Jungle Tales of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs (novel24 txt) 📖

away. “The lions seek their prey,” he murmured to himself, looking up once again at the swift-flying clouds. The moaning rose to a great volume of sound. “They come!” said Tarzan of the Apes, and sought the shelter of a thickly foliaged tree.

Quite suddenly the trees bent their tops simultaneously as though God had stretched a hand from the heavens and pressed His flat palm down upon the world. “They pass!”

whispered Tarzan. “The lions pass.” Then came a vivid flash of lightning, followed by deafening thunder.

“The lions have sprung,” cried Tarzan, “and now they roar above the bodies of their kills.”

 

The trees were waving wildly in all directions now, a perfectly demoniacal wind threshed the jungle pitilessly.

In the midst of it the rain came—not as it comes upon us of the northlands, but in a sudden, choking, blinding deluge.

“The blood of the kill,” thought Tarzan, huddling himself closer to the bole of the great tree beneath which he stood.

 

He was close to the edge of the jungle, and at a little distance he had seen two hills before the storm broke; but now he could see nothing. It amused him to look out into the beating rain, searching for the two hills and imagining that the torrents from above had washed them away, yet he knew that presently the rain would cease, the sun come out again and all be as it was before, except where a few branches had fallen and here and there some old and rotted patriarch had crashed back to enrich the soil upon which he had fatted for, maybe, centuries. All about him branches and leaves filled the air or fell to earth, torn away by the strength of the tornado and the weight of the water upon them. A gaunt corpse toppled and fell a few yards away; but Tarzan was protected from all these dangers by the wide-spreading branches of the sturdy young giant beneath which his jungle craft had guided him.

Here there was but a single danger, and that a remote one.

Yet it came. Without warning the tree above him was riven by lightning, and when the rain ceased and the sun came out Tarzan lay stretched as he had fallen, upon his face amidst the wreckage of the jungle giant that should have shielded him.

 

Bukawai came to the entrance of his cave after the rain and the storm had passed and looked out upon the scene.

From his one eye Bukawai could see; but had he had a dozen eyes he could have found no beauty in the fresh sweetness of the revivified jungle, for to such things, in the chemistry of temperament, his brain failed to react; nor, even had he had a nose, which he had not for years, could he have found enjoyment or sweetness in the clean-washed air.

 

At either side of the leper stood his sole and constant companions, the two hyenas, sniffing the air.

Presently one of them uttered a low growl and with flattened head started, sneaking and wary, toward the jungle.

The other followed. Bukawai, his curiosity aroused, trailed after them, in his hand a heavy knob-stick.

 

The hyenas halted a few yards from the prostrate Tarzan, sniffing and growling. Then came Bukawai, and at first he could not believe the witness of his own eyes; but when he did and saw that it was indeed the devil-god his rage knew no bounds, for he thought him dead and himself cheated of the revenge he had so long dreamed upon.

 

The hyenas approached the ape-man with bared fangs.

Bukawai, with an inarticulate scream, rushed upon them, striking cruel and heavy blows with his knob-stick, for there might still be life in the apparently lifeless form.

The beasts, snapping and snarling, half turned upon their master and their tormentor, but long fear still held them from his putrid throat. They slunk away a few yards and squatted upon their haunches, hatred and baffled hunger gleaming from their savage eyes.

 

Bukawai stooped and placed his ear above the ape-man’s heart.

It still beat. As well as his sloughed features could register pleasure they did so; but it was not a pretty sight.

At the ape-man’s side lay his long, grass rope.

Quickly Bukawai bound the limp arms behind his prisoner’s back, then he raised him to one of his shoulders, for, though Bukawai was old and diseased, he was still a strong man.

The hyenas fell in behind as the witch-doctor set off toward the cave, and through the long black corridors they followed as Bukawai bore his victim into the bowels of the hills. Through subterranean chambers, connected by winding passageways, Bukawai staggered with his load.

At a sudden turning of the corridor, daylight flooded them and Bukawai stepped out into a small, circular basin in the hill, apparently the crater of an ancient volcano, one of those which never reached the dignity of a mountain and are little more than lava-rimmed pits closed to the earth’s surface.

 

Steep walls rimmed the cavity. The only exit was through the passageway by which Bukawai had entered.

A few stunted trees grew upon the rocky floor. A hundred feet above could be seen the ragged lips of this cold, dead mouth of hell.

 

Bukawai propped Tarzan against a tree and bound him there with his own grass rope, leaving his hands free but securing the knots in such a way that the ape-man could not reach them.

The hyenas slunk to and fro, growling. Bukawai hated them and they hated him. He knew that they but waited for the time when he should be helpless, or when their hatred should rise to such a height as to submerge their cringing fear of him.

 

In his own heart was not a little fear of these repulsive creatures, and because of that fear, Bukawai always kept the beasts well fed, often hunting for them when their own forages for food failed, but ever was he cruel to them with the cruelty of a little brain, diseased, bestial, primitive.

 

He had had them since they were puppies. They had known no other life than that with him, and though they went abroad to hunt, always they returned. Of late Bukawai had come to believe that they returned not so much from habit as from a fiendish patience which would submit to every indignity and pain rather than forego the final vengeance, and Bukawai needed but little imagination to picture what that vengeance would be.

Today he would see for himself what his end would be; but another should impersonate Bukawai.

 

When he had trussed Tarzan securely, Bukawai went back into the corridor, driving the hyenas ahead of him, and pulling across the opening a lattice of laced branches, which shut the pit from the cave during the night that Bukawai might sleep in security, for then the hyenas were penned in the crater that they might not sneak upon a sleeping Bukawai in the darkness.

 

Bukawai returned to the outer cave mouth, filled a vessel with water at the spring which rose in the little canon close at hand and returned toward the pit. The hyenas stood before the lattice looking hungrily toward Tarzan.

They had been fed in this manner before.

 

With his water, the witch-doctor approached Tarzan and threw a portion of the contents of the vessel in the ape-man’s face.

There was fluttering of the eyelids, and at the second application Tarzan opened his eyes and looked about.

 

“Devil-god,” cried Bukawai, “I am the great witch-doctor.

My medicine is strong. Yours is weak. If it is not, why do you stay tied here like a goat that is bait for lions?”

 

Tarzan understood nothing the witch-doctor said, therefore he did not reply, but only stared straight at Bukawai with cold and level gaze. The hyenas crept up behind him.

He heard them growl; but he did not even turn his head.

He was a beast with a man’s brain. The beast in him refused to show fear in the face of a death which the man-mind already admitted to be inevitable.

 

Bukawai, not yet ready to give his victim to the beasts, rushed upon the hyenas with his knob-stick. There was a short scrimmage in which the brutes came off second best, as they always did. Tarzan watched it.

He saw and realized the hatred which existed between the two animals and the hideous semblance of a man.

 

With the hyenas subdued, Bukawai returned to the baiting of Tarzan; but finding that the ape-man understood nothing he said, the witch-doctor finally desisted.

Then he withdrew into the corridor and pulled the latticework barrier across the opening. He went back into the cave and got a sleeping mat, which he brought to the opening, that he might lie down and watch the spectacle of his revenge in comfort.

 

The hyenas were sneaking furtively around the ape-man.

Tarzan strained at his bonds for a moment, but soon realized that the rope he had braided to hold Numa, the lion, would hold him quite as successfully.

He did not wish to die; but he could look death in the face now as he had many times before without a quaver.

 

As he pulled upon the rope he felt it rub against the small tree about which it was passed. Like a flash of the cinematograph upon the screen, a picture was flashed before his mind’s eye from the storehouse of his memory.

He saw a lithe, boyish figure swinging high above the ground at the end of a rope. He saw many apes watching from below, and then he saw the rope part and the boy hurtle downward toward the ground. Tarzan smiled.

Immediately he commenced to draw the rope rapidly back and forth across the tree trunk.

 

The hyenas, gaining courage, came closer. They sniffed at his legs; but when he struck at them with his free arms they slunk off. He knew that with the growth of hunger they would attack. Coolly, methodically, without haste, Tarzan drew the rope back and forth against the rough trunk of the small tree.

 

In the entrance to the cavern Bukawai fell asleep.

He thought it would be some time before the beasts gained sufficient courage or hunger to attack the captive.

Their growls and the cries of the victim would awaken him.

In the meantime he might as well rest, and he did.

 

Thus the day wore on, for the hyenas were not famished, and the rope with which Tarzan was bound was a stronger one than that of his boyhood, which had parted so quickly to the chafing of the rough tree bark. Yet, all the while hunger was growing upon the beasts and the strands of the grass rope were wearing thinner and thinner.

Bukawai slept.

 

It was late afternoon before one of the beasts, irritated by the gnawing of appetite, made a quick, growling dash at the ape-man. The noise awoke Bukawai.

He sat up quickly and watched what went on within the crater. He saw the hungry hyena charge the man, leaping for the unprotected throat. He saw Tarzan reach out and seize the growling animal, and then he saw the second beast spring for the devil-god’s shoulder.

There was a mighty heave of the great, smooth-skinned body.

Rounded muscles shot into great, tensed piles beneath the brown hide—the ape-man surged forward with all his weight and all his great strength—the bonds parted, and the three were rolling upon the floor of the crater snarling, snapping, and rending.

 

Bukawai leaped to his feet. Could it be that the devil-god was to prevail against his servants? Impossible! The creature was unarmed, and he was down with two hyenas on top of him;