Tarzan the Terrible | Page 5

Apes learned from the diary of the dead German captain that his wife still lived. A brief
investigation in which he was enthusiastically aided by the Intelligence Department of the
British East African Expedition revealed the fact that an attempt had been made to keep
Lady Jane in hiding in the interior, for reasons of which only the German High Command
might be cognizant.
In charge of Lieutenant Obergatz and a detachment of native German troops she had been
sent across the border into the Congo Free State.
Starting out alone in search of her, Tarzan had succeeded in finding the village in which
she had been incarcerated only to learn that she had escaped months before, and that the
German officer had disappeared at the same time. From there on the stories of the chiefs
and the warriors whom he quizzed, were vague and often contradictory. Even the
direction that the fugitives had taken Tarzan could only guess at by piecing together bits
of fragmentary evidence gleaned from various sources.
Sinister conjectures were forced upon him by various observations which he made in the
village. One was incontrovertible proof that these people were man-eaters; the other, the
presence in the village of various articles of native German uniforms and equipment. At
great risk and in the face of surly objection on the part of the chief, the ape-man made a
careful inspection of every hut in the village from which at least a little ray of hope
resulted from the fact that he found no article that might have belonged to his wife.
Leaving the village he had made his way toward the southwest, crossing, after the most
appalling hardships, a vast waterless steppe covered for the most part with dense thorn,
coming at last into a district that had probably never been previously entered by any
white man and which was known only in the legends of the tribes whose country
bordered it. Here were precipitous mountains, well-watered plateaus, wide plains, and
vast swampy morasses, but neither the plains, nor the plateaus, nor the mountains were
accessible to him until after weeks of arduous effort he succeeded in finding a spot where
he might cross the morasses--a hideous stretch infested by venomous snakes and other
larger dangerous reptiles. On several occasions he glimpsed at distances or by night what
might have been titanic reptilian monsters, but as there were hippopotami, rhinoceri, and
elephants in great numbers in and about the marsh he was never positive that the forms he
saw were not of these.

When at last he stood upon firm ground after crossing the morasses he realized why it
was that for perhaps countless ages this territory had defied the courage and hardihood of
the heroic races of the outer world that had, after innumerable reverses and unbelievable
suffering penetrated to practically every other region, from pole to pole.
From the abundance and diversity of the game it might have appeared that every known
species of bird and beast and reptile had sought here a refuge wherein they might take
their last stand against the encroaching multitudes of men that had steadily spread
themselves over the surface of the earth, wresting the hunting grounds from the lower
orders, from the moment that the first ape shed his hair and ceased to walk upon his
knuckles. Even the species with which Tarzan was familiar showed here either the results
of a divergent line of evolution or an unaltered form that had been transmitted without
variation for countless ages.
Too, there were many hybrid strains, not the least interesting of which to Tarzan was a
yellow and black striped lion. Smaller than the species with which Tarzan was familiar,
but still a most formidable beast, since it possessed in addition to sharp saber-like canines
the disposition of a devil. To Tarzan it presented evidence that tigers had once roamed the
jungles of Africa, possibly giant saber-tooths of another epoch, and these apparently had
crossed with lions with the resultant terrors that he occasionally encountered at the
present day.
The true lions of this new, Old World differed but little from those with which he was
familiar; in size and conformation they were almost identical, but instead of shedding the
leopard spots of cubhood, they retained them through life as definitely marked as those of
the leopard.
Two months of effort had revealed no slightest evidence that she he sought had entered
this beautiful yet forbidding land. His investigation, however, of the cannibal village and
his questioning of other tribes in the neighborhood had convinced him that if Lady Jane
still lived it must be in this direction that he seek her, since by a process of elimination he
had reduced the direction of her flight to only this possibility. How