Adventure stories; Fantasy fiction; Tarzan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
To one of these entrances the woman carried her unconscious captive,
laid him on the ground, removed the slabs that closed the aperture and
dragged him into the dim and gloomy interior, where she deposited him
upon the floor and clapped her palms together sharply three times with
the result that there presently slouched into the room six or seven
children of both sexes, who ranged in age from one year to sixteen
or seventeen. The very youngest of them walked easily and seemed as
fit to care for itself as the young of most lower orders at a similar
age. The girls, even the youngest, were armed with clubs, but the boys
carried no weapons either of offense or defense. At sight of them the
woman pointed to Tarzan, struck her head with her clenched fist and
then gestured toward herself, touching her breast several times with
a calloused thumb. She made several other motions with her hands,
so eloquent of meaning that one entirely unfamiliar with her sign
language could almost guess their purport, then she turned and left
the building, replaced the stones before the entrance, and slouched
back to her cave, passing, apparently without notice, the woman she had
recently struck down and who was now rapidly regaining consciousness.
As she took her seat before her cave mouth her victim suddenly sat
erect, rubbed her head for a moment and then, after looking about
dully, rose unsteadily to her feet. For just an instant she swayed and
staggered, but presently she mastered herself, and with only a glance
at the author of her hurt moved off in the direction of her own cave.
Before she had reached it her attention, together with that of all
the others of this strange community, or at least of all those who
were in the open, was attracted by the sound of approaching footsteps.
She halted in her tracks, her great ears up-pricked, listening, her
eyes directed toward the trail leading up from the valley. The others
were similarly watching and listening and a moment later their vigil
was rewarded by sight of another of their kind as she appeared in the
entrance to the amphitheater. A huge creature this, even larger than
she who captured the ape-man--broader and heavier, though little, if
any, taller--carrying upon one shoulder the carcass of an antelope and
upon the other the body of a creature that might have been half human
and half beast, yet, assuredly, not entirely either the one or the
other.
The antelope was dead, but not so the other creature. It wriggled
weakly--its futile movements could not have been termed struggles--as
it hung, its middle across the bare brown shoulder of its captor, its
arms and legs dangling limply before and behind, either in partial
unconsciousness or in the paralysis of fear.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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