Читать книгу Kwa and the Beast Men - Perley Poore Sheehan - Страница 4

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WHEN Kwa followed the leopard into the clearing and found the strange monster standing there his first instinct was to turn and run. Here was something that he didn't want to see, something that sent a chill of horror through his veins.

Animals he could understand and men he could understand. But the thing that stood before him now was neither. He recognized it at once. This was a Beast Man. Every now and then the Beast Men made their way into the Devil Bush-that great jungle that covered all this part of Equatorial Africa. Arid, as for that, the Devil Bush had come by its name honestly.

This was haunted jungle. It killed.

There were creatures in it that killed white men and black. Few had ever penetrated to the heart of it and lived to tell about it afterward.

That was why it was called the Devil Bush. It was fetish, greegree, taboo.

Kwa felt a gust of anger, and this drove away his fear.

The leopard had lured him here by a lie. The leopard had come to him with the story of a man lost in the woods.

This was no man.

The Beast Man stood about six feet tall, bulking huge. There was nothing about him to suggest the big ape-the chimpanzee or the gorilla. Head, neck and shoulders shining black-these suggested the goat or the bull rather than the ape. On the top of the low-browed head was a tangled thatch of wool through which emerged a pair of knob-like horns.

The head was low and thrust forward. There were widest eyes, gray, staring and wild. The arms and body were magnificent. They were like a statue of Hercules in oily black marble.

But, with an inner shiver Kwa let his eyes flick down. There was mudcaked wool on the thighs. The shanks were like those of an uncurried horse. The feet were cleft, enormous, split and splayed like those of a moose.

"Ho!" said Kwa. But he was ready to jump.

KWA himself stood there naked and white. He'd been disporting himself with hippos and elephants in a clear green river far over on the other side of the Devil Bush when the leopard had found he didn't even have his knife with him. He'd left the knife where he'd dropped it somewhere along the bank of the river. He hadn't even stopped to twist about him the girdle of vines he usually wore.

Since his return to Africa from his grandfather's home in Florida he'd let his hair grow. It hung now about his shoulders tawny and long. And there was a down on his face, almost as if he'd been actually a member of that Furry Tribe, the Not Yet Men, the Mu, who had reared him.

But his body gleamed smooth and white.

"Ho!" he said again. "I am Kwa, Kwa of the jungle!"

And now, for the first time, he was aware that others of his animal friends had followed him here.

It was as if that declaration of his had been taken up by a thousand voices. But all of them together made no more sound than a breeze.

"Yea, this is Kwa! Kwa the Golden One! Kwa of the jungle!"

THE stir of the breeze was like a vocal chorus, yet it would have been unintelligible and all but inaudible to ordinary ears. Not to the ears of Kwa. This was the sort of speech to which he'd listened ever since he could remember.

Sun-time, the heat of the day, he'd lain in cool shadows and listened to birds and beasts, all manner of things, talking as if in their sleep. A radio that was never silent-elephant whispers running the length and breadth of Africa, the twitter of birds and the minute notes of squirrels and monkeys no bigger than a gorilla's thumb.

But-mostly silence. In what the White World called silence, you could hear more voices and get more information than at any other time, It was a silence, so Kwa had learned, like that of the ether through which uncounted broadcasting stations send their unending programs.

At least some of the elephants must have followed him from the river. Bush-deer and buffalo, troops of mboyo-the shy wolf-dogs of the deeper jungles; leopards, of course.

He might have known that the leopard who had lured him here was tricking him. The only interest that a leopard could have had in a man-a real man-lost in the woods would be to kill him.

Leopards hated men-all men. And, often enough, Kwa had suspected that leopards had extended this hatred to include himself-he who drew no clear frontier between the peoples who were "men" and they that were "animals."

Leopards, unlike the other jungle tribes, appeared to be jealous of men. Leopards were brave. No animal was braver. But there was also always something ghostly about them-running after strange gods.

"A Beast Man!" came the chorus from the jungle. "Kwa! Kwa! Be on your guard! Kwa, Kwa, he will try to kill you!"

This was in the universal language of the jungle, which was almost a manner of thought rather than any articulate speech. It was a means of communication that all animals used, on and off, even when, as many of them did, they possessed a tribal speech of their own. It was the ancient speech, one that Kwa had used instinctively ever since his earliest childhood. But, since then, he'd learned most of the jungle calls as well.

Everywhere, to declare yourself, state, who you were and stand your ground, was in the nature of a challenge.

From the Man Beast there came a long-sustained and rumbling breath. It was something that at first Kwa couldn't understand except that this was an answer to his challenge.

Kwa, with every nerve and sinew on the trigger, flicked a look about him. He was amazed by the number of leopards he saw about him. Leopards were glinting everywhere in the foreground, running, belly-flat; pausing to stare; sliding and slinking. They gave an impression that the jungle-glade was surrounded by the coil of an enormous black and yellow snake-never still-with a hundred heads.

RECOLLECTION and some further measure of understanding came to Kwa. Of all the animals of the jungle the leopards were the only ones who'd ever been reported to have been on terms of intimacy with the Beast Men.

The Sapadi-meaning, "the Cloven Footed"-as all the Negroes of the Guinea Coast call the Beast Men. Time was when the Negroes had talked to the Utangani, the White Men, about the existence of Sapadi in Africa's great Equatorial forests. But the White Men had laughed, and so the Negroes no longer talked about the Sapadi except among themselves.

The Utangani were like that. They laughed at everything they couldn't see or understand-animals and men and trees that were aniemba, possessed by a spirit; the nibuiri, the ghosts of animals or men who roamed about in the dusk and dark; the power of the ougangas, the witchdoctors-not all of them, but some-to trap the souls of things, of men included, and keep them imprisoned in a box.

Kwa laughed at nothing he couldn't understand. The world was filled with such things-both the Great White World, which was his by inheritance through his parents; and the Great Black World, the world of the Devil Bush to which he'd been born and in which he'd been reared.

THERE came a momentary diversion.

Ancheri, a little bush-deer, no larger than a slight Italian greyhound, had leaped a fallen, mosscovered tree, and stood there in the clearing. Evidently it had been taken by panic and it stood there quivering, its soft eyes bright with alarm. At sight of it that revolving wheel of leopards had instantly stopped. But even quicker than the pause and hover of the leopards was the action of the Beast Men.

Maybe this was his final answer to that challenge of Kwa's-also a warning to those other jungle tribesmen he saw assembling. One of his great arms as if uncoiled and struck.

It was a movement faster, almost, than that of the jungle-eyes that followed him. On the instant, it seemed, he'd broken the ncheri's neck. He'd brought its throat to his mouth. He stood there drawing at the little creature's blood.

From where he stood Kwa sprang. "Hah!" he grunted.

And he'd struck the Cloven Footed with his fist.