Читать книгу Kwa and the Ape People - Perley Poore Sheehan - Страница 3

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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-maché, 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!"