THE man who now called himself Anansi—Tembo went on to explain—was a wizard of the worst and most dangerous sort; one who had come into possession of primitive spider secrets—knowledge that spiders themselves had once possessed—and which had made spiders great—great as elephants and lions—great as Utangani—White man.
Here there was a pause.
Kwa himself was listening with no less interest than any other of those people present, furred or feathered—or leathered, like Father Tembo himself.
But the spiders—Tembo revealed—had abused their knowledge. And so it had been taken away from them and the spiders had become debased. But somewhere—somehow—such things happened from time to time—he who called himself Anansi—the name of the ancient spider gods—had come by some part of the Forbidden Spider Knowledge—and that was why he called himself Anansi.
As Tembo stopped speaking—or whispering, sending out waves of communication that were somewhere about half-way between sound and light—there again came that multiple crackle of comment and information from the surrounding jungle.
Anansi had forbidden to some the Valley of the Mu.
Anansi had committed abominations in the Valley of the Mu.
Anansi was leading the strange Utangani now to the Valley of the Mu to do to them that which he had already done to the Furry Tribe, the Ape People, the Not Yet Men.
Kwa shouted, with the shout of silent jungle speech:
"What has Anansi done to my people?"
The answer came from a thousand sources:
"Anansi has sealed them up in the caves! He has spun the gray curtain over all the ways out from the caves!"
Kwa had forgotten that earlier sickness of his. Excitement or the bitter leaves had finally counteracted the spider venom. His wounds were mere pin-pricks. But now, and suddenly, he felt a stab of fresh sickness.
"We lose time," Kwa gasped. But, in truth, there'd been very little time lost since Tembo had stopped them here in the elephant—trail.
"I'll carry you," said Tembo. There were a dozen volunteers—elands and buffalo, okapi and even a zebra herd-leader—nervous in the presence of the lions—although he and all creatures here knew that this was another Truce.
Kwa turned to the lion that had carried him. "Which?" he asked.
"I can outrun them all," the lion answered. "But this is weight and distance as well as speed. The Elephant Father excels."
Tembo swung Kwa to his place just behind those flapping elephant ears—ears that would have served as doors for a garage.
"Come all who will," Kwa trumpeted, "I go to kill Anansi!"
CHAPTER XII
STRANGE GUIDE
MEANTIME, as the animals had reported to Kwa, that group of white strangers had been drawing closer and closer to the Valley of the Mu, under the guidance of the queer black man who'd called himself Anansi.
Anansi! It was a name—so Professor Carl had said—like that of some spider Pharaoh. What the name of Pharaoh was in the history of the early Egyptians, so Anansi was in the legends of Obeah—the Spider Cult of Equatorial Africa.
Those who wish to go to the trouble of doing so may find a slim pamphlet which was written on the subject sometime after Professor Carl's return to Europe from this African tour. The pamphlet is still in manuscript. It has never been printed—it has never received much attention—because it is generally supposed that Professor Carl, when he wrote it, was already out of his mind.
The manuscript was completed not long before his death. He died in a private hospital for the mentally deranged. He'd been taken there immediately after his return from Africa.
From Africa he had returned alone.
ALMOST from the day that Anansi joined the expedition of Prince Otto and his friends the expedition encountered trouble.
First of all, it was the desertion of the porters. There'd been no keeping of those porters at all. They'd slip away, more often than not with no excuse, no demand for their pay.
Doomy, the black interpreter, had only one explanation to offer. It was always the same: "This place, they say, him bad too much!"
After all, Prince Otto and his friends could scarcely blame these people.
There was, in fact, something about the country that the white men themselves could feel that made it "bad too much." Devil Bush! But that wasn't it. "Foul jungle!" But neither was that the trouble. The trouble was something that none of them would explain—or, at any rate, something to which none of them cared to confess.
THEY were all—Professor Carl apart—veterans of the bush. Big game killers. Major Hind himself had begun life as an ivory-hunter—killed elephants wholesale, often slaughtering a whole herd in a single lucky day—and leaving them there to rot and feed the buzzards and hyenas— coming back later to knock out the ivory—unless his Arab rivals had got there first.
It was like that with the younger men, Prince Otto and Count Willy Schwerinvik. Not that they had ever undergone any real hardship in the jungle, as Major Hind had done. But young men, untroubled either with nerves or imagination, seasoned killers.
Wasn't there, after all, something godlike about being able to go about like that distributing death?
Perhaps it all came back to the fact that they seemed to be in a spider country. Spiders all the time. Spiders literally swarmed about the camp—spiders that were big and hairy, curious spiders as gangling and naked as Japanese crabs.
No one was bitten. Yet the continuous presence of the creatures was depressing. The blacks kept drifting away. First the porters; then the askaris—the native police, who were practically soldiers, there on command and not supposed to desert; then Doomy himself, the interpreter.
None of this mattered so much. Anansi was there. Anansi could interpret. Somehow or other, Anansi found bush natives—not many, but some—to carry on.
But this time—when they were deep in the Sango Lobango jungle—Anansi had become practically the whole show. The white men could have done nothing without him.
Anansi was guide, interpreter, tracker, cook.
He excelled at all these branches of the safari trade. He threaded a trail through the towering jungle no one else could ever have found— along deep gullies choked with depths of glossy green, up the sweaty flanks of razor-edged divides. The new bush-people he had taken on obeyed him minutely, while, with the white men, they were merely sullen.
Almost, it seemed, Anansi exerted a similar authority over them. He could go out tracking, it seemed, in the night, and locate whatever was wanted—chimp or gorilla, antelope or buffalo, rare birds—and practically keep the game where he'd found it until Prince Otto or Count Willy could come up for the kill.
Only, those spiders continued to be a curse.
SEVERAL times—this is from Professor Carl's manuscript—the game brought in seemed to have been trapped in powerful spider-webs, although otherwise uninjured, before becoming targets for the guns.
But the spiders became so insistent that members of the party began to dream about spiders, see them when they weren't there, have nightmares about themselves having been caught in a spider web.
All that kept them going was Anansi's positive assurance that they were "close in"—close to the objective of their expedition. They were approaching the territory of the Ape Man, the Missing Link.
As proof of this, one of Anansi's bush-boys returned to camp one day with what he said was the body of a manjarooma—one of the Ape People—he'd been able to kill with a poisoned arrow. Unfortunately, the hunter had cut off the head, the hands and the feet of the specimen. Otherwise, it might have made a magnificent trophy.
THE arms of the specimen appeared to be a little longer than a human being's, yet they were exquisitely modeled along human lines. The body was covered with a sort of golden, silken fur; otherwise it might have been the body of a somewhat small but exquisitely proportioned and graceful child.
Since the specimen, as a specimen, had been ruined anyway, they kept the skin and consigne
d the meat to the cook-pot.
Which brings the professor to a consideration of Anansi's cooking in general. For the professor, it seems, later became convinced that Anansi was a poisoner.
After all, Anansi: the Spider Pharaoh!
Count Willy Schwerinvik was the first to make the charge. He'd seized Anansi by the throat one day and hit him in the face with his fist. "He knew how to handle natives"—and Anansi, he said, had put "bush in his chop," meaning poison in his food—specifically, this time, powdered spider.
That same day, the young count was seen to leave—the camp alone. The gloomy jungle swallowed him—"swallowed him," the professor wrote, "with a weaving of green fingers, feeding him into the green maw of a spectral spider." No wonder they thought the professor was crazy. In any case, the young Count Schwerinvik was gone.
They tracked him; with Anansi's help, far up through the jungle slopes of Santo Lobango to the mouth of a cave, and here a strange thing happened.
It was here that Prince Otto himself disappeared. Just how, the professor didn't try to explain. For it must have happened during a time of panic—of sheer madness; when they'd seen—or thought they'd seen—spider the size of a man come stumbling and skating from the cave.
Major Hind promptly shot at the thing. But it had fastened on the prince. At its airy, stumbling tread it disappeared with the young nobleman into the green oblivion.
The professor fled. He must have been stark raving mad, just then, at any rate. How he ever got away, God only knows. The professor himself didn't.
He was going to be picked up a month later by a band of roving Wandas.
It was miles away from the Devil Bush.
The Wandas could make nothing of his tale, and they took him to the nearest Askari post. The Askaris went out on a search. And they found, at last, the camp the professor told them about. Only, it was a hundred miles south and east of the place where the professor had said it was.
And presently this page also was turned on one more African mystery.
CHAPTER XIII
THE TATTERED VEIL
KWA was hearing fragments of this story all the time that Tembo—son of another Tembo he had known—was rushing through the deep green ocean of the Devil Bush. Jungle as suffocating at times as actual water—yet water that was warm, perfumed; again exhaling a stench of swamp and mephitic springs.
Territory, all of this, from which even the elephants had always remained aloof. A short-cut, though, straight through the jungle from one of the major animal trails to another. Kwa felt as if he rode the spear-head of a hurricane. For the elephants now were making no effort to travel in silence. They were crashing through.
The elephants were followed by a growing army. They were flanked right and left to an unguessed distance by lesser beasts—great runners all.
IT was a shifting army, never quite the same.
Now there would be a tawny serpentine of lions streaking through the glade. But a moment later it would seem as though the lions had changed to buffalo.
Always overhead and all around, a flight of wings—flamingos across a patch of sky, flashes of red and yellow through the green. Then a volley of deer across some higher level—so high and swift and fleeting through the intervening branches that they appeared to be flying, too.
And all the time—from above and below and all around—that incessant hum and whisper of the jungle radio, the universal speech in a thousand voices—telling of Anansi.
This was to be the end of Anansi.
They were going to witness the destruction of Anansi.
Kwa had said it—Kwa of the Ape People—Kwa the Golden—he was going to the Valley of the Mu—going to set his people free—going to kill Anansi.
Kwa knew well how that wave of information was spreading over this part of the world. Now that he was with them, the jungle people seemed to have lost their fear, to have cast off all caution.
They were telling him and each other stories of Anansi.
The Spider Chief had changed himself into a spider and cast his net about first one young member of the Untangani camp, then another. After fanging them with his poison darts, he'd carried them off into a cave of the Sango Lobango, where he'd absorbed—as a spider drains a fly or a humming-bird—the strong fetish of the White Man--.
Kwa heard all this with a shudder at his heart.
He knew who it was of whom the jungle people spoke. Prince Otto was dead—or trapped—and longing for death, perhaps. The young nobleman with Prince Otto had been poisoned—spun about with the subtle paralysis of the spider people.
Would he himself have any better luck? The memory of this morning's fight with some of Anansi's followers quivered in his thought.
There was much talk of Anansi's magic.
In the jungle there were eyes everywhere. All things were seen. All things were known.
There had been witnesses to that final scene when Anansi had rushed from the fetish cave looking like a man-sized spider. So like a spider had Anansi looked that other spiders themselves would have taken him for such. It was this spider that the third man (Major Hind) had fired at before the spider killed him. Well, the next time Anansi, the man, had shown himself he was suffering from a gunshot wound—
THEY'D forged through a final strip of woods that still Kwa did not recognize and into a high gallery that might have been the avenue of an abandoned city.
This Kwa recognized. It was part of the great game trail that for uncounted centuries all sorts of animals had traveled in their migrations back and forth, to and from the Valley of the Mu. Migrations that had, in a way, been pilgrimages. The Valley of the Mu, the Valley of the Truce, the Mecca, the Jerusalem, of the Jungle Folk.
It was as if an invisible hand, kindly but terrible, had reached through the cage of Kwa's ribs and was closing about his heart. His We Country! Here where he had been born! Here where a people who'd come down from the dawn of the World, bringing something of the beauty of that dawn with them, had reared him, taught them their ways—the Ape People—People who were animals—animals who were People.
Where was the frontier between animals and men? There was no such frontier. If there was such a dividing line, it was one that had been traced by man himself—as artificial, as provocative of robbery and murder—as the boundaries men drew on maps—
THIS was the great road leading to what was known as the Elephant Gate, that only entrance to the Valley of the Mu. An actual gate was what it looked like—hugely walled with rock and forest.
The rock was there and the forest was there—unchanged; Kwa saw the remembered contours. But even while they were at a distance, there was something about the Elephant Gate suggestive of death and ruin, of abandonment and desolation.
It was just an impression and he wasn't sure where this impression came from—perhaps it was just a touch of ghostly imagination. But it made his heart sink, then quicken.
Tembo, with a final rocking pace, had come rushing up to within fifty yards of the gate and there had halted. The halt was long enough for some of the laggard animals to catch up.
There was a universal cry of, "You see, Oh, Kwa?"
Tembo himself had launched that overwhelming whisper: "You see, Oh, Kwa?"
Kwa saw.
Across the height of the gate from a towering mulberry tree to a pillar of rock there was a festoon of liana that had always been there. But now this had become the support of a gray curtain—a tattered gray veil. The stuff of the veil was like an ancient cobweb— strings and tatters of gray crepe.
Kwa was so impressed by the sight that he lifted himself from where he sat. He stood upright on the elephant's head—Tembo holding steady as a rock. Kwa looked and looked—chest heaving like a bellows, and this bellows blowing up a shining fire in his brain.
"I see!" he said.
And his voice struck silence through all that mixed horde of jungle people.
"I see! And hear ye all!" he shouted. He raised one knee, then another, in the ritual
dance of the Mu. "I declare I have a greater magic than Anansi's. For this—this is Shauri Munga! This is the business of God!"
CHAPTER XIV
JUDGMENT DAY
THERE was, as a matter of fact, a powerful magic in that particular phrase that Kwa had used—"Shangri Munga!"—when used in a particular way. And, unconsciously or consciously, this was the way that Kwa had used it.
The animals recognized that fact. So did Kwa himself. There was that inexpressible equivalent of a cheer that went up from all these jungle people. It was like a curious swirling magnetism—call it that; but a wave-length perhaps somewhere between sound and light, audible in a way and visible in a way.
A swirling cloud that lifted and dissolved and spread out across the Valley of the Mu; yet multiplied itself like a sort of music broadcast, starting up vibrations in places that had gone silent and heavy as if under a pall of death.
Tembo, at a hint from Kwa, had paced forward and stretched up his trunk like a straight but supple ladder. And up this Kwa ran to a shoulder of rock.
He was Kwa again—Kwa of the Ape People—whatever the White Magician he might have so suddenly become. For in a moment he was running out onto the festoon of vines, kicking away the webs that supported that funereal curtain. It fell in rags. It drifted away in shreds that dissolved in the sun.
The half-silent music of the shouting spun and became curling currents of energy that sped the work that Kwa was doing—
Far away on the further side of the great round valley where Kwa had been born and the Furry Tribe had continued to live since the Dawn Age, those swirling vibrations washed their way along the cliffs and found their way into the secret places of the rocks.
ONE of the largest of the caverns over there was the great Fire Cave of the Mu, the place where Kwa had spent so many of his days and nights. It had always been a sort of cathedral, not only for the Mu themselves but for all of the jungle world. A place that was large as Noah's Ark must have been, for here also the beasts had assembled—not only in pairs but by families, clans; eaters of grass and drinkers of blood. They lay down side by side. This was the place of the Truce. And this was the place of the Fire.
Adventures of Kwa, Man of the Jungle (Two jungle adventure classics in one volume!) Page 5
