been munching wild celery and bamboo shoots on a sort of family picnic.
The prince had recounted his hunting experiences, with many a laugh, to the elder Rahan—Nat's grandfather—and had tried to draw the old man out.
Curiously—that is, for one who'd been able to send rare specimens to half the museums of America and Europe—old Mr. Rahan hadn't cared very much to talk about his own shooting in Africa. He seemed, as a matter of fact, a little ashamed of that red twenty years he had spent shooting things. He dropped a strange remark.
"Nowadays," he said, gently and politely, "I prefer to do my hunting without a gun—in what you might call a social way."
"I do not quite follow," said the prince.
"Animals," old man Rahan explained. "Animals are people!"
AND then and there, in spite of himself, the old man told more than he'd really intended to about how that grandson of his, as the result of an accident, had been born among a strange tribe who were neither men nor apes.
The prince was listening open-mouthed.
"Neither men nor apes, Meester Rahan?"
"Neither, or both," Rahan had replied.
"Savages!"
"Less savage than we," Rahan declared. "We could tell them much of benefit, perhaps. They could tell us more."
"You must explain, Meester Rahan," Prince Otto urged.
Nathaniel Rahan, a fine old gentleman—rendered so, like fine gold, by much tough treatment—took on a touch of poetry.
"I don't know," he said; "but the human race, it seems to me, is a good deal like paper money. I don't mean merely that it's quick to get dirty, thin, worn out. But that back of it, somewhere, there has to be a gold reserve—pure gold—perhaps as yet unminted gold as good in Sweden or France as it is here in the United States. Where shall we look for this human gold reserve? Perhaps hidden away in some lost valley—like the Valley of the Mu—"
Beyond that, Prince Otto wasn't able to get very much from the elder Rahan. He was able to extract even less from Nathaniel Rahan, 2nd, when—politely, not too directly—he tried to extract from him additional information about the Valley of the Mu.
STRANGE game. Creatures who were neither apes nor men. There'd come seeping into Prince Otto's imagination already certain pictures of himself not only as an intrepid big-game hunter but as a famous scientist as well. A great explorer. Prince Otto—"just back from the Valley of the Mu." "Swedish Prince discovers missing link!" There are a whole lot of things that even princes are crazy to get. A fame like Einstein's, for example. A reputation like Marconi's, or Peary's, or Scott's.
An obscure Belgian professor goes sailing up to the roof of the sky, and some prince says: "Du lieber! Why didn't I think of that?"
The fame that had come to Prince Otto for having shot seventeen gorillas on a single, occasion had been heady enough while it lasted. But it hadn't lasted long enough. It had quickly evaporated, leaving him merely with an increased thirst for more.
Those gorillas he had shot had all been mounted. You could see them now in various museums, made to look very fierce even when enclosed in glass, and each of them ticketed as having been donated by H. R. H. Prince Otto, and so on; but the fame—like the specimens—was getting a little moldy.
Prince Otto, like the world in general, was looking for something new.
BUT Prince Otto, although he found young Nat Rahan charming and all that, wasn't able to get much out of him either about the Ape People or the exact place where these might be found. This, however, merely stimulated the prince's purpose.
Everything that he learned from this time on increased that stimulation. For, if neither Nat nor his grandfather cared to talk about that African experience, it was different with practically everyone who knew the Rahans, not only in Palm Beach but Newport.
For example, there was that well authenticated story of how Nat's father and mother had crashed in an airplane while flying over a bit of Equatorial Africa marked on the maps as Sango Lobango.
There was that other story of how Nat had quelled a circus-panic by talking to the animals in a language that the animals seemed to understand. There were other stories in this same connection about how the two Rahans were known to be the most expert animal tamers in America—maybe in the world—either amateur or professional.
The first that young Nathaniel Rahan, 2nd, knew about what the prince was up to came to him in a full-page story, richly illustrated, appearing in a Sunday newspaper.
The story bore a heading, seven columns wide, that read:
ROYAL GORILLA HUNTER OFF
TO SEEK MISSING LINK
And there was a picture of Prince Otto
in a sun-helmet. There was a dramatic drawing of him blazing away at the breast of a giant gorilla—beating its chest and showing its fangs—on the edge of a bamboo thicket.
Prince Otto, it was explained, was organizing a scientific expedition into one of the least-known sections of Equatorial Africa—a place as yet practically unmapped. It was a region of dense forest from the center of which arose that almost legendary mountain mass known as Sango Lobango.
It was here—so said the article—that according to tradition there lived a strange race that was neither animal nor man—the Ape People— the Mu. And the prince was hopeful of bringing back a number of specimens, either alive or fit to be mounted with his gorilla groups.
CHAPTER VI
EVEN AS GODS
"BAOBASI"—that word that the old elephant-leader had used back there in the Devil Bush. A word meaning, really, gods; the makers—when they happen to be in the mood for it—of peace and happiness.
The word, or thought, in some form or other, must have been in the minds of many as the great white Nahan yacht, the Faustina, especially built for tropical waters, once more pushed her graceful stem into African waters.
Ragged or stark naked mystics on ancient sailing craft; black Kru boys on rusty red tramps bound in for the Guinea Coast—the old Slave Coast, Ivory Coast, Gold Coast, the Bights. Some of the ships that tilted on the glazed blue sea as the Faustina passed were little better than dugout canoes; there were others that trailed behind them a stench that might have belonged to the old blackbirders.
And from all these craft, and later from the shore-boats, and then from the shore itself—that endless line of surf and jungle that means West Africa—there came looks of envy, awe, speculation.
SURELY, the people who traveled on a yacht like the Faustina must be all same for one "Baobasi"—even as gods.
But the white yacht poked her way carefully into a bay of the Cameroons. She would be running down to the Congo later. Back of the Cameroon Bay there was a dark river up which the elder Rahan and his grandson would find a plantation devoted exclusively—or just about— to the raising of memories.
Adventures of Kwa, Man of the Jungle (Two jungle adventure classics in one volume!) Page 2
