XX. The Vulture, the Snake and the Torrent of Ants
It was decided that the woodcutters and Gorden’s adventurers would serve as beaters. It was a genuine pleasure-party; the region was full of game; gunshots fired on every side announced an imposing tableau for the return. For two hours the hunters devoted themselves to their work with joyful hearts. No dangerous animal had been spotted, so the initial vigilance had relaxed considerably, and everyone wandered at hazard, in isolation. Mabel, in particular—who was irritated by the attentiveness with which her two worshipers watched over her—exercised her ingenuity in order to give them the slip and take her chances without being under surveillance by her bodyguards.
The Nimrods had gradually drawn nearer to the forest. The adventurous young woman slid into a kind of rocky gorge, strewn with enormous trees and thorny thickets. From time to time she stopped to listen, anxious on the one hand to hear some animal, and on the other, to keep track of the sound of gunfire, in order not to get too far away from the hunt.
Suddenly, she stated. Like a falling stone, a large vulture swooped down from the sky upon a prey that was invisible to the young woman. A minute later, she saw it take off laboriously from a rocky escarpment, holding a snake at least two meters long in its beak. Having arrived at the summit, it spread its broad wings, ready to fly away, carrying the reptile, doubtless reserved for a family meal.
Mabel took aim and fired. The animal, hit in the head, dropped dead. The intrepid huntress set off to climb the rock in quest of her victim. She succeeded, and examined it. The vulture was a magnificent specimen of that carnivorous species. Extended, it was more than four meters from one wingtip to the other. It was dark brown on the upper part of its body, pale blond underneath, with a formidable beak and claws.
There, she thought. That will make a superb trophy in the dining-room at Riddle-Temple.
The difficulty was carrying it, for it weighed at least thirty kilos. She called for help, but was not heard. She fired a few shots, with no better result.
“Bah! I’ll leave it here and send someone to fetch it.”
Thus resolved, she was about to descend from the when a strange noise attracted her attention. She looked down, and her hair bristled. A kind of black torrent was now flowing at the base of the enormous block, which it enclosed in its waves. At the same time a characteristic odor rose up to her.
The black tide was a migration of ants, and Mabel was not unaware of the danger that threatened her, for in the passage of those terrible insect dissectors, everything disappeared, sliced, torn apart and devoured by millions of ferocious little creatures, the largest of their kind, being nearly two centimeters long.
Already, the rock was surrounded by a column more than six meters broad. Attracted by the odor of the vulture and its leaking blood, a few ants were starting an ascent; if they drew the bulk of the army with them, the rock would be submerged and Mabel was doomed.
She seized the cadaver of the bird and threw it down, as well as the snake, as fodder for the jaws of the innumerable devastators. In a very short time the two cadavers had been stripped, and nothing remained but their skeletons, fleshless and gleaming.
For more than two hours, the black flood flowed around the foot of the singular pedestal. Mabel, in anguish, followed the march of the infernal column anxiously.
Finally, she heard shouts and gunshots, and the young woman replied to them with a rifle-shot. A few minutes later, Archibald, Gorden, the doctor and Mabel’s father, Harry Smith, arrived at the edge of the ravine, accompanied by twenty hunters. Archibald, the American, was about to launch himself into the moving river of ants, but Gorden held him back. It would be certain death, without saving the young woman.
With a rapid glance, the Englishman assessed the situation. At a sign from him, one of his men attacked a eucalyptus whose stem rose up as straight and smooth as a mast to a height of twenty meters; circling the enormous trunk with his flannel waistband, three meters long, he went rapidly up the tree, bracing himself with his bare feet. He reached the top and started down again, cutting the branches as he came. The eucalyptus was reduced to the state of a greasy pole; subsequently attacked at its base, it was cut down and up-ended like a bridge between the hunters and Mabel’s refuge.
The latter, who had been watching her rescuers’ work anxiously, did not waste a second. Scarcely had the tree touched the summit of the rock than she launched herself on to the improvised bridge and came to fall into her father’s arms. In spite of her efforts to master herself, her sex got the upper hand, and she collapsed in a nervous flood of tears.
Four hunters unrolled their waistbands, on which she as laid, and, lifted up by eight vigorous fellows, was rapidly carried back to the camp. On the other hand, the hunt had produced copious results: deer, wild boar, monkeys and birds of all sizes, representing at least four hundred kilos of various meat. Everyone got busy skinning and plucking. Fires were lit on all sides, promising abundant and copious roasts for the evening meal.
Mabel had retired to hr tent, where she was resting. Her nervous excitement gradually calmed down. Dr. Goldry administered a cordial that was both calming and restorative, accompanied by remonstrations—which, after the terror she had experienced, the young woman accepted without too much irritation.
As the day drew to a close, the Malays came back to the camp. They had not observed anything worrying, and judged that they could resume the pursuit through the new forest; To Wang affirmed that they ought not be more than two or three days march from the great apes’ refuge.
XXI. The Invisible Companions
The next morning, the little army had resumed its appearance of two days before, and everyone prepared to penetrate into the new sea of verdure, which promised to be more easily accessible than the first.
Mabel, completely recovered, drawn toward peril by her recent excitement, manifested a great joy when the immense forest appeared close at hand: the virgin naves between columnar tree-boles, a natural cathedral that no one of her race had ever penetrated before.
After the plain with its scattered clumps of trees and thick bushes, the caravan passed beneath the arches of giant tulip-trees, and palm-trees whose crowns disappeared in a tangle of lianas, golden yellow, red, brown or greens ranging from pale emerald to dark. There were myriads of strange plants, multicolored orchids and spiny cacti in various forms: some as round as the heads of ogres, florid with red patches, like bloody lips or wounds; others with harsh, sharpened leaves like menacing darts brisling with spines. Here were giant mushrooms, pink, violet and white with leprous brown patches; there and everywhere flowers with bizarre corollas, their gaping mouths studded with sapphires, rubies, peridots and amethysts; there was metallic foliage, bronzed, oxidized, some seemingly varnished, furry or moist.
More slowly now, obliged to pause by incessantly-renewed difficulties—rocks, torrents, steep ravines—the caravan advanced with difficulty into the forest, which became denser and darker by the hour.
The sun’s rays scarcely penetrated, here and there, the interlacement of verdure and creepers, the tresses of the great woods. In the penumbra, the twisted trunks of the trees seemed to be giant phantoms and aged, immobile monsters lying in wait for living prey.
An anxiety born of the perpetual gloom, the darkness and the unknown, gripped the voyagers, especially the whites, who missed the customary glare of daylight.
Sometimes, immense trunks felled by old age, the ruins of trees, blocked their route. Their interstices had been populated by avid plants, grown from seeds carried by the wind, and blooming flowers extracted their life from death. Unseen snakes sometimes hissed, whose slithering could be heard in the dry leaves. The calls and songs of birds became rare in the thickness of mysterious naves.
Most of the time, they marched in silence; at times, the orangutan hunters exchanged a few whispers, reminiscent, as if by instinct, of hushed words spoken in obscure churches. The route became more arduous as time went by; in the inextricable
tangle of undergrowth and thorny scrub, it was necessary to resume the quotidian labor of hatchets and sabers, which cut through the ironwood and the coarse fibers of ebony and mahogany; then they heard the protest and flight of frightened animals, the bounds of wild beasts scared by the sight of so many humans, suddenly disturbed in their quietude.
They followed a nameless river all day. In the water heavy caimans lay dormant, like slimy paving-stones. They were all gripped by the grandiose majesty of the place. Mabel no longer left her place between her father and Wilson, while Gorden liked to supervise the hardest endeavors, to which everyone except the young woman lent a hand.
“Are you still finding the journey so monotonous, Miss Smith?” asked Gorden, smiling.
“No, the forest seems to me, according to the time of day and place, to be a huge amorous brunette, or a marvelous blonde.”
“Yes,” Gorden murmured, “A dreamer, sometimes she lies down limply in the hollows of valleys, or along the slopes, or else, virginally, she defends herself with all her thorns and all her thick branches, like a woman; she’s a coquette; she attracts, reaching out her arms, but rejects you as soon as you try to penetrate her.”
“She has the tresses of a goddess,” Mabel murmured, “and sometimes, illuminated clearings like laughing mouths. She’s chaste, veiled with verdure; but suddenly, immodestly, she displays her beauty; she’s proud of knowing that she’s so magnificent.”
Major Bennett laughed at that enthusiasm. He confessed that he was getting old, and knew it. Combine with that the lack of habitual comfort, to the point of suffering, and—would you believe it?—it was, most of all, the endless whining of his wife that he missed.
Gathered together in the evening camp, after To Wang had made the necessary observations and determined the route, the Americans had their meal, chatting about previous voyages they had made and civilizations they had seen.
Mabel was seriously annoyed; Wilson had asked her, smiling, whether she had been afraid during her adventure with the ants; she sulked throughout the next day.
For two days, however, it seemed that everyone had sensed the invisible presence of unidentified creatures around the caravan. Exhalations of breath, unusual noises, the cracking of branches and confused rumors made the Whites and the men of the escort shiver.
Several times, To Wang, the recognized leader of the expedition, sent out scouts to explore the surrounding area; the bushes were searched and the forest beaten in all directions during a thousand and one halts and pauses, but nothing justified those fears: no enemy, no trace to put the humans on the track of any danger.
Mabel, anxious in spite of her constant effort not to let her unease show, taunted Wilson every time he came back from one of these patrols.
“Was it wild pigs, Archibald? Why didn’t you kill one or two?”
“No, I didn’t see anything. I heard footsteps, though; last night, I even thought I heard breathing to one side, overhead, quite distinct within the sounds of the wind and your bivouac. It was like the breath of another camp, very close to ours. I woke Bennett and your Father. Gorden heard them too.”
“Who?”
“But I thought I was dreaming,” said Smith. “It was a nightmare, I told myself, and went back to sleep.”
“Who was it?” Mabel asked, again. “What beings were they?”
“I don’t know,” said Gorden. “We didn’t find anything. To Wang claims that there are snakes that follow humans, which are never seen.” The young man laughed and concluded: “Perhaps it was the spirits of the forest that we’ve violated.”
“The fairies are following us, without showing themselves,” said Mabel.
The major snorted. “I don’t know which of us is the craziest. I too heard footsteps in the trees.”
Artfully questioned one by one, for fear that terror might grip the escort, each of the men n the troop affirmed that he had heard the same sounds of footfalls, simultaneously muffled and heavy.
The insouciant Malays smiled. “Spirits hunt by night, in the plains and forests, but brown men close their eyes in order not to offend the gods who pass by with any human gaze.”
Al night long, sentinels kept watch around the fires. That same day, although hallucinations were scarcely explicable in such strong minds, noises more prolonged than the customary voices of the forest had resonated; then everything entered once again into the great silence populated by songs infinite in their nature, without any precise symptom aiding the voyagers in giving a name to the vague peril, the unknown evil, from which they thought, inexplicably, they were suffering.
The impression remained, however, in spite of everything, that they were being watched and followed.
XXII. The First Encounter
After three days of marching through the new forest, the hunters seemed no further forward, and Mabel, especially, was manifesting an impatience that was translated into mocking or irritated remarks toward her two flirts. Dr. Abraham Goldry too found the time long, and increasingly regretted having irritated his pupil Ouha and allowed him to escape.
Toward the end of the third day, as they were setting up camp in a kind of clearing devoid of large trees, which the coolies and woodcutters had stripped of bushes and small trees with great blows of sabers and hatchets, Harry Smith was the first to see the Malays—who had, as usual, gone out as scouts—emerge from the forest.
They were running in terror, howling: “Alert! Alert! The free men!”
Behind them, there was a frightful racket. Stones and enormous whistled through the air, hitting two of the running men, who fell, struck dead. After a momentary shock, everyone was armed and on the defensive, quickly forming a rampart of bales.
They did not have to wait long. From the edge of the clearing, fortunately well-cleared, surged the army corps of Harr and Kri-Kri.
Guided by the two bellicose leaders of the volunteer troop, the orangutans advanced rapidly, each one supporting himself with one hand of the ground and brandishing an enormous club in the other. Twenty meters from the retrenchment, the two chiefs drew themselves up to their full height, struck their chests, which resonated like gongs, and uttered formidable screeches—war-cries to which the orangs all replied with similar screeches—and they all surged toward the hunters, who, almost at point-blank range, launched a violent fire against the men of the woods.
The coolies, retired to the rear, reloaded the weapons and passed them to the combatants, but they soon became useless and hand-to-hand combat was engaged in places all along the front line. The coolies, understanding that the white mens’ defeat would be their ruination, threw themselves into the battle and fought with the rage of desperation.
The merciless battle lasted a good quarter of an hour, after which, the two chiefs Harr and Kri-Kri having been killed, the anthropoids retreated. They had lost about thirty of their own. Then, at a sign from Wilson, echoed by Gorden, the Europeans and the Malays set up and aimed the two machine-guns, which, a minute later, riddled the orangs, unfortunately regrouped, with bullets. Bewildered, unable to comprehend that avalanche of projectiles, they spun around and crumpled in dozens. Finally, the survivors took flight, pursued by the hunters’ bullets, leaving sixty of their number strewn on the battleground, as many dead as wounded.
Victory went to the white men, but they had paid dearly for it. Twenty men had perished, and thirty more had been wounded. In order to guard against a new attack, Gorden and Archibald had a rampart of earth erected by the coolies, simultaneously hollowing out a trench and a refuge for the riflemen.
There was also the matter of dressing wounds—mostly head-wounds or broken arms. The doctor, aided by Mabel and the Malay women, was actively engaged in that all night long, while the men were organizing the defenses, burying the dead and finishing off the wounded orangs—for it was impossible to take a single one alive. One of Gorden’ men risked himself imprudently; he was grabbed by an orang’s inferior hand, which seized his abdomen and eviscerated him in the blink of an eye
. That was one more death to add to all the rest.
Large fires were lit at the four corners of the entrenchment, to illuminate the edge of the forest, and a careful watch was kept thereon. The night passed, however, without any further incident. In the morning, the convened council decided to send back the wounded, who would be a hindrance and could not render any service, under the guidance of the two married Malays, Sing Mah and Ehhi Facu, with their wives and an escort of thirty coolies. They were to return to Riddle-Temple by the route cleared on the outward journey, and wait there for the return of the expedition.
After the departure of the wounded, the hunters sent a few advance scouts into the forest, but with the greatest precaution. They returned to the camp without having made any disquieting observation.
XXIII. Dialogues
“It could be that the bulk of the band are further away. If we go into the woods to pursue them, they’d have the advantage over us.”
“And there must be more of them, for we didn’t see Ouha among these, and that gigantic orang must be a chief. If there are other tribes against us, the situation becomes critical.”
“But with our coolies, who showed themselves to be very courageous, there are still more than three hundred and fifty of us. That’s more than enough to defeat an army of apes.”
“Besides, what guarantee do we have that, if we beat a retreat, we won’t be pursued?”
“We have to recapture Ouha” said Mabel.
“We’re continuing the hunt, then?” said Gorden.
“Let’s get on with it!” Miss Smith concluded. “Forward march!”
They ate in haste. The Malays resumed their posts at the head of the column, and they plunged once again into the forest. Progress was slow and painful. Involuntarily, at the slightest sound, the hunters raised their heads, and alerts were all the more frequent because a host of small monkeys of all kinds accompanied the explorers—but that was, at the same time a reassuring sign, for all monkeys fled from the anthropoids.
Ouha, King of the Apes Page 8