Adventures of Kwa, Man of the Jungle
Featuring the books:
Kwa and the Ape People
Kwa and the Beast Men
Both books written by Paul Regard (under the pen name: Perley Poore Sheehan)
Kwa and the Ape People
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Kwa and the Beast Men
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Kwa and the Ape People
CHAPTER I
LURKING DEATH
THERE where Sobek, the crocodile king, lay in his muddy cave, it was dim and silent. But Sobek slowly raised his head and listened. In the heavy twilight of the place his eyes shone like dim green lanterns. These eyes of his were all of two feet apart, set high in the barge of a skull that had the length of a man. His body was like a fallen tree.
Whatever it was he heard—or felt, through the faint and ever-singing vibration of the earth, which to him was a sort of wireless—Sobek decided to investigate. Those short and crooked legs of his—looking comparatively skinny, at that—lifted his huge body as lightly as if it had been a mere dummy made of paper-mache, he began to walk. His walk was awkward, but it was swift and springy. His enormous tail, trailing behind him, was as quick and alive as the tail of a cat.
The entrance to the cave was a shimmering weed-bearded slide into green water. Sobek took it with the stealth and silence of a snake.
Not a ripple nor a sound, either, advertised his presence when he came up to the surface in the open air. He had chosen his place. He was still in deep water; but under a shelving bank where the thick jungle over-hung him.
The big crocodile didn't recognize at first the thing he saw. Sight of it brought to him a faint preliminary spasm of fear. For whatever it was he saw was white—the gleam and flash of a white body, appearing all the whiter against the dark green of the surrounding jungle; in the green dusk it was almost like a white flame.
Throughout Africa, white is a fetish color, with something sacred and ghostly about it, for animals as well as men. White figures are often to be seen at night going their way through dense black forests. And maybe these are nothing but whisps of vapor from a bog; or maybe they're more than that. In any case, animals crouch and watch them pass the same as men.
There was something else that may have occurred to Sobek, the crocodile king, just now. This was that vast region of Equatorial Africa known as the Devil Bush. Whether he knew of the name or not, or what it signified, Sobek must have known that this was a region famous for its ghosts. Most animals see ghosts far more readily than men. In all the years Sobek had lived in the marsh he'd seen many ghosts, seen no men, white or black.
SOBEK was very old. He had traveled far—all the way across Africa, from the great swamps at the head of the Nile.
There now crept into his memory a glint and a sensation from that Far-Far time before he'd made the long trek. He had killed and eaten men. One of these men had not been as other men. He'd been a white man— white, the fetish color; and it was this that had made Sobek a king among his kind. It had made him a sort of crocodile god. It had awakened still older memories in his racial brain-memories of a time, perhaps, when there had been crocodile gods in Egypt.
Sobek was no longer afraid. He remembered. He'd killed and eaten a white man. This was a white man, over there.
All of this had transpired, so far, with the lightness and swiftness of so much of jungle action—where creatures appear and disappear as swiftly and easily as glints of sun and shadow, where death is so often a matter of a fleeting second.
Just above the place where Sobek lurked while making this survey and reaching his conclusion that here was food fit for an immortal, there was a small blue kingfisher sitting on the tendril of a vine.
The kingfisher had spotted the presence of Sobek at once and had watched him. Now as the crocodile became an all but invisible shadow sliding swiftly under water in the direction of the white bather the bird gave a chattering note of alarm. It was across the pool like a flash of blue flame.
The note was somewhat like that the bird would have made had it discovered a snake robbing its nest. It struck through the dead silence of the jungle with the effect of a shattered pane of glass in a haunted house. This was "sun-time"—the heat of the day—when nothing stirred. But instantly the alarm had spread.
There must have been something different in that cry.
A mile or so away, a herd of elephants had been rocking and dozing in the heavy green shade. At once, the old bull was awake and alert, flinging out his ears, curling up his trunk to test the air. Without a sound he started off in the direction of the pool, the whole herd drifting after him.
It was like that when the kingfisher's alarm reached a herd of tinga-tinga—swamp buffalo—nooning in a bamboo swale more than a mile downstream below the pool. The buffalo also were off in the direction of the call at their sliding trot, which can be so swift and at the same time silent.
THROUGH the trees there was a sudden movement of monkeys, birds, and snakes.
Sun-time; the noon hour of the jungle; when animals in general are less occupied with the hard, driving business of life, just as it is with the crowds of big cities at a similar time. A time of let-up in the daily grind. And now, all the inhabitants of the Devil Bush within sound of the kingfisher's alarm were on the run, knowing that this was something special, wanting to see what it was all about.
The elephants may have guessed. They were a people of long memory and wide acquaintance. Their own private radio, known as "the elephant whisper," was one that spread its invisible network over Africa.
THE buffalo also may have guessed. They'd heard queer rumors from among their own kind of a white man who'd lived in the Valley of the Mu and there learned the speech of animals among the Furry Tribe, the Ape People, the Men Who Were Not Yet Men.
Among that flitting, ghosting, charging army of jungle peoples, birds and beasts, all headed for the pool, there was one old ape woman, an Engl-eco, a chimpanzee. And it was she who hit on the truth and spread it abroad in the universal speech of the bush.
"Kwa!" she was crying. "Kwa! He is here! Kwa of the Ape People!"
Her voice wasn't very loud, but it carried far.
"Kwa!" she cried. "And Sobek would kill him—would eat him—to master the brain and soul of Kwa!"
That was part of the old African, magic, eating that whose virtue you would absorb. It was a magic shared in and abetted by comparatively few of those who heard what the old ape-woman said. But they all understood it.
In response there was something like a soughing of wind through the dense dark forest, although the still noon was airless.
It was the breath of that universal speech of the jungle world:
"Kwa! Kwa! And Sobek would kill him!"
CHAPTER II
OLD WISDOM
HE was a white man, all right, and not a ghost—that lone bather in the po
ol which the crocodile king claimed as his own. But he didn't act like one, either now nor later.
At that first note of alarm the kingfisher uttered, he'd thrust up a sinewy arm to a vine swinging low overhead. By the time the little blue sentinel had flashed across the pool the man was seated in a loop of the vine—composed, at ease, but curious. He'd struck up a friendship with this bird two days ago, some forty miles back in the direction of the coast. Since then, they'd been following this stream together—deeper and deeper into the forbidden jungle of the Devil Bush.
At first, the man had been wearing clothes. But he'd been quick to take the kingfisher's attitude toward these—and the attitude of such other animals as he met. Clothes were strange. They were the insignia of a murderous magic. They that wore clothes killed for the pleasure of killing.
One by one, the man had shed his garments, until he was as you would have seen him now—wearing nothing but a twist of vine around his middle, the way he'd learned to dress himself among the Mu—the Furry Tribe—the Ape People. They had many names.
The Mu lived in a secret place—in a great round valley. The valley was in the heart of that great mountain mass called by the black people Sango Lobango, meaning "Father of Lies"—and this name had been accepted by the makers of maps, as well, for never had anyone, white or black, been able to find it when they set out to find it. They died on the way. The Devil Bush killed them off—"wet jungle," all of it, for hundreds of miles in every direction.
The Devil Bush, meaning haunted. No wonder the black people called it that. Killing blacks and whites indiscriminately. "Foul jungle," as it used to be marked on the old maps of the slave and ivory smugglers. Dense forest rising in festooned masses over bottomless quagmires and razor-edged rocks tricked out with deceptive ferns and mosses.
BUT Kwa would find his way. Pure white; but born in the Valley of the Mu, the Ape. They'd reared him as one of their own. But they'd named him Kwa, which, in their language, meant the Golden One, or, again, the Sun-Born; not only because his parents had crashed in an airplane—what the Mu called "a sky canoe"—but because his color was golden.
He sat there now in the loop of the vine just over the pool, with that single vine garment about him, and golden in fact, rather than white. With something leonine about him in both face and build. That vine about his waist, moreover, served as a belt to carry a knife in a sheath. So he wasn't wholly unarmed.
The little blue kingfisher was now chattering just over his head. Kwa listened to it attentively, then surveyed the pool. He could understand what the kingfisher was intending to convey, all right; but he was a little puzzled. He had tested the pool for crocs before starting to bathe.
Crocodiles lived on flesh, any kind, wherever and whenever they could snatch it. No use throwing temptation in their way. Not unless there were friendly hippos or elephants about to keep the crocs in order.
But there was no mistaking what the kingfisher meant. The warning reached Kwa with something more than the understanding with which a woodsman listens to his dog.
Then, in a moment, Kwa saw the coil and pause of that lurking shadow below.
There flashed through Kwa's brain a mist of pictures—not only of what might have happened to himself but of what had happened to uncounted friends of his—most of them young, all of them taken by surprise. There were other pictures, all in that swift and graphic visualization that serves so much for speech and thought in the jungle.
Sobek! The crocodile king. Living here alone. There'd been no other crocodiles in this pool because Sobek would tolerate no rivals in his hunting. Sobek had a chain of pools, most of them miles apart. When the animals became wary of one—the deer and the apes, the wild hogs and the okapi—Sobek would move on to another pool.
For a time Sobek had tried to establish himself even in the Valley of the Mu—
Kwa dropped.
IT was just as the great head of Sobek was passing beneath him—under perhaps two feet of water; Sobek's front legs, or arms, drawn slightly back and relaxed.
Kwa dropped with the concentrated purpose of a stooping hawk. There'd been no real premeditation in his action—just that timeless, spaceless unreeling of a thousand swift pictures, culminating in the one that he was enacting now. This was a matter of his destiny as much as destiny springs a young mongoose to the attack of his first snake. And the same sort of risk was there, yet the same sort of science.
Perhaps not in a hundred years had Sobek ever been attacked. The attacker had always been himself. He'd stolen the calves of hippos, buffalo, and elephants; yet always with such cunning that he'd avoided the enraged parents. Each year, in season, he spent a few luxurious days and nights, crushing, holding on, then crushing again, the leg of some would-be rival he'd taken by surprise.
Now it was he who'd been taken by surprise.
Swift as Kwa's action had been though, it had come within an ace of not being swift enough.
To Sobek there'd come this jolt of a shadow from above, then the vibration of the water just above him that was like the shock of an electric current. He already had a good momentum, swimming with his tail. Galvanized, his tail swung instantly into a stronger sweep, throwing his head out of line of the impending danger.
But Kwa, out of some occult ocean of wisdom older than himself, had somehow foreseen this move. Throughout all that followed, it was always as if the next second had already been the second before. He'd spread his legs and twisted slightly at the moment his feet were touching the water. Miscalculation of a hair's breadth—of the split shaving of a second—and he'd be minus a leg, minus life; muddy and maimed he'd be headed for Sobek's den and there be allowed to rot.
THE old cuisine of the crocodiles. Their meat must be tender, for they can crush but they cannot tear or masticate. Their food must come away in chunks that can be swallowed whole.
Kwa's legs and hands—and, for that matter, body and brain—acted together. In atoms of time blown big and stuffed with action. His knees were now behind Sobek's jaws. He was in the one position where Sobek couldn't reach him with that lashing and armor-plated tail. He'd dropped forward along Sobek's head and taken a double-handed grip on the closed front of Sobek's murderous mouth.
One hand would have been enough to hold Sobek's mouth closed—once it was closed; while, open, that same mouth could have clamped through a log. But Kwa knew what was coming next. It was like getting caught in a waterspout as Sobek started to roll.
Over and over they went, churning the pool to a lather.
CHAPTER III
BIG BROTHER
ONE of the strangest galleries in the world had gathered to see one of the strangest battles in the world.
There was hardly a creature present who didn't know who Sobek was. But who was Kwa? What was Kwa?
Kwa was a word from the universal speech which the Ape People, the Furry Tribe, used when communicating with their friends. The Mu were friends of all animals. The Mu dated from that time in the history—or "pre-history"—of the world when all animals, all things, still lived in peace—united in a certain common understanding.
Kwa was of the sun. Kwa was of the golden light. He was of the earth the sun shines on.
Sobek was of the underworld. He was of the ooze and darkness. He belonged to a world of the time before the sun, before that first great Truce of which the Mu were the only real guardians on earth today.
The Mu never fought. Yet Kwa fought.
"Our fight!"—and that was the elephant whisper, breathing about. "The fight of all of us!"
The elephants were friends of the Mu. Of all the jungle peoples, perhaps, the elephants came closest to living up to the ideals of the Mu. Yet the elephants would fight on occasion.
THE old bull leader of the herd, another Tembo, stood there now on the edge of the jungle clearing at an end of the pool. His great ears were extended to a width equal to his towering height. His tusks gleamed like a pair of sharp new moons.
The rest of the herd clouded about
him, half-hidden, half-seen. The tinga-tinga were there—the swamp buffalo; they'd come up like a cavalry charge and were still in movement wanting to do something, but irresolute.
Leopards slinked about. They stopped to spit and slap at each other. But no fight lasted—only that one out there in the middle of the pool.
The Tembo had said it: "Our fight! The fight of all of us!"
For, no matter how men may regard themselves as creatures apart, of a different order, animals have never regarded men as such. Animals have always regarded men as merely one more species in the world of animals—sometimes pleasant, sometimes hellish; willing to accept men on terms of tolerance or even friendship when men show an inclination to do as much.
Kwa was almost drowned. But he'd ridden Sobek through that first wild flurry. Sobek ceased to roll. Instead, he was off on a heaving, zigzag race. Again—and yet again—he was half out of water. He writhed like a speared eel. The muddy lather of the pool was curdled with branches and clots of brush Sobek had carried away with the lashing of his tail.
A black panther grimaced and hissed. That was the smell of blood. There wasn't an animal there—except certain of the birds, perhaps— that didn't know that tragic smell and react to it in a way. The apes, the monkeys, large and small, responded to it as if they'd been touched with a cold breeze. A knot of wild pigs squealed and were off into the jungle; but soon they were back again. The elephants swayed closer. The buffalo held steadier now—staring, straining.
THERE was no telling, at first, whether the blood was that of Kwa or that of Sobek, the common enemy. Only one thing was certain—blood, the smell and taste of the blood, would be stirring the big crocodile now to the last extremity of murderous frenzy.
In ordinary times, in ordinary rivers, just a hint of blood and all the Sobeks for a mile would come streaking in.
Sobek heeled over in a swirl, bringing one of Kwa's legs into sight. It looked as if the leg had been cut to ribbons. Even in that flashing second it could be seen that Sobek, was doing murderous play with those clawed fingers of his. If this went on, Kwa would have no legs left.
Adventures of Kwa, Man of the Jungle (Two jungle adventure classics in one volume!) Page 1