The beast seemed dressed in a linen robe by virtue of his thick fur, hanging down in long wisps. The enormous head was swaying, the eyes rolling: two black diamonds mounted in gold, for which the wrinkled red pupils made a hideous matrix. Two black hands were suddenly extended toward Mabel, with long hooked fingers with curved nails.
At first, the young woman had remained still, as if petrified, beneath the gaze with which the beast was covering her, but at that gesture, a scream of anguish and horror and an appeal for help escaped her mouth, and she leapt backwards.
The standing orangutan considered her, and it appeared to Mabel that he looked at her sadly, in an almost human fashion, and she became less fearful. She recognized Ouha.
Several recent wounds marbled the ape’s fawn-colored fleece, one on the shoulder, another—frightful, and swollen by a patch of coagulated blood—on the chest. Ouha was indeed the abductor of the previous night; the one whose steely arms had borne her away through the darkness. In the indescribable sentiment of terror that chilled the beautiful American, Wilson’s joke, when he wanted to dissuade her from taking part in the expedition, came back to her:
“They don’t devour women, or eat their flesh at all—but would you want an ape for a husband?”
Mabel allowed the orang to approach her, firmly resolved—she kept one hand on the holster of the revolver that she had, providentially, retained—to die or to kill Ouha, if any excessively ardent audacity threatened her. But she took account, remembering the previous day and the dawn, of the multiple danger; other monsters were surely not far away: an entire city, a simian tribe, whose prey she was. Who could tell? Patience and cunning might save her.
Ouha continued to stare at the blonde Mabel with eyes that were infinitely gentle, in spite of the gleam of covetousness. He was articulating syllables, veritable words, which were certainly explaining a desire, perhaps a plea.
With his long hands, brown on one side, with black palms, Ouha made gestures similar to those of humans, in a mime of admiration. The hands sketched the oval of an imaginary face, the eyes, the lips; he seemed to be trying to explain his thoughts—things, at least that he represented by signs.
For a moment, she was tempted to laugh, because the embarrassed beast in front of her scratched his narrow cranium, comically and ridiculously. Ouha stroked his thighs, murmuring in a raucous voice, which he attempted to soften, words of prayer, anger, supplication and command.
Finally, Ouha disappeared, making his exit through the gaping opening in the cavern wall, and allowed two female apes to go to Mabel, who looked at her, felt her, astonished by the feel of her clothes, her soft hands and her pale face.
Her initial read having dissipated, Mabel understood that the anthropoid monsters had no designs on her life, at least for the moment. She studied the scarcely-articulate language of her two jailers, astonished by the gentleness of their movements toward her.
The opening was sealed again from outside, by a block of granite.
The beams of light descending from the vault were attenuated; the young woman presumed, after the day’s ordeals, that worse anguish awaited her in the dusk and the approaching darkness. Her two guards were agitated, addressing hoarse words to her, accompanied by signs—and the two beasts, with gestures of respect and dread, continually repeated the two syllables:
“Ouha! Ouha! Ouha!”
They sniggered in Mabel’s face and, pointing to their parted legs, repeated a word—what did it signify?—pointed to their breasts, their sex, miming kisses or bites.
And disgust overwhelmed the virgin.
The monster came in again. He dismissed the jailers with a gesture, striking them brutally with one of his posterior hands.
Mabel, trembling, felt herself caressed; the monster’s breath brushed her face.
As Ouha leaned over her, she had the inspired idea of launching her fist at the wound in his chest.
Ouha uttered a cry of pain, and raises his enormous hand—but he let his arm fall again into empty space, and his bobbing head took on a melancholy and heartbroken expression. His eyes became misty. He stared at the American woman, caressing her for a long time with his black diamond pupils encircled by gold. Mabel understood that it was not death, but true love that was coming toward her.
Then, she felt her strength.
She had, thus far, played with the love of men; she was about to have to exercise her power upon a brute. In spite of the horror of her situation, a smile of audacious pride brushed her lips. What was she risking, after all? Only death—for she was firmly resolved not to submit to the Beast’s caresses. She was armed with a revolver. If she were about to succumb, if she were defeated, she would kill herself.
Still squatting in front of her, Ouha seemed to be seeking to read the expression in her eyes, and Mabel was struck by the intensity of the intelligence shining in the colossal orangutan’s eyes. In that frightful mask, the eyes were alive, astonishing luminous and eloquent. The American woman understood, on seeing that gaze, that she had nothing to fear from the violence of the wild beast. However, it was necessary to occupy the anthropoid’s mind in order that desire should not get the upper hand over the apprehension that he seemed to have of doing the wrong thing.
She took two bananas from the bed of leaves where they had been placed, and offered one to Ouha, keeping the other for herself. The orang seemed delighted by the offer. He watched the young woman peel the fruit and raise it delicately to her lips. He copied Mabel’s gestures carefully, and, instead of swallowing he banana whole, he savored it, as he had seen his prisoner do. He was so comical that Mabel had difficulty not bursting into laughter, but she remembered Ouha’s anger at Riddle-Temple, and restrained herself.
After that fruit, others followed, and then others. The meal, uniquely vegetarian, was scarcely satiating after the fatigue of recent days, but she saw nearby the pith of the breadfruit tree. She took a morsel of it and raised it to her mouth. She pulled a face. Ouha, who continued to imitate her, grimaced too, but infinitely more successfully. Mabel, who had never eaten that precious vegetable, but who had heard mention of it, knew that it was necessary to dry out a fragment that pith and roast it.
In order to indicate to Ouha that she wanted a fire, she collected three large stones, which she arranged as a hearth beneath one of openings in the cave, took a handful of brushwood, put it between the stones and mimed striking a match. Ouha knew what she was doing, because he had seen Smith and his guests light cigars.
The orangutan scratched his buttock, then his head; then, abruptly, he got up and disappeared.
XXVIII. A Little Mandolin Music and Tea
A few minutes later, he came back, but he was not alone; he brought the chimpanzee Ko-Zu with him. At the sight of the American woman, the latter made the gesture of raining a non-existent hat, and bowed with the grace of a true gentleman. Mabel, flabbergasted, returned the salute. Ouha looked at his companion in astonishment, and, as if Ko-Zu’s expansive gesture had displeased him, gripped him brutally by the arm and dragged him to the hearth. Then he took a twig from the ground and made the gesture of striking a match, after which he signed an instruction to the chimpanzee to light the fire.
Ko-Zu, embarrassed, turned toward Ouha and started a very animated conversation with him. Ouha appeared to approve. The chimpanzee immediately went out, and Ouha sat down again beside the hearty. A few more minutes went by. Ko-Zu came back in, and held out to the stupefied Mabel a little sculpted silver box on which Indian deities were depicted: a box full of wax matches.
Mabel started. She recognized the box; she had seen it in the hand of Dr. Abraham Goldry. How had it come to be in the hands of her abductors?
Meanwhile, Ouha, seeing that she was not lighting anything, made a gesture of impatience. The young woman, reminded of her situation, struck a match; a few moments later, a bright flame rose up between the stones of the hearth. That seemed to amuse the two apes enormously. They drew nearer to the fire, and were soon rubbing
their hands voluptuously.
Over the flame, Mabel extended slices of the precious starchy substance, which, when dried and roasted, loses its acridity and becomes succulent.
Mabel made the distribution. She was at home, receiving visitors. Ko-Zu, remembering good manners, from the European viewpoint, sat down in the Turkish fashion, extended a large banana leaf over his knees and politely received the morsels that the mistress of the house handed to him. Ouha looked at the elegant gentleman askance, but did his best to imitate him. The meal was quite cheerful; the manners of the two guests amused Mabel, who forgot her situation a little. Where did that singular animal come from?
Suddenly, Ko-Zu slapped his forehead in a casual gesture. Bowing to Mabel, seemed to ask her permission to leave, and then disappeared.
Mabel turned to Ouha and, by means of a lively mime, attempted to interrogate him. Ouha appeared to understand that she was asking about Ko-Zu, and he pronounced a series of more-or-less articulate sounds, doubtless words, accompanied by an explanatory mime that she found incomprehensible.
In any case, Ko-Zu came back, carrying a wickerwork tray bearing a number of objects, which he deposited triumphantly in front of Mabel. On seeing them, she felt tears rising to her eyes. They were, alas, the relics of the catastrophe. There was no more doubt about it; the apes really had been victorious, and all the Europeans had doubtless fallen under the blows of the anthropoids. She really was Ouha’s prisoner, then. What ought she to do? Continue the ridiculous struggle for life or put an end to it straight away?
Her right hand settled on her revolver. At the same moment, however, a strange sound attracted her attention, and, her eyes involuntarily going toward Ko-Zu, she burst out laughing. Would that irritate Ouha? But the impulse was stronger than she was. She might have been killed on the spot, but she was unable to refrain from that nervous and inextinguishable laughter. There was good reason.
Ko-Zu brought out a mandolin that he had been hiding behind his back, and started strumming the strings delicately, opening his mouth as if he were singing and rolling his eyes, showing the whites. It had been one of his principal turns when he was an artiste in the Perkins Circus. Every time, Ko-Zu had unleashed tempests of laughter and bravos.
Finally, the piece came to an end. The ape stood up, bowed gravely to the right, the left and the front, and walked away backwards, still bowing. Mabel, exhausted by laughter, was weeping.
To her great astonishment, Ouha was not annoyed. On the contrary, he was looking at the young woman with a very satisfied expression. Seeing his prisoner finally calmed down, he stood up, and bowed. He was about to leave when he bumped into Ko-Zu, who was coming back in. The virtuoso had made a false exit, and was coming back for his curtain call. Seeing that his audience was not thinking about that, he came to sit down again and politely indicated the tray to Mabel.
On the tray there was a kettle, a packet of tea and a bottle of whisky. There was no sugar. Under the attentive eyes of the two apes, Mabel brewed the national beverage. To sweeten it, she had the idea of squeezing a little mango juice into the kettle, and, that fruit being very sweet, it did an adequate job. She poured the result into a calabash, drank first, and then passed it to Ouha—who, in a brotherly gesture, left a little for Ko-Zu. The latter had been eyeing the bottle for some time, but Mabel, fearing that alcohol might lead her guests to some drunken stupidity, confiscated it—to Ko-Zu’s great disappointment. Ouha supported the American woman’s decision, however, and dragged the chimpanzee outside to calm him down.
XXIX. The King of the Apes
For three days Mabel remained imprisoned in the cave. Every evening, when the light from the vents in the vault began to fade, the jailers mimed what she divined to be her destiny. Then the Master, the giant orang, arrived and chased away the two females. For long minutes, the Beast stood in contemplation before Mabel.
Once, when he hazarded a gesture toward her, and a vague inclination of desirous empery, the young woman struck him so hard with a stick she had picked up from the ground, directly on the site of one of his wounds, that a croak of anger and pain exhaled from the ape’s gigantic mouth, where sharp ivory teeth bristled in the bestial red jaws.
She thought she was doomed, and mentally resolved to sacrifice her life—but the Beast soon mastered his anger and, crouched at the woman’s feet, uttered plaintive and puerile complaints, moaning soft syllables that attempted to express persuasive pleas. With infinite gentleness, Ouha seemed to be giving in; he was begging to obtain what he could have taken by force.
Had he divined the resistance that Mabel would oppose to him, and that he could not succeeded in vanquishing her? If she were dead, Ouha would have to renounce his desire. With the instinct of a near-human brute, the superior orangutan found the road. He never came with empty hands but, like and infatuated swain, brought his captive the most beautiful fruits of the forest, which he presented to her in evident homage.
From the yelps of the female jailers, Mabel gathered that the two endlessly-repeated syllables “Ouha,” with which the orangs saluted the master when he appeared, were his name, and that all of these animals had one of their own, like humans. In her mind, the terrible creature, the orang abductor, the lover whose frightful assiduity she dreaded, also became designated, as for his peers and subjects, as Ouha.
Mabel Smith decided to undress. No modesty prevented her from being seen by the apes. She thought she would keep her clothes for the hoped-for day when she would reappear before human beings. She took off her short brown dress and her belt and the Indian underskirt that she had adopted for the voyage.
The monster came in as she was undressing. Mabel did not interrupt herself, but continued to remove the pieces of her civilized costume one by one.
She was afraid of being completely nude, however, under the near-human gaze of the Beast. From the corset, almost a girdle, amid the ruffled whiteness of the crumpled slip, her bosom emerged in firm and rhythmic globes, swelling, immaculate cupolas of alabaster, into which two crimson rose-petals had fallen. Her culottes, like bouffant britches, floated above her knees over the blue-tinted flash of garters retaining long back stockings, emerging from boots laced to the calves, comprising gaiters.
Interest by the young woman’s gestures and state of undress, Ouha was careful not to disturb her; avidly, he watched Mabel with eyes desirous of these unknown beauties, tranquilly unveiled, which he hoped eventually to penetrate.
With an instinct superior to that of his fellows, Ouha had noticed how Mabel, having nothing to do, had collected flowers from the walls of her prison. One day, he arrived with a heap of corollas in his hairy arms: lilies of the forest and clusters of variously-nuanced umbels, daturas and orchids, in an enormous sheaf. He had scattered them at the young woman’s feet.
Mabel, beautiful and pale, beautiful and blonde, radiant with youth, in the superb springtime of her sexuality, radiant in her slender, supple grace, seemed, in confrontation with the monstrous orangutan, amid the scattering of violet, brown, pink, white, red and orange flowers, like some marvelous and impudent fairy from the distant civilization and refinement of human beings.
Gently, Ouha grasped Mabel’s hand and drew her toward the opening of the cavern, which had not been sealed. Soon, the infanta was standing, holding flowers, beneath an arcades of branches, in the midst of an animal people, clamoring enthusiastically:
“Ouha! Ouha!”
And pointing at her, the beasts cried:
“Bouff! Bouff! Bouff!”
She understood the admiration of the crowd of quadrumanes, and that the orangs found her beautiful.
Around the giant—Ouha surpassed all the apes of his tribes by the extent of his head and shoulders—climbing or tumbling from branch to branch, capering in crazy leaps, the apes pressed forward, with manifest signs of respect, arms extended above their heads toward him and toward her, humbly bowing their enormous heads, like a caricature of the way in which human courtiers behaved.
Wi
th an instinctive majesty, Ouha held in his hand an object that the young woman had some difficulty in recognizing at first, so worn and disfigured had it become by virtue of unknown avatars. It was a rifle stolen from a trapper, the butt notched in many places: a trophy taken from vanquished humans. He stood there, holding it by the barrel with the butt in the air, like a club; it was undoubtedly his scepter, the emblem of the power he exercised over his fellows.
When the audacious orangs approached, prowling around him, he scattered them with a gesture of that human weapon. Evidently, the apes, conscious of Ouha’s superiority over them, obeyed him by virtue of a respect mingled with fear. He also had a kind of slit leather belt, stolen in the course of his raids on humans.
Ouha, King of the Apes, held Mabel Smith by the hand, and all the orangs bowed down to them with various cries of astonishment and admiration—and there were also covetous gleams in the pupils of the wild beasts, flames of ferocious flattery, searching the young white woman’s semi-naked body, all the more alluring and irritating for her nudity being incomplete.
Hanging from Mabel’s belt was the revolver from which she was never separated. The thirty cartridges that she still possessed would certainly not have sufficed to facilitate a crazy escape; even if she had killed more than twenty of her enemies, others would have caught and disarmed her; she would not have escaped their claws, their enormous and powerful jaws. Even if she had contrived to flee by means of cunning, how could she have found a route to civilized lands? And how could she have succeeded, even if she knew the way, in making the journey, in suffering hunger, in resisting thirst, in defending herself from the thousand ambushes and countless perils with which the route was strewn? But the weapon remained precious in order to evade an immediate peril, or even, in the case of excessive suffering, to free herself from a captivity that she could no longer bear.
Ouha, King of the Apes Page 10