Chapter XXI
The Village of Torture
As the little expedition of sailors toiled through the dense junglesearching for signs of Jane Porter, the futility of their venturebecame more and more apparent, but the grief of the old man and thehopeless eyes of the young Englishman prevented the kind heartedD'Arnot from turning back.
He thought that there might be a bare possibility of finding her body,or the remains of it, for he was positive that she had been devoured bysome beast of prey. He deployed his men into a skirmish line from thepoint where Esmeralda had been found, and in this extended formationthey pushed their way, sweating and panting, through the tangled vinesand creepers. It was slow work. Noon found them but a few milesinland. They halted for a brief rest then, and after pushing on for ashort distance further one of the men discovered a well-marked trail.
It was an old elephant track, and D'Arnot after consulting withProfessor Porter and Clayton decided to follow it.
The path wound through the jungle in a northeasterly direction, andalong it the column moved in single file.
Lieutenant D'Arnot was in the lead and moving at a quick pace, for thetrail was comparatively open. Immediately behind him came ProfessorPorter, but as he could not keep pace with the younger man D'Arnot wasa hundred yards in advance when suddenly a half dozen black warriorsarose about him.
D'Arnot gave a warning shout to his column as the blacks closed on him,but before he could draw his revolver he had been pinioned and draggedinto the jungle.
His cry had alarmed the sailors and a dozen of them sprang forward pastProfessor Porter, running up the trail to their officer's aid.
They did not know the cause of his outcry, only that it was a warningof danger ahead. They had rushed past the spot where D'Arnot had beenseized when a spear hurled from the jungle transfixed one of the men,and then a volley of arrows fell among them.
Raising their rifles they fired into the underbrush in the directionfrom which the missiles had come.
By this time the balance of the party had come up, and volley aftervolley was fired toward the concealed foe. It was these shots thatTarzan and Jane Porter had heard.
Lieutenant Charpentier, who had been bringing up the rear of thecolumn, now came running to the scene, and on hearing the details ofthe ambush ordered the men to follow him, and plunged into the tangledvegetation.
In an instant they were in a hand-to-hand fight with some fifty blackwarriors of Mbonga's village. Arrows and bullets flew thick and fast.
Queer African knives and French gun butts mingled for a moment insavage and bloody duels, but soon the natives fled into the jungle,leaving the Frenchmen to count their losses.
Four of the twenty were dead, a dozen others were wounded, andLieutenant D'Arnot was missing. Night was falling rapidly, and theirpredicament was rendered doubly worse when they could not even find theelephant trail which they had been following.
There was but one thing to do, make camp where they were untildaylight. Lieutenant Charpentier ordered a clearing made and acircular abatis of underbrush constructed about the camp.
This work was not completed until long after dark, the men building ahuge fire in the center of the clearing to give them light to work by.
When all was safe as possible against attack of wild beasts and savagemen, Lieutenant Charpentier placed sentries about the little camp andthe tired and hungry men threw themselves upon the ground to sleep.
The groans of the wounded, mingled with the roaring and growling of thegreat beasts which the noise and firelight had attracted, kept sleep,except in its most fitful form, from the tired eyes. It was a sad andhungry party that lay through the long night praying for dawn.
The blacks who had seized D'Arnot had not waited to participate in thefight which followed, but instead had dragged their prisoner a littleway through the jungle and then struck the trail further on beyond thescene of the fighting in which their fellows were engaged.
They hurried him along, the sounds of battle growing fainter andfainter as they drew away from the contestants until there suddenlybroke upon D'Arnot's vision a good-sized clearing at one end of whichstood a thatched and palisaded village.
It was now dusk, but the watchers at the gate saw the approaching trioand distinguished one as a prisoner ere they reached the portals.
A cry went up within the palisade. A great throng of women andchildren rushed out to meet the party.
And then began for the French officer the most terrifying experiencewhich man can encounter upon earth--the reception of a white prisonerinto a village of African cannibals.
To add to the fiendishness of their cruel savagery was the poignantmemory of still crueler barbarities practiced upon them and theirs bythe white officers of that arch hypocrite, Leopold II of Belgium,because of whose atrocities they had fled the Congo Free State--apitiful remnant of what once had been a mighty tribe.
They fell upon D'Arnot tooth and nail, beating him with sticks andstones and tearing at him with claw-like hands. Every vestige ofclothing was torn from him, and the merciless blows fell upon his bareand quivering flesh. But not once did the Frenchman cry out in pain.He breathed a silent prayer that he be quickly delivered from historture.
But the death he prayed for was not to be so easily had. Soon thewarriors beat the women away from their prisoner. He was to be savedfor nobler sport than this, and the first wave of their passion havingsubsided they contented themselves with crying out taunts and insultsand spitting upon him.
Presently they reached the center of the village. There D'Arnot wasbound securely to the great post from which no live man had ever beenreleased.
A number of the women scattered to their several huts to fetch pots andwater, while others built a row of fires on which portions of the feastwere to be boiled while the balance would be slowly dried in strips forfuture use, as they expected the other warriors to return with manyprisoners. The festivities were delayed awaiting the return of thewarriors who had remained to engage in the skirmish with the white men,so that it was quite late when all were in the village, and the danceof death commenced to circle around the doomed officer.
Half fainting from pain and exhaustion, D'Arnot watched from beneathhalf-closed lids what seemed but the vagary of delirium, or some horridnightmare from which he must soon awake.
The bestial faces, daubed with color--the huge mouths and flabbyhanging lips--the yellow teeth, sharp filed--the rolling, demoneyes--the shining naked bodies--the cruel spears. Surely no suchcreatures really existed upon earth--he must indeed be dreaming.
The savage, whirling bodies circled nearer. Now a spear sprang forthand touched his arm. The sharp pain and the feel of hot, tricklingblood assured him of the awful reality of his hopeless position.
Another spear and then another touched him. He closed his eyes andheld his teeth firm set--he would not cry out.
He was a soldier of France, and he would teach these beasts how anofficer and a gentleman died.
Tarzan of the Apes needed no interpreter to translate the story ofthose distant shots. With Jane Porter's kisses still warm upon hislips he was swinging with incredible rapidity through the forest treesstraight toward the village of Mbonga.
He was not interested in the location of the encounter, for he judgedthat that would soon be over. Those who were killed he could not aid,those who escaped would not need his assistance.
It was to those who had neither been killed or escaped that hehastened. And he knew that he would find them by the great post in thecenter of Mbonga village.
Many times had Tarzan seen Mbonga's black raiding parties return fromthe northward with prisoners, and always were the same scenes enactedabout that grim stake, beneath the flaring light of many fires.
He knew, too, that they seldom lost much time before consummating thefiendish purpose of their captures. He doubted that he would arrive intime to do more than avenge.
On he sped. Night had fallen and he traveled high along the upperterrace where the gorgeous tropic moon lighted the dizzy pathwaythrough the gently undulating branches of the tree tops.
Presently he caught the reflection of a distant blaze. It lay to theright of his path. It must be the light from the camp fire the two menhad built before they were attacked--Tarzan knew nothing of thepresence of the sailors.
So sure was Tarzan of his jungle knowledge that he did not turn fromhis course, but passed the glare at a distance of a half mile. It wasthe camp fire of the Frenchmen.
In a few minutes more Tarzan swung into the trees above Mbonga'svillage. Ah, he was not quite too late! Or, was he? He could nottell. The figure at the stake was very still, yet the black warriorswere but pricking it.
Tarzan knew their customs. The death blow had not been struck. Hecould tell almost to a minute how far the dance had gone.
In another instant Mbonga's knife would sever one of the victim'sears--that would mark the beginning of the end, for very shortly afteronly a writhing mass of mutilated flesh would remain.
There would still be life in it, but death then would be the onlycharity it craved.
The stake stood forty feet from the nearest tree. Tarzan coiled hisrope. Then there rose suddenly above the fiendish cries of the dancingdemons the awful challenge of the ape-man.
The dancers halted as though turned to stone.
The rope sped with singing whir high above the heads of the blacks. Itwas quite invisible in the flaring lights of the camp fires.
D'Arnot opened his eyes. A huge black, standing directly before him,lunged backward as though felled by an invisible hand.
Struggling and shrieking, his body, rolling from side to side, movedquickly toward the shadows beneath the trees.
The blacks, their eyes protruding in horror, watched spellbound.
Once beneath the trees, the body rose straight into the air, and as itdisappeared into the foliage above, the terrified negroes, screamingwith fright, broke into a mad race for the village gate.
D'Arnot was left alone.
He was a brave man, but he had felt the short hairs bristle upon thenape of his neck when that uncanny cry rose upon the air.
As the writhing body of the black soared, as though by unearthly power,into the dense foliage of the forest, D'Arnot felt an icy shiver runalong his spine, as though death had risen from a dark grave and laid acold and clammy finger on his flesh.
As D'Arnot watched the spot where the body had entered the tree heheard the sounds of movement there.
The branches swayed as though under the weight of a man's body--therewas a crash and the black came sprawling to earth again,--to lie veryquietly where he had fallen.
Immediately after him came a white body, but this one alighted erect.
D'Arnot saw a clean-limbed young giant emerge from the shadows into thefirelight and come quickly toward him.
What could it mean? Who could it be? Some new creature of torture anddestruction, doubtless.
D'Arnot waited. His eyes never left the face of the advancing man.Nor did the other's frank, clear eyes waver beneath D'Arnot's fixedgaze.
D'Arnot was reassured, but still without much hope, though he felt thatthat face could not mask a cruel heart.
Without a word Tarzan of the Apes cut the bonds which held theFrenchman. Weak from suffering and loss of blood, he would have fallenbut for the strong arm that caught him.
He felt himself lifted from the ground. There was a sensation as offlying, and then he lost consciousness.