Andrew Dickson White - "Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White"

John Greenleaf Whittier - "Narrative and Legendary Poems, Complete"

William Makepeace Thackeray - "Vanity Fair"

Maturin Murray - "The Sea Witch"

Tarzan the Untamed

E >> Edgar Rice Burroughs >> Tarzan the Untamed




So far, with the single exception of the attack made upon him, they
had no reason to believe that they might not receive fair treatment
from their captors, and so he reasoned that it might be wiser to
avoid antagonizing them until such a time as he became thoroughly
convinced that their intentions were entirely hostile. He saw the
girl led from the building and just before she disappeared from
his view she turned and waved her hand to him:

"Good luck!" she cried, and was gone.

The lions that had entered the building with the party had, during
their examination by the man at the table, been driven from the
apartment through a doorway behind him. Toward this same doorway
two of the men now led Smith-Oldwick. He found himself in a long
corridor from the sides of which other doorways opened, presumably
into other apartments of the building. At the far end of the corridor
he saw a heavy grating beyond which appeared an open courtyard.
Into this courtyard the prisoner was conducted, and as he entered
it with the two guards he found himself in an opening which was
bounded by the inner walls of the building. It was in the nature
of a garden in which a number of trees and flowering shrubs grew.
Beneath several of the trees were benches and there was a bench
along the south wall, but what aroused his most immediate attention
was the fact that the lions who had assisted in their capture and
who had accompanied them upon the return to the city, lay sprawled
about upon the ground or wandered restlessly to and fro.

Just inside the gate his guard halted. The two men exchanged a few
words and then turned and reentered the corridor. The Englishman
was horror-stricken as the full realization of his terrible plight
forced itself upon his tired brain. He turned and seized the grating
in an attempt to open it and gain the safety of the corridor, but
he found it securely locked against his every effort, and then he
called aloud to the retreating figure of the men within. The only
reply he received was a high-pitched, mirthless laugh, and then
the two passed through the doorway at the far end of the corridor
and he was alone with the lions.





The Queen's Story




In the meantime Bertha Kircher was conducted the length of the
plaza toward the largest and most pretentious of the buildings
surrounding it. This edifice covered the entire width of one end
of the plaza. It was several stories in height, the main entrance
being approached by a wide flight of stone steps, the bottom of
which was guarded by enormous stone lions, while at the top there
were two pedestals flanking the entrance and of the same height,
upon each of which was the stone image of a large parrot. As the
girl neared these latter images she saw that the capital of each
column was hewn into the semblance of a human skull upon which
the parrots perched. Above the arched doorway and upon the walls
of the building were the figures of other parrots, of lions, and
of monkeys. Some of these were carved in bas-relief; others were
delineated in mosaics, while still others appeared to have been
painted upon the surface of the wall.

The colorings of the last were apparently much subdued by age
with the result that the general effect was soft and beautiful.
The sculpturing and mosaic work were both finely executed, giving
evidence of a high degree of artistic skill. Unlike the first
building into which she had been conducted, the entrance to which
had been doorless, massive doors closed the entrance which she now
approached. In the niches formed by the columns which supported
the door's arch, and about the base of the pedestals of the stone
parrots, as well as in various other places on the broad stairway,
lolled some score of armed men. The tunics of these were all of a
vivid yellow and upon the breast and back of each was embroidered
the figure of a parrot.

As she was conducted up the stairway one of these yellow-coated
warriors approached and halted her guides at the top of the steps.
Here they exchanged a few words and while they were talking the
girl noticed that he who had halted them, as well as those whom
she could see of his companions, appeared to be, if possible, of
a lower mentality than her original captors.

Their coarse, bristling hair grew so low upon their foreheads as,
in some instances, to almost join their eyebrows, while the irises
were smaller, exposing more of the white of the eyeball.

After a short parley the man in charge of the doorway, for such
he seemed to be, turned and struck upon one of the panels with
the butt of his spear, at the same time calling to several of his
companions, who rose and came forward at his command. Soon the great
doors commenced slowly to swing creakingly open, and presently,
as they separated, the girl saw behind them the motive force which
operated the massive doors--to each door a half-dozen naked Negroes.

At the doorway her two guards were turned back and their places taken
by a half dozen of the yellow-coated soldiery. These conducted her
through the doorway which the blacks, pulling upon heavy chains,
closed behind them. And as the girl watched them she noted with
horror that the poor creatures were chained by the neck to the
doors.

Before her led a broad hallway in the center of which was a little
pool of clear water. Here again in floor and walls was repeated in
new and ever-changing combinations and designs, the parrots, the
monkeys, and the lions, but now many of the figures were of what
the girl was convinced must be gold. The walls of the corridor
consisted of a series of open archways through which, upon either
side, other spacious apartments were visible. The hallway was
entirely unfurnished, but the rooms on either side contained benches
and tables. Glimpses of some of the walls revealed the fact that
they were covered with hangings of some colored fabric, while upon
the floors were thick rugs of barbaric design and the skins of
black lions and beautifully marked leopards.

The room directly to the right of the entrance was filled with men
wearing the yellow tunics of her new guard while the walls were hung
with numerous spears and sabers. At the far end of the corridor a
low flight of steps led to another closed doorway. Here the guard
was again halted. One of the guards at this doorway, after receiving
the report of one of those who accompanied her, passed through the
door, leaving them standing outside. It was fully fifteen minutes
before he returned, when the guard was again changed and the girl
conducted into the chamber beyond.

Through three other chambers and past three more massive doors, at
each of which her guard was changed, the girl was conducted before
she was ushered into a comparatively small room, back and forth
across the floor of which paced a man in a scarlet tunic, upon the
front and back of which was embroidered an enormous parrot and upon
whose head was a barbaric headdress surmounted by a stuffed parrot.

The walls of this room were entirely hidden by hangings upon which
hundreds, even thousands, of parrots were embroidered. Inlaid in
the floor were golden parrots, while, as thickly as they could be
painted, upon the ceiling were brilliant-hued parrots with wings
outspread as though in the act of flying.

The man himself was larger of stature than any she had yet seen
within the city. His parchment-like skin was wrinkled with age and
he was much fatter than any other of his kind that she had seen.
His bared arms, however, gave evidence of great strength and his
gait was not that of an old man. His facial expression denoted almost
utter imbecility and he was quite the most repulsive creature that
ever Bertha Kircher had looked upon.

For several minutes after she was conducted into his presence
he appeared not to be aware that she was there but continued his
restless pacing to and fro. Suddenly, without the slightest warning,
and while he was at the far end of the room from her with his back
toward her, he wheeled and rushed madly at her. Involuntarily the
girl shrank back, extending her open palms toward the frightful
creature as though to hold him aloof but a man upon either side of
her, the two who had conducted her into the apartment, seized and
held her.

Although he rushed violently toward her the man stopped without
touching her. For a moment his horrid white-rimmed eyes glared
searchingly into her face, immediately following which he burst
into maniacal laughter. For two or three minutes the creature gave
himself over to merriment and then, stopping as suddenly as he
had commenced to laugh, he fell to examining the prisoner. He felt
of her hair, her skin, the texture of the garment she wore and by
means of signs made her understand she was to open her mouth. In
the latter he seemed much interested, calling the attention of one
of the guards to her canine teeth and then baring his own sharp
fangs for the prisoner to see.

Presently he resumed pacing to and fro across the floor, and it
was fully fifteen minutes before he again noticed the prisoner, and
then it was to issue a curt order to her guards, who immediately
conducted her from the apartment.

The guards now led the girl through a series of corridors and
apartments to a narrow stone stairway which led to the floor above,
finally stopping before a small door where stood a naked Negro armed
with a spear. At a word from one of her guards the Negro opened the
door and the party passed into a low-ceiled apartment, the windows
of which immediately caught the girl's attention through the fact
that they were heavily barred. The room was furnished similarly to
those that she had seen in other parts of the building, the same
carved tables and benches, the rugs upon the floor, the decorations
upon the walls, although in every respect it was simpler than
anything she had seen on the floor below. In one corner was a low
couch covered with a rug similar to those on the floor except that
it was of a lighter texture, and upon this sat a woman.

As Bertha Kircher's eyes alighted upon the occupant of the room
the girl gave a little gasp of astonishment, for she recognized
immediately that here was a creature more nearly of her own kind
than any she had seen within the city's walls. An old woman it was
who looked at her through faded blue eyes, sunken deep in a wrinkled
and toothless face. But the eyes were those of a sane and intelligent
creature, and the wrinkled face was the face of a white woman.

At sight of the girl the woman rose and came forward, her gait so
feeble and unsteady that she was forced to support herself with a
long staff which she grasped in both her hands. One of the guards
spoke a few words to her and then the men turned and left the
apartment. The girl stood just within the door waiting in silence
for what might next befall her.

The old woman crossed the room and stopped before her, raising
her weak and watery eyes to the fresh young face of the newcomer.
Then she scanned her from head to foot and once again the old eyes
returned to the girl's face. Bertha Kircher on her part was not
less frank in her survey of the little old woman. It was the latter
who spoke first. In a thin, cracked voice she spoke, hesitatingly,
falteringly, as though she were using unfamiliar words and speaking
a strange tongue.

"You are from the outer world?" she asked in English. "God grant
that you may speak and understand this tongue."

"English?" the girl exclaimed, "Yes, of course, I speak English."

"Thank God!" cried the little old woman. "I did not know whether I
myself might speak it so that another could understand. For sixty
years I have spoken only their accursed gibberish. For sixty years
I have not heard a word in my native language. Poor creature! Poor
creature!" she mumbled. "What accursed misfortune threw you into
their hands?"

"You are an English woman?" asked Bertha Kircher. "Did I understand
you aright that you are an English woman and have been here for
sixty years?"

The old woman nodded her head affirmatively. "For sixty years I
have never been outside of this palace. Come," she said, stretching
forth a bony hand. "I am very old and cannot stand long. Come and
sit with me on my couch."

The girl took the proffered hand and assisted the old lady back
to the opposite side of the room and when she was seated the girl
sat down beside her.

"Poor child! Poor child!" moaned the old woman. "Far better to have
died than to have let them bring you here. At first I might have
destroyed myself but there was always the hope that someone would
come who would take me away, but none ever comes. Tell me how they
got you."

Very briefly the girl narrated the principal incidents which led
up to her capture by some of the creatures of the city.

"Then there is a man with you in the city?" asked the old woman.

"Yes," said the girl, "but I do not know where he is nor what are
their intentions in regard to him. In fact, I do not know what
their intentions toward me are."

"No one might even guess," said the old woman. "They do not know
themselves from one minute to the next what their intentions are,
but I think you can rest assured, my poor child, that you will
never see your friend again."

"But they haven't slain you," the girl reminded her, "and you have
been their prisoner, you say, for sixty years."

"No," replied her companion, "they have not killed me, nor will
they kill you, though God knows before you have lived long in this
horrible place you will beg them to kill you."

"Who are they--" asked Bertha Kircher, "what kind of people? They
differ from any that I ever have seen. And tell me, too, how you
came here."

"It was long ago," said the old woman, rocking back and forth on
the couch. "It was long ago. Oh, how long it was! I was only twenty
then. Think of it, child! Look at me. I have no mirror other than
my bath, I cannot see what I look like for my eyes are old, but
with my fingers I can feel my old and wrinkled face, my sunken eyes,
and these flabby lips drawn in over toothless gums. I am old and
bent and hideous, but then I was young and they said that I was
beautiful. No, I will not be a hypocrite; I was beautiful. My glass
told me that.

"My father was a missionary in the interior and one day there came
a band of Arabian slave raiders. They took the men and women of
the little native village where my father labored, and they took
me, too. They did not know much about our part of the country so
they were compelled to rely upon the men of our village whom they
had captured to guide them. They told me that they never before
had been so far south and that they had heard there was a country
rich in ivory and slaves west of us. They wanted to go there and
from there they would take us north, where I was to be sold into
the harem of some black sultan.

"They often discussed the price I would bring, and that that price
might not lessen, they guarded me jealously from one another so
the journeys were made as little fatiguing for me as possible. I
was given the best food at their command and I was not harmed.

"But after a short time, when we had reached the confines of the
country with which the men of our village were familiar and had
entered upon a desolate and arid desert waste, the Arabs realized
at last that we were lost. But they still kept on, ever toward
the west, crossing hideous gorges and marching across the face of
a burning land beneath the pitiless sun. The poor slaves they had
captured were, of course, compelled to carry all the camp equipage
and loot and thus heavily burdened, half starved and without water,
they soon commenced to die like flies.

"We had not been in the desert land long before the Arabs were
forced to kill their horses for food, and when we reached the first
gorge, across which it would have been impossible to transport the
animals, the balance of them were slaughtered and the meat loaded
upon the poor staggering blacks who still survived.

"Thus we continued for two more days and now all but a handful of
blacks were dead, and the Arabs themselves had commenced to succumb
to hunger and thirst and the intense heat of the desert. As far as
the eye could reach back toward the land of plenty from whence we
had come, our route was marked by circling vultures in the sky and
by the bodies of the dead who lay down in the trackless waste for
the last time. The ivory had been abandoned tusk by tusk as the
blacks gave out, and along the trail of death was strewn the camp
equipage and the horse trappings of a hundred men.

"For some reason the Arab chief favored me to the last, possibly
with the idea that of all his other treasures I could be most easily
transported, for I was young and strong and after the horses were
killed I had walked and kept up with the best of the men. We English,
you know, are great walkers, while these Arabians had never walked
since they were old enough to ride a horse.

"I cannot tell you how much longer we kept on but at last, with
our strength almost gone, a handful of us reached the bottom of a
deep gorge. To scale the opposite side was out of the question and
so we kept on down along the sands of what must have been the bed
of an ancient river, until finally we came to a point where we
looked out upon what appeared to be a beautiful valley in which we
felt assured that we would find game in plenty.

"By then there were only two of us left--the chief and myself. I
do not need to tell you what the valley was, for you found it in
much the same way as I did. So quickly were we captured that it
seemed they must have been waiting for us, and I learned later that
such was the case, just as they were waiting for you.

"As you came through the forest you must have seen the monkeys
and parrots and since you have entered the palace, how constantly
these animals, and the lions, are used in the decorations. At home
we were all familiar with talking parrots who repeated the things
that they were taught to say, but these parrots are different
in that they all talk in the same language that the people of the
city use, and they say that the monkeys talk to the parrots and the
parrots fly to the city and tell the people what the monkeys say.
And, although it is hard to believe, I have learned that this is
so, for I have lived here among them for sixty years in the palace
of their king.

"They brought me, as they brought you, directly to the palace. The
Arabian chief was taken elsewhere. I never knew what became of him.
Ago XXV was king then. I have seen many kings since that day. He
was a terrible man; but then, they are all terrible."

"What is the matter with them?" asked the girl.

"They are a race of maniacs," replied the old woman. "Had you not
guessed it? Among them are excellent craftsmen and good farmers
and a certain amount of law and order, such as it is.

"They reverence all birds, but the parrot is their chief deity.
There is one who is held here in the palace in a very beautiful
apartment. He is their god of gods. He is a very old bird. If what
Ago told me when I came is true, he must be nearly three hundred
years old by now. Their religious rites are revolting in the
extreme, and I believe that it may be the practice of these rites
through ages that has brought the race to its present condition of
imbecility.

"And yet, as I said, they are not without some redeeming qualities.
If legend may be credited, their forebears--a little handful of
men and women who came from somewhere out of the north and became
lost in the wilderness of central Africa--found here only a barren
desert valley. To my own knowledge rain seldom, if ever, falls
here, and yet you have seen a great forest and luxuriant vegetation
outside of the city as well as within. This miracle is accomplished
by the utilization of natural springs which their ancestors developed,
and upon which they have improved to such an extent that the entire
valley receives an adequate amount of moisture at all times.

"Ago told me that many generations before his time the forest was
irrigated by changing the course of the streams which carried the
spring water to the city but that when the trees had sent their
roots down to the natural moisture of the soil and required no
further irrigation, the course of the stream was changed and other
trees were planted. And so the forest grew until today it covers
almost the entire floor of the valley except for the open space
where the city stands. I do not know that this is true. It may be
that the forest has always been here, but it is one of their legends
and it is borne out by the fact that there is not sufficient rainfall
here to support vegetation.

"They are peculiar people in many respects, not only in their form
of worship and religious rites but also in that they breed lions
as other people breed cattle. You have seen how they use some of
these lions but the majority of them they fatten and eat. At first,
I imagine, they ate lion meat as a part of their religious ceremony
but after many generations they came to crave it so that now it is
practically the only flesh they eat. They would, of course, rather
die than eat the flesh of a bird, nor will they eat monkey's meat,
while the herbivorous animals they raise only for milk, hides,
and flesh for the lions. Upon the south side of the city are the
corrals and pastures where the herbivorous animals are raised.
Boar, deer, and antelope are used principally for the lions, while
goats are kept for milk for the human inhabitants of the city."

"And you have lived here all these years," exclaimed the girl,
"without ever seeing one of your own kind?"

The old woman nodded affirmatively.

"For sixty years you have lived here," continued Bertha Kircher,
"and they have not harmed you!"

"I did not say they had not harmed me," said the old woman, "they
did not kill me, that is all."

"What"--the girl hesitated--"what," she continued at last, "was
your position among them? Pardon me," she added quickly, "I think
I know but I should like to hear from your own lips, for whatever
your position was, mine will doubtless be the same."

The old woman nodded. "Yes," she said, "doubtless; if they can keep
you away from the women."

"What do you mean?" asked the girl.

"For sixty years I have never been allowed near a woman. They would
kill me, even now, if they could reach me. The men are frightful,
God knows they are frightful! But heaven keep you from the women!"

"You mean," asked the girl, "that the men will not harm me?"

"Ago XXV made me his queen," said the old woman. "But he had many
other queens, nor were they all human. He was not murdered for ten
years after I came here. Then the next king took me, and so it has
been always. I am the oldest queen now. Very few of their women live
to a great age. Not only are they constantly liable to assassination
but, owing to their subnormal mentalities, they are subject to
periods of depression during which they are very likely to destroy
themselves."

She turned suddenly and pointed to the barred windows. "You see
this room," she said, "with the black eunuch outside? Wherever
you see these you will know that there are women, for with very
few exceptions they are never allowed out of captivity. They are
considered and really are more violent than the men."

For several minutes the two sat in silence, and then the younger
woman turned to the older.

"Is there no way to escape?" she asked.

The old woman pointed again to the barred windows and then to the
door, saying: "And there is the armed eunuch. And if you should
pass him, how could you reach the street? And if you reached the
street, how could you pass through the city to the outer wall? And
even if, by some miracle, you should gain the outer wall, and, by
another miracle, you should be permitted to pass through the gate,
could you ever hope to traverse the forest where the great black
lions roam and feed upon men? No!" she exclaimed, answering her
own question, "there is no escape, for after one had escaped from
the palace and the city and the forest it would be but to invite
death in the frightful desert land beyond.

"In sixty years you are the first to find this buried city. In
a thousand no denizen of this valley has ever left it, and within
the memory of man, or even in their legends, none had found them
prior to my coming other than a single warlike giant, the story of
whom has been handed down from father to son.

"I think from the description that he must have been a Spaniard,
a giant of a man in buckler and helmet, who fought his way through
the terrible forest to the city gate, who fell upon those who were
sent out to capture him and slew them with his mighty sword. And
when he had eaten of the vegetables from the gardens, and the fruit
from the trees and drank of the water from the stream, he turned
about and fought his way back through the forest to the mouth of
the gorge. But though he escaped the city and the forest he did
not escape the desert. For a legend runs that the king, fearful
that he would bring others to attack them, sent a party after him
to slay him.

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