“I can’t help feeling sorry for them,” said Archibald. “Those people aren’t to be scorned.”
Gorden looked at him, smiling. “Did you say those people?”
“It’s true that I can’t look at those anthropoids without anguish. In truth, they resemble us too closely.”
“Yes, but they’re still apes. If humankind owes its origin to them, it took thousands of years and appropriate climatological conditions to arrive at that result—which is to say, us. Anyway, your simian sympathies would be considerably diminished if, like me...” Gorden stopped dead. “Bah! the main thing is to be rid of the obscene beasts. If we come back here later, without dolls with us, we’ll have more room for maneuver.”
The two men went back to the camp, and informed their companions of the result of their observations.
After a week, the eleven, including Mabel Smith, her father, Archibald, Gorden, the doctor, the Malays, Rava, were ready to leave. By then, the rising waters of the river had almost arrived at the level of the tunnel, and Mabel was able to embark without even getting her feet wet.
LXXI. On the Water
The two women had dressed as best they could in clothes borrowed from their companions and had installed themselves in the tent. They busied themselves preparing a meal. A large flat stone served as a hearth, and dry, resinous wood as fuel.
If Major Bennett had been able to make the journey, it would have reminded him of his return from the Borneo campaign in his youth, when, with a company of bold and joyful fellows, he had descended the rapids to join the Dutch fleet. The river was flowing impetuously, eating away its banks uprooting and carrying away thousands of trees and clumps of brushwood.
Sometimes, that mass formed an immense train of living and leafy wood that surged forth, smashing everything in its passage, colliding, becoming jammed in a bed until the force of the current carried everything away—and the mass went on, like an enormous battering-ram, shattering and breaking up an entire corner of the forest further on, which, swallowed up in its turn, would swell the fanatic catapult.
In the presence of such a peril, it was necessary to let themselves be carried away by the moving islet or to clear a passage, with a great effort of levers and hatchets. Then, when the difficult passage had been surmounted, the raft set off again with the rapidity of an express train.
The route, so painfully traveled on the outward journey, was covered in ten days; on the eleventh, the raft emerged into the sea. The mast was set up, and the coconut-fiber sail hoisted.
Four days later, the steamboat Inverness, serving as a ferry between the Celebes and the Philippines, picked them up and disembarked them at Imbuk.
They were safe.
LXII. A Little Calm and Rest
Six days later, they were at White House, where Major Bennett’s widow received them, contrary to her habit, with the greatest cordiality—which did not prevent her from scolding her domestics and her children for their idleness and rudeness in the presence of the strangers. She insisted that they should all stay at the farm while Gorden and the Malays went to Riddle-Temple to find out whether the orangutans were already there.
“It’s scarcely probable,” Gorden said, “for it’s only twenty-two days since they left, and the forest must have had surprises in store for them.”
Indeed, there was not the slightest sign of orangutans at Riddle-Temple, and Betty Symian had no other anxiety than that of not seeing Harry Smith and Mabel again. When she knew that her young mistress was at White House, she had the tilbury hitched up and departed, in order to embrace her more rapidly.
Gorden and the Malays immediately organized the defenses, in case the orangutan army arrived. Emissaries were sent in all directions to appeal for and summon help. That done, they waited.
LXXIII. Toward the Promised Land
During the difficult journey through the burned forest, so awkward for orangutans, they were obliged to march like humans on the ground, bent over, supporting themselves on their hands, while clasping their clubs, each of them bearing on his shoulders a heavy burden of bananas, sago and other fruits and roots. In order to encourage them, Ouha carried his own bale, like all the rest. His example did not prevent complaints, for the great apes whom the people of Borneo call “free men” are not used to carrying kitbags like our soldiers.
Finally, they reached the virgin forest again, and the anthropoids were able to relax, running through the branches and lianas. Ouha too was glad to be able to launch himself wholeheartedly through the forest foliage, but it was necessary for him not to forget his duties as leader continuing to guide his soldiers along the right path.
Indications were rare; he had some difficulty locating, among the newly-regrown plants, the traces of the route cleared by the axes of the Muni-Wali brothers’ woodcutters. Eventually, he found it, and for fear of losing it again, constrained himself to march on the ground. A few of his most faithful subjects escorted him, complaining, but following him anyway, obedient to their master. The bulk of the army advanced overhead. Sometimes, to encourage the chiefs, Ouha permitted them to rejoin their soldiers, spending an hour or two in the branches.
Thus, for two days, all was going reasonably well, when the first drops of rain began to fall.
LXXIV. The Enemy with Countless Feet
The anxious orangutans surrounded their leaders and demanded good weather with furious cries. Ouha made the most loud-mouthed shut up with blows of his club, and ordered them with a gesture to resume the march. For the orangutans, that march to the land of Cockayne had only represented an attack, a conquest, booty and food, and idleness at their discretion. When they began to suffer fatigue, and it was necessary to ration and conserve their food-supplies, they had not anticipated any such thing. The majority had squandered their provisions in the first few days and then thrown away the sacks of reserves, which were heavy to carry.
When the rainy season began, only Ouha and thirty of his most faithful adherents had kept their sacks, and the discipline of well-trained and battle-hardened troops. Soon, even among the captains, in spite of the spirit of imitation typical of their race, idleness and hunger held sway. The rain arrived, steady rain without an hour’s pause, gentle or violent but falling incessantly, frightfully continuous, drowning the route and masking the already-limited horizon of the virgin forest, which was nothing but a mass of vegetation, even more luxuriant and exuberant. Beneath the rain, beneficent for itself, the vegetation expanded and dilated, taking on formidable proportions. The lianas grew visibly, invading everything.
After several days of that infinite rain, the few traces left by the woodcutters’ axes disappeared; the soil, composed of the spongy and fermenting humus of a hundred generations of trees and various plants, gave birth to thousands of biting insects, voracious and venomous. The water accumulated in depressions in the ground, forming pools that were sometimes several kilometers in extent, in which an entire society of viscous, crawling, slithering creatures swarmed: enormous toads and snakes of every sort, ranging from the coral snake, scarcely as long as a pencil, with a fatal bite, to the gigantic python, between six and eight meters long, capable of strangling an ox.
On higher ground, the great wild beasts had taken refuge: tigers and panthers, and wild pigs of the peccary variety, pullulating and wallowing in the mire. Attracted by all that forest vermin, the great Indian vultures had arrived, and were living on all that fauna while doing their best to devour one another. Large herds of buffalo fled, seeking the high plateaux where they hoped to find their nourishment, passing by like whirlwinds, upsetting everything in their passage.
The rain fell, and kept falling.
The simian army, in disarray, like a mob of phantom wild beasts, their fur soaked and their bodies sweating, marched—or, rather, dragged themselves along—clearing a difficult passage through the tangle of lianas, the waterlogged branches sticky with moss, ungraspable by their four hands. Some deserted, hoping to be able to return home, got lost or conti
nued wandering until they perished of hunger and misery.
The rain fell, falling tirelessly.
Still at its head, Ouha was the army’s soul. They all felt that, and clung to his tracks. Sometimes, weary of the struggle, one of the great apes let himself fall at the foot of a tree, and, without the strength to defend himself, became the prey of some monster—a snake, a tiger, or even carnivorous insects, whose number prevailed over the giant victim’s last remains of strength.
When would that misery end? When?
Ouha, lost, was only steering by means of a sort of intuition. Would that march to the conquest of the world, following a star—which, for him, was a march of love—last much longer?
The days succeeded one another; nothing indicated that the disastrous deluge would come to an end. They went on because staying where they were would have meant death, and the pitiless rain fell incessantly, extending its mobile curtain around them, limiting visibility to a few paces.
Little by little, the mass became clearer. How many were they now? Ouha dared not count his apes. They sustained themselves on roots, plants that were scarcely nourishing they were so saturated with water. The poor diet, fatigue and damp undermined the army’s health; they suffered from fever, dysentery, infected bites, ophthalmia—which rendered their already-gummy eyes purulent—and the incessant assault of thousands of flies, living in all their wounds and rendering them putrid.
Oh, how far away they were from their departure, when they could already see themselves entering the promised land as conquerors! But all the orangutans trailed along behind Ouha, in the stinging rain, the funereal rain, through the sodden virgin forest, just as Napoléon I’s veterans had once dragged themselves through the Russian snows.
Devoid of thought, with to visible objective, Ouha marched on, drawing behind him a troop of muddy, bloodstained specters covered in wounds, the skin of their hands worn down to the flesh washed and thinned down, so to speak, by the incessant rain.
Would that agony last for days or weeks? Was it close to its end? Had they been going in a circle of incessantly-renewed torture? They could not tell, having no notion of time. They had marched this far, they would march until, like the others, they fell exhausted, renouncing the horrors of the struggle for survival, and land in the marsh.
In the beginning, when a comrade weakened and collapsed, they had tried to lift him up. Now, they went on, indifferently, all of them, in the end, almost desirous of falling and resting forever.
It rained, and rained.
Finally, one day—how many days had their misery lasted before that resplendent morning?—the rain stopped. Ouha, having slid painfully to the top of an enormous pandamus, perceived the blue sky, and called out, screeching his cry of command and glory: “Ouha! Ouha!”
What remained of his army, some forty individuals, the strongest and most resistant, made further efforts, dragging themselves along, and the laggards soon rejoined their leader.
LXXV. The Triumphant Return of the Sun
One morning, the sun rose, as it had before the deluge, radiantly, in a cloudless sky. Over the treetops of the forest, a purer air reigned. Each of them felt revived, forgetting his past distress in order to experience nothing but the present well-being. Ouha ordered them to rest. He wanted to regroup. The apes chose a suitable location, and, for the first time in two months, were able to sleep well. They slept all that day and the following night.
When they woke up, they felt slightly more cheerful. Their pelts had had dried out; their eyes, closed for twenty-four hours, had been cleared of all the parasites that were eating them away. They set out in quest of food, and one of them was lucky enough to discover an entire clump of coconut-palms on a ridge, laden with fruits. That provender, healthy and abundant, which furnished them simultaneously with something to eat and drink, settled their stomachs and intestines.
They took up residence to that hilltop, from which he water flowed away rapidly, creating a sort of well-aerated oasis accessible to the sunlight. With their changeable minds and short memories, the orangs, forgetful of their former plans, thought that they had arrived at their goal, and resumed living their habitual life. Only one satisfaction was lacking: females—but the fatigues they had endured had numbed their sexual appetite somewhat, and the great apes rapidly came back to life, reconstituting their strength.
Ouha, however, had not forgotten, and racked his brains to find a means of continuing the enterprise. Nothing now remained of is project of conquest; he no longer had the necessary number of soldiers—but he wanted Mabel, his wife, and if it were necessary for him to go after her alone, then he would go alone, even if it were to fall inanimate and dead at her feet.
Ouha did not feel any anger against the infidel, and found it natural that she would return, by herself, to the luxury that he had dreamed of providing for her.
While his companions, coming and going, yielded to their whims or their needs, Ouha, crouched on a principal branch, remained pensive. Once, he was obliged to change his position, the sun having got in his eyes.
That ray of sunlight was, for the anthropoid, Newton’s apple. He remembered that, in the homeland Harr-ha, when he had been on the threshold of his cave, the sun had risen to his right, behind he mountainous massif, and that, in consequence, the river, the burned forest and the virgin forest were in front of him. He therefore concluded that, being in the same position relative to the sun, he had the objective to be attained—Riddle-Temple—ahead of him.
With his war-cry of “Ouha! Ouha!” he summoned is companions, and gave them the order to stay in the same place, making them understand that he was going to explore.
Then he headed southwards, alone.
LXXVI. The Heart of a Faint-Hearted Lover
Leaning on the highest balustrade of the gallery of Riddle-Temple, Archibald Wilson was daydreaming. After an evening spent in the great hall of the ancient monument, in which Harry Smith had installed a large organ, with his companions in adventure-for, since their return, the eight companions whatever their social status, had been treated as equals by the grateful Mabel and Harry Smith.
The Malays, with perfect tact, knew how to assume their place without any affectation of humility. Frequent contact with Europeans had rapidly acted on that race, naturally intelligent, whom only religious superstitions had debased, in giving them a mentality enslaved by all kinds of credulities. The positive mentality of their companions had influenced them, and they had gained by it. Thus far, the three Malays, retained by Rava—who did not want to be separated from Mabel—had stayed at Riddle, but their departure was imminent. They were to go to Brunei, and then rejoin Silven Gorden in an attempt to return to the large cave in order to harvest its gold.
Archibald was thinking about that expedition and wondering it if might not be better to join the quest for gold rather than continue the pursuit of a more-than-problematic love with Mabel.
In fact, since her return to the paternal domain, the young woman’s attitude with regard to her suitors had been so bizarre that Gorden, as he had already told Archibald, had not hesitated to surrender his place entirely. Although Harry Smith had tried to retain him, he had decided to go home. Left alone, a flirt devoid of competition, Wilson had striven to please her, with a good deal of care and grace. Mabel listened to him with an astonished expression, scarcely responding at all to his inflamed declarations.
Meanwhile, Archibald had singular returns to the past; he could not help thinking about the nature of Mabel’s life among the orangutans, wondering what comparison might, in the future, be drawn between him and the anthropoid. The brave lad felt that it was his duty to marry Mabel Smith, attempting to erase from the young woman’s life the terrible adventure and promiscuity to which she must have been subjected—for he assumed, naturally, that Mabel had only succumbed to violence. He dared not make the slightest allusion to that past, in order not to communicate his discomfort and embarrassment to the young woman.
Harry Smith,
who was also suffering from the ambiguous situation of his daughter, would have liked the whole thing to be terminated by a marriage, and for Archibald to take his young wife to America for a while. It was evident to the worthy papa that staying in Borneo would not help her to forget the filthy catastrophe. Personally, he would remain at Riddle-Temple; the doctor seemed to have no desire to return to his homeland and was doggedly determined to finish the work he had begun on the great apes and their relationship to humankind, in the same arena.
Thus, everyone at the ancient Indian temple was carefully avoiding, in Mabel’s regard, and reference to her captivity among the Orangs—but that very silence was a reason to think about it constantly. Evidently, her father and fiancé were glad about her rescue, but she felt that they might, perhaps, have preferred to regret her death than have found her living in a situation that she seemed to have accepted without horror.
Archibald felt the repercussions of all these mental fluctuations; he, most of all, was suffering from being unable to find a way out that would satisfy his heart.
LXXVII. The Offering
A slight sound made him turn around. A white form was coming toward him.
“Mabel!”
“Yes, it’s me,” said the American woman. “Don’t get up, dear. We need to have a frank talk. As I’ve understood what you’ll never dare to ask me, I’ve come to put an end to a discomfort that’s weighing on both of us. You’re hesitating to ask for my hand. I understand that well enough that, in your place, I’d do the same. Well, Silven Gorden has understood better than you everything that’s precarious between us, and he’s retired from the game. Why are you waiting for before doing the same?”
Ouha, King of the Apes Page 20