I know that what I have related here is the truth, and in my mind I have a vivid and rather pitiful picture of a mangled body, bloody and alone, in the barn-like structure the ancient paper had described; a body, broken and motionless, lying athwart the striated metal disc, like a sacrificial victim--a victim and a sacrifice of science. There have been many such. Manape the Mighty A COMPLETE NOVELETTE _By Arthur J. Burks_ CHAPTER I _Castaway_ [Illustration: _There, the words were written._] [Sidenote: High in jungle treetops swings young Bentley--his human brain imprisoned in a mighty ape.] Lee Bentley never knew how many others, if any, lived on after the _Bengal Queen_ struck the hidden reef and sank like a stone. He had only a hazy memory of the catastrophe, and recalled that when she had struck and the alarm had gone rocketing through the great passenger boat--though no alarm was really necessary because she went to pieces so fast--that he had leaped far over the rail and swam straight out, fast, in order to escape being dragged down by the suction of the sinking liner. The screaming of frightened women and children would ring in his ears until the day the grave closed over him--screaming that was made all the more terrible by the crashing roar of the raging black seas which came out of the darkness to make the affair all the more hideous, and to bear down beneath them into the sea the feeble struggling ones who had no chance for their lives. Lifeboats had been smashed in their davits. Bentley swam straight away after he was satisfied at last that he could do nothing more. He had helped men and women reach bits of wreckage until he could scarcely any longer keep his wearied arms to the task of keeping his own head above water. He knew even as he helped the white-faced ones that few of them would ever live through it, but he was doing the best he knew--a man's job. When absolutely sure that he could do nothing further, when he could no longer hear cries of distress, or discover struggling forms in the sea which he might aid, he had turned his back on the graveyard of the _Bengal Queen_ and had struck for shore. He remembered the direction, for before sunset that evening, in company with several ship's under officers, he had studied the navigation charts upon which each day's run of the _Bengal Queen_ was shown. Ahead of him now was the coast of Africa, though what part of it he knew but in the haziest way. He might not guess within a hundred miles. * * * * * One thing only he remembered exactly. The second officer had said, apropos of nothing in particular: "This wouldn't be a happy place to be shipwrecked. This section of the coast is a regular hangout of the great anthropoid apes. You know, those babies that can pick a man apart as a man would pluck the legs off a fly."