Adventure stories; Fantasy fiction; Tarzan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
It was still daylight when Tarzan returned to where the Alalus was
awaiting him. The youth had a small stone knife and with this the
ape-man hacked off a generous portion of the antelope for the whelp of
The First Woman and another for himself. Into the raw flesh, hungrily,
sank the strong white teeth of the English lord, while the Alalus
youth, gazing at him in surprise, sought materials for fire making.
Amused, Tarzan watched him until the other had succeeded in preparing
his food as he thought it should be prepared--the outside burned to a
cinder, the inside raw, yet it was cooked food and doubtless imparted
to its partaker a feeling of great superiority over the low beasts that
devoured their meat raw, just as though he had been a civilized epicure
eating decaying game and putrid cheeses at some fashionable club in
London.
Tarzan smiled as he thought how vague, after all, the line that
separates primitive from civilized man in matters pertaining to their
instincts and their appetites. Some of his French friends, with whom
he was dining upon a certain occasion, were horrified when they
learned that in common with many of the African tribes and the apes he
ate caterpillars, and they voiced their horror between mouthfuls of
the snails they were eating with relish at the time. The provincial
American scoffs at the French for eating frogs' legs, the while he
munches upon the leg of a pig! The Esquimaux eat raw blubber, the
Amazonians, both white and native, eat the contents of the stomachs of
parrots and monkeys and consider them delicacies, the Chinese coolie
asks not how his meat came by its death, nor how long since, and there
is a man in New York, an estimable and otherwise harmless man, who eats
Limburger cheese on Bartlett pears.
The following day, with sufficient meat to last them several days,
Tarzan set to work upon his weapons and his loin cloth. Showing the
Alalus how to scrape the antelope hide with his stone knife, the
ape-man set to work, with nothing more in the way of tools than bits of
stone picked from the bed of a stream, to fashion weapons with which
to cope successfully with the Alali women, the great carnivores and
whatever other enemies time might reveal to him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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