You don't have to describe the sky to see it. In a glance of an eye you see the thousand herds on the Nyasa plain. Jungle speech was something like that-direct, far reaching, limpid, meant for truth.
NEW Moon Night, and ever since the first glimmer of the slim crescent could be seen against the green of the sky, the leopards had been assembling more or less, as they always did, in the vicinity of the Fire Pit Lodge of the Beast Men.
No one will ever know how that breeze came up in the airless night. It wasn't the sort of breeze that sways the tree tops. But all through the Devil Bush-the hundreds of square miles of it-the jungle tribes, the furred and the feathered, the scaled and the armor-plated-lifted their heads and said: "The Leopards are talking!"
Old rhinos dozing as solid as rocks under the stars, hippos at pasture in the strong grass fringing the rivers, the wide-awake sentinels of monkey-towns, lesser cats, lions, elephants. All these heard that breeze of a Leopard broadcast.
How such things start, few ever know-another sort of Cosmic Ray, perhaps; blowing down from somewhere out of interstellar space, giving this fresh young world an old idea from a wiser place.
And suddenly the whole Devil Bush began to stir. It was a tradition that the great things of the Bush always happened on a New Moon Night. Sometimes it was one thing, sometimes another-sometimes the beginning of a plague that would sweep the plains, sometimes a great fright out of nowhere as if all around there was a great war raging that none could see nor hear.
But the jungle radio had already broadcast the story of that battle too day between Kwa and the Beast Man. Tonight there'd been a broadcast that the Beast Men were in conclave at their ancient lodge on the setting-sun side of Sango Lobango.
Then, this stupendous broadcast that the Leopards were on their way to destroy their old gods, accept the new.
Too late?
Kwa was gone. The Beast Men had taken him. In their Lodge they were about to work that oldest of all magic. The Beast Men would take to themselves the virtues of Kwa—w Kwa the Golden-by a sacrifice of blood.
A great torment swept the Devil Bush. Rhinos plunged through the jungle-thudding and tearing their way. Elephants shadowed along the paths they knew. Leopards ran and paid no attention to the wild dogs, the shy bush wolves, the pigs, the apes and the monkeys. High above the bush there was a beating of wings-now and then the harsh cry of raven and heron.
There were creatures afoot or awing that had never been known before to have ventured out in the dark.
But the broadcast had proclaimed it. This would be a night of truce-the night of a Great Truce, such as Kwa had set up once or twice back in the Valley of the Mu. There would be a truce, this night for all things except the Beast Men, except for the devils who'd passed themselves off for gods.
The Bush for miles around the entrance to the Fire Pit Lodge was swarming with all the beasts of this part of Africa-and no animal afraid of another-as the leopards drove into the corridor of the shallow river, then into the rock entrance of the forbidden lodge room.
The leopards were like a river that flowed upstream-or more like some enormous serpent, with a thousand heads, glittering as if with greenfire stones, as the staring eyes of the wrapt and concentrated cats went by.
Suddenly, there swept over the straining, silent Devil Bush another broadcast; and what it said was:
It is over!
What was over and how? Not a frog sang, not a cricket chirped.
THEN, from far away in all this tremendous silence, there came the chant of what the Black Men called a "cooba iga," meaning, literally, a "wild chicken"-a jungle fowl, the crowing of a cock. And this meant that the sun was coming up.
That, at least, was something. The sun was coming up.
As the leopards swarmed into the cave, all in an instant, it seemed, they were everywhere. For, after all, the Leopards were the only wild Bush people who'd lost their fear of fire. In a way, they themselves were fetishes superior to the ordinary dreads of the Jungle folk.
Three of them had swarmed over the old man who was head of the Lodge. The Beast Men fell where they stood. Their power had gone out of them entirely.
And then, at last, the Leopards came to Kwa.
HE'D got the broadcast in some moment of inner silence even here in the cave. He'd known that the Leopards were coming. And, after that, the hand on no dead man could hold him.
He'd swung his bone club.
From beyond the Fire Pit someone had flung a skull that knocked him prostrate. He'd been fighting since.
"Ho," he managed to say, "into the pit with them!"
And the bodies of the Beast Men began to drop-by ones, by twos, by fours-into the purifying flames. For, by this time, other animals were crowding in.
They formed a great circle, and there, in the midst of them, around the edge of the Fire Pit, Kwa danced-solemnly, knees up-calling for some new message from his mbuiri-his heart, his soul.
THE END
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
Adventures of Kwa, Man of the Jungle (Two jungle adventure classics in one volume!) Page 10
