Читать книгу Kwa and the Ape People - Perley Poore Sheehan - Страница 4

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HE was a white man, all right, and not a ghost--that lone bather in the pool 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.