Adventure stories; Fantasy fiction; Tarzan (Fictitious character) -- Fiction
They jumped their diadets over every obstruction. One rider, leaping
straight for him, struck him head on in the pit of the stomach, half
winding him and sending him back a step. Another and another struck his
legs and sides. Again and again the needlelike points of their rapiers
pierced his brown hide until from hips to feet he was red with his own
blood, and always there were more thousands bearing down upon him. His
weapons, useless against them, he made no attempt to use and though
he wrought havoc among them with his bare hands there were always a
hundred to take the place of each that he disposed of.
He smiled grimly as he realized that in these little people,
scarce one-fourth his size, he, the incomparable Tarzan, the Lord
of the Jungle, had met his Wellington. He realized that he was
entirely surrounded by the Veltopismakusians now, the warriors of
Trohanadalmakus having engaged the advancing enemy were racing onward
with them toward the seven thousand dismounted men who were to receive
the brunt of that terrific charge. Tarzan wished that he might have
witnessed this phase of the battle, but he had fighting enough and to
spare to engage all his attention where he was.
Again he was struck in the stomach by a charging rider and again the
blow staggered him. Before he could recover himself another struck
him in the same place and this time he went down, and instantly he
was covered, buried by warriors and diadets, swarming over him, like
ants, in countless numbers. He tried to rise and that was the last he
remembered before he sank into unconsciousness.
Uhha, daughter of Khamis the witch doctor of the tribe of Obebe the
cannibal, lay huddled upon a little pile of grasses in a rude thorn
shelter in an open jungle. It was night but she was not asleep. Through
narrowed lids she watched a giant white man who squatted just outside
the shelter before a tiny fire. The girl's lids were narrowed in hate
as her smoldering eyes rested upon the man. There was no fear of the
supernatural in her expression--just hate, undying hate.
Long since had Uhha ceased to think of Esteban Miranda as The River
Devil. His obvious fear of the greater beasts of the jungle and of the
black men-beasts had at first puzzled and later assured her that her
companion was an impostor; River Devils do not fear anything. She was
even commencing to doubt that the fellow was Tarzan, of whom she had
heard so many fabulous stories during her childhood that she had come
to look upon him as almost a devil himself--her people had no gods,
only devils--which answer just as good a purpose among the ignorant
and superstitious as do gods among the educated and superstitious.
And when Esteban Miranda quite conclusively proved by his actions that
he feared lions and that he was lost in the jungle these things did
not square at all with her preconceived estimate of the powers and
attributes of the famous Tarzan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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