Jungle Tales of Tarzan - Edgar Rice Burroughs (bearly read books TXT) 📗

great neck in his mighty fingers. Twice he shook the old ape, then he released his tooth-hold.

 

“Are you God?” he demanded.

 

“No,” wailed Numgo. “I am only a poor, old ape.

Leave me alone. Go ask the Gomangani where God is.

They are hairless like yourself and very wise, too.

They should know.”

 

Tarzan released Numgo and turned away. The suggestion that he consult the blacks appealed to him, and though his relations with the people of Mbonga, the chief, were the antithesis of friendly, he could at least spy upon his hated enemies and discover if they had intercourse with God.

 

So it was that Tarzan set forth through the trees toward the village of the blacks, all excitement at the prospect of discovering the Supreme Being, the Creator of all things.

As he traveled he reviewed, mentally, his armament—the condition of his hunting knife, the number of his arrows, the newness of the gut which strung his bow—he hefted the war spear which had once been the pride of some black warrior of Mbonga’s tribe.

 

If he met God, Tarzan would be prepared. One could never tell whether a grass rope, a war spear, or a poisoned arrow would be most efficacious against an unfamiliar foe.

Tarzan of the Apes was quite content—if God wished to fight, the ape-man had no doubt as to the outcome of the struggle.

There were many questions Tarzan wished to put to the Creator of the Universe and so he hoped that God would not prove a belligerent God; but his experience of life and the ways of living things had taught him that any creature with the means for offense and defense was quite likely to provoke attack if in the proper mood.

 

It was dark when Tarzan came to the village of Mbonga.

As silently as the silent shadows of the night he sought his accustomed place among the branches of the great tree which overhung the palisade. Below him, in the village street, he saw men and women. The men were hideously painted—more hideously than usual.

Among them moved a weird and grotesque figure, a tall figure that went upon the two legs of a man and yet had the head of a buffalo. A tail dangled to his ankles behind him, and in one hand he carried a zebra’s tail while the other clutched a bunch of small arrows.

 

Tarzan was electrified. Could it be that chance had given him thus early an opportunity to look upon God? Surely this thing was neither man nor beast, so what could it be then other than the Creator of the Universe! The ape-man watched the every move of the strange creature.

He saw the black men and women fall back at its approach as though they stood in terror of its mysterious powers.

 

Presently he discovered that the deity was speaking and that all listened in silence to his words. Tarzan was sure that none other than God could inspire such awe in the hearts of the Gomangani, or stop their mouths so effectually without recourse to arrows or spears.

Tarzan had come to look with contempt upon the blacks, principally because of their garrulity. The small apes talked a great deal and ran away from an enemy. The big, old bulls of Kerchak talked but little and fought upon the slightest provocation. Numa, the lion, was not given to loquacity, yet of all the jungle folk there were few who fought more often than he.

 

Tarzan witnessed strange things that night, none of which he understood, and, perhaps because they were strange, he thought that they must have to do with the God he could not understand. He saw three youths receive their first war spears in a weird ceremony which the grotesque witch-doctor strove successfully to render uncanny and awesome.

 

Hugely interested, he watched the slashing of the three brown arms and the exchange of blood with Mbonga, the chief, in the rites of the ceremony of blood brotherhood.

He saw the zebra’s tail dipped into a caldron of water above which the witch-doctor had made magical passes the while he danced and leaped about it, and he saw the breasts and foreheads of each of the three novitiates sprinkled with the charmed liquid. Could the ape-man have known the purpose of this act, that it was intended to render the recipient invulnerable to the attacks of his enemies and fearless in the face of any danger, he would doubtless have leaped into the village street and appropriated the zebra’s tail and a portion of the contents of the caldron.

 

But he did not know, and so he only wondered, not alone at what he saw but at the strange sensations which played up and down his naked spine, sensations induced, doubtless, by the same hypnotic influence which held the black spectators in tense awe upon the verge of a hysteric upheaval.

 

The longer Tarzan watched, the more convinced he became that his eyes were upon God, and with the conviction came determination to have word with the deity. With Tarzan of the Apes, to think was to act.

 

The people of Mbonga were keyed to the highest pitch of hysterical excitement. They needed little to release the accumulated pressure of static nerve force which the terrorizing mummery of the witch-doctor had induced.

 

A lion roared, suddenly and loud, close without the palisade.

The blacks started nervously, dropping into utter silence as they listened for a repetition of that all-too-familiar and always terrorizing voice. Even the witch-doctor paused in the midst of an intricate step, remaining momentarily rigid and statuesque as he plumbed his cunning mind for a suggestion as how best he might take advantage of the condition of his audience and the timely interruption.

 

Already the evening had been vastly profitable to him.

There would be three goats for the initiation of the three youths into full-fledged warriorship, and besides these he had received several gifts of grain and beads, together with a piece of copper wire from admiring and terrified members of his audience.

 

Numa’s roar still reverberated along taut nerves when a woman’s laugh, shrill and piercing, shattered the silence of the village. It was this moment that Tarzan chose to drop lightly from his tree into the village street.

Fearless among his blood enemies he stood, taller by a full head than many of Mbonga’s warriors, straight as their straightest arrow, muscled like Numa, the lion.

 

For a moment Tarzan stood looking straight at the witch-doctor. Every eye was upon him, yet no one had moved— a paralysis of terror held them, to be broken a moment later as the ape-man, with a toss of head, stepped straight toward the hideous figure beneath the buffalo head.

 

Then the nerves of the blacks could stand no more.

For months the terror of the strange, white, jungle god had been upon them. Their arrows had been stolen from the very center of the village; their warriors had been silently slain upon the jungle trails and their dead bodies dropped mysteriously and by night into the village street as from the heavens above.

 

One or two there were who had glimpsed the strange figure of the new demon and it was from their oft-repeated descriptions that the entire village now recognized Tarzan as the author of many of their ills. Upon another occasion and by daylight, the warriors would doubtless have leaped to attack him, but at night, and this night of all others, when they were wrought to such a pitch of nervous dread by the uncanny artistry of their witch-doctor, they were helpless with terror. As one man they turned and fled, scattering for their huts, as Tarzan advanced.

For a moment one and one only held his ground. It was the witch-doctor. More than half self-hypnotized into a belief in his own charlatanry he faced this new demon who threatened to undermine his ancient and lucrative profession.

 

“Are you God?” asked Tarzan.

 

The witch-doctor, having no idea of the meaning of the other’s words, danced a few strange steps, leaped high in the air, turning completely around and alighting in a stooping posture with feet far outspread and head thrust out toward the ape-man. Thus he remained for an instant before he uttered a loud “Boo!” which was evidently intended to frighten Tarzan away; but in reality had no such effect.

 

Tarzan did not pause. He had set out to approach and examine God and nothing upon earth might now stay his feet.

Seeing that his antics had no potency with the visitor, the witch-doctor tried some new medicine. Spitting upon the zebra’s tail, which he still clutched in one hand, he made circles above it with the arrows in the other hand, meanwhile backing cautiously away from Tarzan and speaking confidentially to the bushy end of the tail.

 

This medicine must be short medicine, however, for the creature, god or demon, was steadily closing up the distance which had separated them. The circles therefore were few and rapid, and when they were completed, the witch-doctor struck an attitude which was intended to be awe inspiring and waving the zebra’s tail before him, drew an imaginary line between himself and Tarzan.

 

“Beyond this line you cannot pass, for my medicine is strong medicine,” he cried. “Stop, or you will fall dead as your foot touches this spot. My mother was a voodoo, my father was a snake; I live upon lions’

hearts and the entrails of the panther; I eat young babies for breakfast and the demons of the jungle are my slaves.

I am the most powerful witch-doctor in the world; I fear nothing, for I cannot die. I—” But he got no further; instead he turned and fled as Tarzan of the Apes crossed the magical dead line and still lived.

 

As the witch-doctor ran, Tarzan almost lost his temper.

This was no way for God to act, at least not in accordance with the conception Tarzan had come to have of God.

 

“Come back!” he cried. “Come back, God, I will not harm you.”

But the witch-doctor was in full retreat by this time, stepping high as he leaped over cooking pots and the smoldering embers of small fires that had burned before the huts of villagers. Straight for his own hut ran the witch-doctor, terror-spurred to unwonted speed; but futile was his effort—the ape-man bore down upon him with the speed of Bara, the deer.

 

Just at the entrance to his hut the witch-doctor was overhauled.

A heavy hand fell upon his shoulder to drag him back.

It seized upon a portion of the buffalo hide, dragging the disguise from him. It was a naked black man that Tarzan saw dodge into the darkness of the hut’s interior.

 

So this was what he had thought was God! Tarzan’s lip curled in an angry snarl as he leaped into the hut after the terror-stricken witch-doctor. In the blackness within he found the man huddled at the far side and dragged him forth into the comparative lightness of the moonlit night.

 

The witch-doctor bit and scratched in an attempt to escape; but a few cuffs across the head brought him to a better realization of the futility of resistance. Beneath the moon Tarzan held the cringing figure upon its shaking feet.

 

“So you are God!” he cried. “If you be God, then Tarzan is greater than God,” and so the ape-man thought.

“I am Tarzan,” he shouted into the ear of the black.

“In all the jungle, or above it, or upon the running waters, or the sleeping waters, or upon the big water, or the little water, there is none so great as Tarzan.

Tarzan is greater than the