Ouha, King of the Apes

by Félicien Champsaur

  Fréü was an oldster, as was evident, not from his vigor or his stature by his white hide. Venerable, he had taken part in all the governments prior to Ouha’s dictatorship. The latter knew that Fréü was an old imbecile, but as, before anything else, he was utterly devoted to the fatherland. Ouha held him in some esteem, and often put on an appearance of asking him for advice. The Ancient was becoming decrepit, though; his slack jaw often caused him to mumble, which excited the mockery of the practically-minded young orangs, who were always ready to launch themselves into an adventure without waiting for the lessons of experience, provided that there was a profit to be obtained from it.

  This time, however, the patriotic fiber was vibrating in all of them; there was a sacred union in every heart. There was only one point on which it was difficult to reach agreement: the means of getting rid of the enemy. The latter’s numbers, by comparison with the orangutans’, was formidable. In fat, the Harr-Ha nation, including females and children, comprised no more than eight hundred individuals, and the enemy must be at least twenty thousand strong. Moreover, the orangutans, not being carnivores, did not desire the death of an adversary, from which they could not derive any advantage.

  After Fréü, another orator took the floor. This one, named Brray, was a tall and sturdy orang, in the plenitude of age and strength, expert in the art of war. One could say that he had been dried out in the fire of combats. He had once been Ouha’s adversary, being the former leader of the black-bearded orangutans; vanquished, he had accepted defeat with resignation, and before the common danger, he swore that if he were given command of the army, he would vanquish or die.

  Ouha stood up and interrupted him. It was not a matter of electing a leader; he was already in place: himself, Ouha. It was a matter of discussing a plan of attack. The orangutans had the physical strength, but could they vanquish an enemy so numerous, and much more agile than themselves? It was to be feared that the enemy would avoid hand-to-hand combat, in which they would certainly come off worse, in order to fight at a distance and pepper them with projectiles. He knew, thanks to one of his spies, that the enemy had amassed enormous quantities of pebbles in the crowns of tall trees. They would be peppered without being able to reach the enemy, which, being lighter, could maintain themselves at a greater height on weaker branches, incapable of supporting the noble weight of an orangutan.

  After this explanation of the situation, Ouha sat down again, and the discussion resumed. There were brilliant speeches. Many of them drew applause, but nothing useful emerged from those turns of verbiage and mime. If a European could have witnessed the assembly, he would not have found the slightest difference from those of his own country.

  The meeting, begun in mid-morning, had not reached a conclusion by nightfall. The females and children, had brought he patriotic citizens something to eat. The latter had thus been sustained during the oratorical gesticulations, and, in the ardor of the debate, each one relieved himself without leaving his place—which, combined with the natural slovenliness of apes, made the parliamentary enclosure a trifle malodorous.

  Ouha closed the session and postponed the remainder of the debate until the next day.

  XLI. Dr. Goldry Is Rediscovered

  Instead of going to the cave, the dictator, understanding that duty must come before love, headed for the river and went upstream, thus heading toward the mountainous massif that overlooked the entire region.

  After a good hour’s march, he found himself on a vast plateau completely devoid of vegetation. In the middle, there was an enormous hole in the form of a well. Ouha seized a gigantic liana, solidly attached to a spur of rock, which hung down into it, and let himself slide into the opening. The hollow was about ten meters deep, and in the direction of the river, evidently hollowed out by water, here was a tunnel extending toward the stream. After hundred paces, he emerged into a grotto illuminated by crevasses situated at a great height. Fine sand carpeted the ground, which was pierced here and here by stalagmites, some of which joined up with the stalactites in the vault, forming majestic colonnades.

  From the depths of the grotto, a voice emerged.

  “Is that you, my dear Ouha?”

  “Yes, yes,” Ouha replied.

  Then, a shadow advanced from the back of the cave: a hairy man, Dr. Abraham Goldry, in person. Unkempt russet hair fell over his shoulders; a beard of the same color, extensively streaked with gray hairs, descended to his chest, as hairy as those of the apes. From all that hair nothing emerged but a cranium, polished like ivory.

  “You’ve come very late, my dear Ouha,” said Abraham Goldry.

  “Impossible to get here sooner,” said Ouha, accompanying his mime with a few sounds that vaguely resembled words. And without further delay, the king of the apes explained to the doctor the political events of the day and the orangutans embarrassment.

  Evidently, those two strange beings understood one another very well. The man had almost become an ape, and the orangutan had profited a great deal from contact with the man. Doubtless remembering the scientific amity and profound personal esteem that the doctor had immediately testified toward him at Riddle-Temple, the orangutan had spared the scholar’s life and had kept him prisoner. It was the inverse of his own adventure; the ape, in his turn, kept the human in a cave and conducted his simian education. The doctor lent himself to it readily, with a good grace, and hoped in time, by means of devotion and scientific sacrifice, to become a perfect orangutan, while remaining Dr. Abraham Goldry, thus collecting a considerable booty of incomparable observations for his studies of the origin of humankind.

  When Ouha had informed him of the situation, he asked for his advice. The doctor reflected for some time, after which, he explained his plan to the orang, who listened attentively, supporting the explanations of his captive and friends with nods of the head.

  “Perfect,” he mimed, finally. “But only you can help me put the plan into action. Do you want to be one of us?”

  “You’re going to let me out of here, then?”

  “You can come with me. Is your costume ready?”

  “Yes, old chap—wait. You’ll see.”

  The doctor went around a corner of the grotto, which formed a covert less well-lit than the rest of the cave. He stayed there for a few minutes, and then a superb red-haired orangutan appeared before Ouha’s eyes. The king examined the new individual minutely, in whom the widow of the late Kri-Kri would certainly have recognized her husband.

  This necessitates a few explanations.

  During the attack on the European camp, the headstrong Kri-Kri, who was commanding the attack with his friend Harr, had been mortally wounded. He had dragged himself away from the battlefield, painfully, and, encountering a crevasse in a group of rocks on his route, had slid into it in order to die in peace. That is a habit among that race of apes; when they feel the end approaching, they retire to the most distant spot possible in order to die there. A petty bourgeois poet, François Coppée, has made the same observation with regard to the sparrows of Paris.

  In winter, one does not see their delicate skeletons.

  Is that because birds hide away to die?16

  It was in that location that Kri-Kri ceased to live. The conflagration of the forest passed over him without consuming him, and it was in that tomb of stone that Ouha found him, thanks to traces of blood, when he came back with his fellows to collect from the battlefield those of his subjects who had escaped the flames.

  Having the intuition that it might interest his friend, Ouha had taken the cadaver to him—a precious gift that the doctor received with transports of joy. He had been able to study the anatomy of an adult orangutan that had always lived in the wild, and had learned many things therefrom.

  Ouha, always curious to learn, had watched the surgical operation, at first reluctantly, but soon with interest. The doctor explained to him the action of the nerves and muscles, the function of the organs and their role in the general economy. Did Ouha understand? At any ra
te, the lesson seemed to excite him—as for example, three years after the Great World War, in 1922, the theories of the German Einstein had enthused many people in Parisian salons, who had thus appeared to comprehend the relativity of time and space and even the nonexistence of those two infinities, which were but one.

  However, practical in the midst of his speculations, the skin having been removed with the greatest care, Ouha made his friend understand that he desired him to put it on, and the American doctor did his best to comply. Thanks to his medical kit, fortunately preserved, he was able to tailor and sew it, adjusting Kri-Kri’s skin to his figure. The head, cleverly prepared, was fitted to the scholar’s skull—who thus became the oddest of orangutans.

  Satisfied, Ouha made a gesture of approval, led Goldry to the liana-rope, and signed an instruction to climb up. Alas, the new ape was not yet perfect. Having climbed up a few meters, the doctor fell. Ouha gave him a friendly tap, which sat him down on the ground. The orang scratched his head. What kind of a figure would his maladroit pupil cut among his subjects? Bah! He had been grievously wounded; he would use a crutch to support himself; that would spare him from executing the leaps and somersaults of his fellows.

  That difficulty resolved, he put the scientist on his back and emerged from the grotto in the blink of an eye. When they set foot on the plateau, the immense landscape was lit by the moon, which was full—but it was about to disappear behind the mountains. The king and the doctor took advantage of its last rays to return to the orangutans’ camp.

  XLII. The Fugitives Are Forced to Return

  During that day, so fecund in events, Mabel and Rava had bravely set forth, but, as Rava had foreseen, they did not get far. In fact, the agitation of the population testified that something unusual was happening. Scarcely had they gone into the woods, heading for the river, than they ran into sentinels who made them understand that it would be dangerous to go any further.

  They went on, the sentinels not thinking that they ought to oppose by force the caprice of His Majesty’s wives—but scarcely had they reached the river bank than a hail of stones descended upon them. Rava, hit on the head, fell down. Mabel, seeing a brave little baboon leaping from branch to branch brandishing a cudgel, had fired her revolver and killed it.

  There were furious cries, then, and the rain of stones increased; launched from a greater distance however, they did not reach the young women. Supporting Rava, who had been stunned by the blow she had received, Mabel beat a retreat and went back to the cave, where she lavished the necessary care on the casualty—who came out of it, in the end, with a enormous bump on the head.

  XLIII. The Alliance of the King of the Apes

  and the American Doctor

  Ouha resolved not to wait until the next day to apply to the attack by the means indicated by the doctor. He went with the doctor to the apes’ mustering-ground, a clearing situated in the heart of the forest, in an area that, thanks to its isolation between two hills, as entirely under the sway of the orangutans. Emissaries were sent to wake up the combatants and instruct them to rally there.

  XLIV. The Ape Council: Nocturnal Session

  Beneath the immense vaults of branches in gigantic arcades, which are interlaced and entangled in the darkness, are groups of shadows. In places, the full moon finds gaps in the vaults, and the mighty branches and trunks of the titanic trees writhe in a rip of light.

  Enormous corollas hang down from the tulip-trees, their pistils twisted and almost animal darting protruding between the petals of the monstrous flowers; sweet perfumes mingle with the odor of putrid dead leaves and the reek of marshy ground.

  The forest, noisy with a rhythmic breath, in which so many lives are palpitating—of wild beasts, trees, perhaps humans, flowers and birds—seems by night to be a body full of the ardor of female lust, beneath the sky constellated by myriads of stars, awaiting the lover who will come, from daybreak to sunset, from dusk to dawn: incessantly quivering beneath the sun or in the soft light of exotic nights, in expectation, the virgin forest, palpitating with so much life: its own.

  In the naves of trees, phantoms with a hundred arms, formless and almost divine, vegetable octopodes whose branches and multiple trunks are the tentacles, the orangutans—the entire tribe—are gathered: caricatures of humankind. The notable apes have taken their places in the middle of the immense clearing, where, on the undulating grass, the tresses of the soil, the moonlight creates a large luminous semicircular space. The strongest—those whose limbs are the most robust or the mot agile—have taken the first row. Some are sitting or squatting with their hands on their knees; others are standing up, crowding together and jostling to get nearer to the leaders, uttering cries of appeal.

  There are nearly two hundred of them.

  Some, in order to dominate the assembly, have climbed on to branches, and mischievous or annoyed at not having obtained the coveted places, are raining fruits and broken branches on the others, the first to be seated, the strongest, whom they taunt with yelps, doubtless gibes, and mockery. Some of the larger ones, however, swiftly climb into the foliage in order to make the impudent shut up.

  And here, standing tall, with his rifle, scepter and club in his extended right hand, is Ouha, with his three wives, one of ebony, one of living bronze and the white-fleshed Mabel, crowned with russet curls, clad in her slip, bunched up at the edge of her corset, her calves curved beneath the carefully pulled-up black stockings, emerging from the tan-colored boots, and short transparent trousers. Dilou, naked and gleaming, is carrying an enormous banana leaf; Rava is sad, serious and pensive in her dress woven from liana-fibers.

  “Sksch! Sksch! Ouha!” Thus clamor, by way of a salutation, the palms extended toward the sovereign of the great apes: Ouha, the most robust, the most powerful, the most intelligent among them.

  Silence falls while Ouha sits down, slowly and majestically, one foot set at the same height as his belly, the other hanging down from the decapitated trunk of a double tree, the second of which forms the back of the strange chair: it is the king’s throne, almost in the center of the clearing, directly beneath the moon, whose laughing disk seeming to be looking down on the bizarre assembly from the height of a firmament of somber lapis lazuli, spangled with gold.

  The women, at a sign from Ouha—the polygamous orangutan who takes his wives from among the companions and equals of men—sit down in front of him. like a living trophy to the simian glory that caresses his fiery eyes: black diamonds encircled by gold, in the crude setting of verminous and crumpled eyelids.

  Immense fruit-bats fly away, frightened.

  Now Ouha mimes with furious gestures, designating a part of the forest that all of them, nodding their heads approvingly, seem to know.

  With wide-eyed amazement, Mabel—sitting between Dilou, who is rolling a coconut back and forth like a kitten, and Rava, indifferent, hieratic and pensive, supporting her chin in her right hand, staring into the distance—contemplates the sea of half-bald heads, black jowls punctuated by ivory whiteness, fangs overlapping lips and russet spines, bizarrely striped in places by the shadows of branches and leaves in the silvery moonlight.

  In various attitudes, the orangutans are listening—or, rather, following the mime of the regal harangue. There are those among them like white-haired old men, their beards sticking out to either side of their jaws; some of them, having not lost an inch off their torsos, are standing up, showing off their huge, gangling, muscular bodies, fixing their attentive and shining eyes on the orator; others are leaning on their elbows, affecting serious and weary poses, letting their heads fall almost between their parted knees, as if bowed beneath the burden of grave thoughts; some are turning their heads from side to side, seemingly inattentive and mocking, babbling untiringly, wrinkling their black, brown, russet or gray muzzles over their terrible chattering teeth; a few, seemingly lost in distant brutishness, suddenly emerge from their apathy from time to time, approving with nods of the head or applauding, with their hands extended
toward Ouha.

  Several are scratching their behinds comically, and the most serious suddenly obscene, are caressing one another or themselves, without abandoning their serious expressions. And the contagious manual example of some is propagated from group to group. In a spirit of migration, the lust spreads and blossoms. Sudden spasms, joyful grimaces and blissful sighs momentarily interrupt an immobility swiftly resumed.

  Mabel Smith thought she was witnessing an unexpected sabbat, but was troubled even so by those gestures, especially frightened by the resemblance of the simian faces to human faces, the parity of signs that might have been thought those of human madness. She did not know whether or not she was suffering a bizarre hallucination, witnessing, with the sensation of being awake, a nightmare both grotesque and terrible in its buffoonery: a senate of men disguised as apes, who, by virtue of eccentricity, were engaging in a parody of serious discussion, punctuated by lubricious wagers, follies, gestures and furious patriotic exclamations, broken and zigzagged like lightning-spitting clouds, by threats, fits of anger and screeches expressing, in an exaggerated fashion, all the human emotions.

  Ouha, the respected sovereign, indicated a direction, a part of the woods, with signed calls for vengeance, and a bellicose excitement that signified combat. One syllable, from among the unintelligible sounds, reverberated in Mabel’s ears:

  “R’ran! R’ranich! R’rran!”

  Mabel remembered the terrible fury of the orangutans on discovering their provisions of fruits—bof fof!—pillaged on returning from an expedition into the forest; other apes had passed by who, discovering the hiding-places, had stolen the roots, lianas and comestibles hidden in rocky granaries, in cracks in the stony flanks of the mountain.