Others heard, too, and saw, from the darkness of their huts--bold warriors, hideously painted, grasping heavy war spears in nerveless fingers. Against Numa, the lion, they would have charged fearlessly. Against many times their own number of black warriors would they have raced to the protection of their chief; but this weird jungle demon filled them with terror. There was nothing human in the bestial growls that rumbled up from his deep chest;there was nothing human in the bared fangs, or the catlike leaps.
Mbonga's warriors were terrified--too terrified to leave the seeming security of their huts while they watched the beast-man spring full upon the back of their old chieftain.
Mbonga went down with a scream of terror. He was too frightened even to attempt to defend himself.
He just lay beneath his antagonist in a paralysis of fear, screaming at the top of his lungs. Tarzan half rose and kneeled above the black. He turned Mbonga over and looked him in the face, exposing the man's throat, then he drew his long, keen knife, the knife that John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, had brought from England many years before.
He raised it close above Mbonga's neck. The old black whimpered with terror. He pleaded for his life in a tongue which Tarzan could not understand.
For the first time the ape-man had a close view of the chief.
He saw an old man, a very old man with scrawny neck and wrinkled face--a dried, parchment-like face which resembled some of the little monkeys Tarzan knew so well.
He saw the terror in the man's eyes--never before had Tarzan seen such terror in the eyes of any animal, or such a piteous appeal for mercy upon the face of any creature.
Something stayed the ape-man's hand for an instant.
He wondered why it was that he hesitated to make the kill;never before had he thus delayed. The old man seemed to wither and shrink to a bag of puny bones beneath his eyes.
So weak and helpless and terror-stricken he appeared that the ape-man was filled with a great contempt;but another sensation also claimed him--something new to Tarzan of the Apes in relation to an enemy. It was pity--pity for a poor, frightened, old man.
Tarzan rose and turned away, leaving Mbonga, the chief, unharmed.
With head held high the ape-man walked through the village, swung himself into the branches of the tree which overhung the palisade and disappeared from the sight of the villagers.
All the way back to the stamping ground of the apes, Tarzan sought for an explanation of the strange power which had stayed his hand and prevented him from slaying Mbonga.
It was as though someone greater than he had commanded him to spare the life of the old man. Tarzan could not understand, for he could conceive of nothing, or no one, with the authority to dictate to him what he should do, or what he should refrain from doing.
It was late when Tarzan sought a swaying couch among the trees beneath which slept the apes of Kerchak, and he was still absorbed in the solution of his strange problem when he fell asleep.
The sun was well up in the heavens when he awoke.
The apes were astir in search of food. Tarzan watched them lazily from above as they scratched in the rotting loam for bugs and beetles and grubworms, or sought among the branches of the trees for eggs and young birds, or luscious caterpillars.
An orchid, dangling close beside his head, opened slowly, unfolding its delicate petals to the warmth and light of the sun which but recently had penetrated to its shady retreat. A thousand times had Tarzan of the Apes witnessed the beauteous miracle; but now it aroused a keener interest, for the ape-man was just commencing to ask himself questions about all the myriad wonders which heretofore he had but taken for granted.
What made the flower open? What made it grow from a tiny bud to a full-blown bloom? Why was it at all? Why was he?
Where did Numa, the lion, come from? Who planted the first tree? How did Goro get way up into the darkness of the night sky to cast his welcome light upon the fearsome nocturnal jungle? And the sun! Did the sun merely happen there?
Why were all the peoples of the jungle not trees? Why were the trees not something else? Why was Tarzan different from Taug, and Taug different from Bara, the deer, and Bara different from Sheeta, the panther, and why was not Sheeta like Buto, the rhinoceros? Where and how, anyway, did they all come from--the trees, the flowers, the insects, the countless creatures of the jungle?
Quite unexpectedly an idea popped into Tarzan's head.
In following out the many ramifications of the dictionary definition of GOD he had come upon the word CREATE--"to cause to come into existence; to form out of nothing."Tarzan almost had arrived at something tangible when a distant wail startled him from his preoccupation into sensibility of the present and the real. The wail came from the jungle at some little distance from Tarzan's swaying couch. It was the wail of a tiny balu.
Tarzan recognized it at once as the voice of Gazan, Teeka's baby. They had called it Gazan because its soft, baby hair had been unusually red, and GAZAN in the language of the great apes, means red skin.
The wail was immediately followed by a real scream of terror from the small lungs. Tarzan was electrified into instant action. Like an arrow from a bow he shot through the trees in the direction of the sound.
Ahead of him he heard the savage snarling of an ***** she-ape. It was Teeka to the rescue. The danger must be very real. Tarzan could tell that by the note of rage mingled with fear in the voice of the she.
Running along bending limbs, swinging from one tree to another, the ape-man raced through the middle terraces toward the sounds which now had risen in volume to deafening proportions. From all directions the apes of Kerchak were hurrying in response to the appeal in the tones of the balu and its mother, and as they came, their roars reverberated through the forest.
But Tarzan, swifter than his heavy fellows, distanced them all.