And all at once it stopped.
The drumming and revelry. The men receded from the circle to stand behind the leaf table, the night silent but for the sharp crackle of the fire. But the silence was short-lived, for now the drumming recommenced and the women—young and old alike—stepped delicately into the circle … and they began to move.
So different from the men were they, with bent bodies, crooked knees, and small shuffling steps. Swiveling and snaking, the women rose and fell with mild expressions and utter reserve. Some bore small children on their backs, and the little Waziri moved their heads and limbs in perfect syncopation with the drums.
I felt my composure returning. I chanced a look at Tarzan and found him staring unabashedly at me, his eyes gleaming, his bold, handsome features set in shadowy relief by the firelight. I found I could not draw my gaze away from his, but then the drumming stopped again and the women joined the men outside the circular table. All were perfectly silent. Riveted with avid expectation.
I anticipated more drumming, but there was none. Just absolute stillness. Cessation of the revelry. Nothing but the night and the flames and the soft sounds of the forest beyond the village.
Now on cat’s feet, a single young tribesman padded into the circle before Tarzan and me. He was painted with stripes of white and ocher on all his limbs. He wore thick golden anklets, a necklace of long white fangs, and a lion skin pelt at his loins. He was joined then by a nubile girl, perhaps sixteen. Her bare breasts were small and tilted upward, her waist slender, and long legs shapely. She was clothed in a lion skin skirt and her ornaments were simply a golden bracelet and a necklace of dark claws.
They took their places standing face-to-face and locked eyes for what seemed to me an eternity. Then, without cue or the sounding of the drums, they began to move. It was at once apparent that the rhythm of drums was deep inside the couple. The dance itself—its raw thrusts and grinds, its quivers and shakes—was utterly profane. Where I had felt heat and pounding at my center, now I believed I was drunk.
The palm wine—I had had too much.
My head swam as I feasted my eyes on the exuberant, blistering passion that spanned the space between them, an invisible current connecting the pair altogether abandoned to this voluptuous public coupling. Their shaking quickened, their bodies nearly touching, never touching. Thrusts insanely carnal.
And then the drums began! Pounding out a swell of sound to match the movement. Louder and louder! Faster and faster! Arms and legs a blur. Sweat glistening. Shouts and groans. The dancers’ arms reached out, finally touching. A frenzied climax. Clutching rigid forearms, their eyes mad.
They stopped. Panting, their faces streaming, the couple broke out in smiles. The spell was broken.
I was unsure what next to do. I did become aware that the circle of Waziri behind the leaf table had strangely thinned. When I dared turn my head and look, I saw that pairs of men and women were quietly peeling away, disappearing into the dark of the village.
I felt a hand on my shoulder. Two women who had bathed and dressed me helped me stand. Inebriated still—with the wine or the shocking spectacle I had just witnessed—I allowed myself to be led from the fire to a hut bordering the main clearing. The light was dim inside, but there squatting on the earthen floor was Tarzan.
When he saw me, he stood. Even in the dim light I could see he was taut, straining, as a stallion set to be loosed upon a fertile mare.
I was dreaming. Intoxicated. Outside of myself.
He took a step closer and I felt the heat pulsing from his body in waves so strong I staggered backward. He caught hold of my shoulders, fixed me in his gaze.
There is no tenderness there,
I thought with sudden clarity,
only savage, quenchless desire.
There in my thin native shift, holding in my power this magnificent primal man, I trembled with my own wanton appetites. I reached out slowly and laid my palm to his breast. It was warm stone against my skin, and all at once I knew the depth and breadth of Tarzan’s staggering strength.
I took a single step forward. It was all he needed. His arms clamped around me and he pulled me in. I raised my lips to be kissed, but he buried his face in the soft of my neck. Spikes of fire weakened my knees and I faltered. He caught me, lifted me, and laid me down on a blanketed floor bed. Knees on either side of me, he pinioning my two hands behind my shoulders.
Here was a ravenous beast. Nothing left of my nurse or gentle protector. This greedy creature was set to devour me, and I wished with all my might that he should. He plunged, his mouth suckling my breasts through the cotton shift. I moaned and writhed, ecstatic with pleasure. My hips arched toward his and I struggled to free my hands, for I yearned to touch him, feel his burning skin, pull him down, down onto me, into me …
Then I heard it. Heard the earth roaring, like thunder coming closer, closer. Heard it before I felt the movement beneath my back. The ground was quaking! I quieted under him. Now the hut’s mud walls and the central pole began to jerk and shudder. Small creatures fell from the thatch onto us. He leaped from the bed, lifted me in his arms, and hurtled out the door.
Villagers were pouring into the central clearing, now lit only by the dying embers of the bonfire. I clung to Tarzan, trembling. Small children wailed. We heard spoken around us a single word, again and again, whispered in tones of fear and reverence—“Sumbula…”
Chief Waziri appeared, surrounded by his several wives, and spoke in soothing tones to the rattled villagers. Then Ulu, bald without his feathered headdress, frowning and somber, strode out among them. All were silent as he raised a great rattle above his head and shaking it in an easterly direction began to sing in words that made the people tremble and huddle close to one another. He sang till the earth stopped its tremors. Sang till the last embers died and the clearing was pitched into utter blackness.
“Sumbula,” intoned an old woman clutching her neck charm.
“Sumbula,” I heard as the Waziri melted away into the night.
“Sumbula,” I whispered.
Tarzan clutched me to him, but the fire had left my body, as it had his. Feeling his way in the dark, he led me to our hut, but we did not enter. We sat on the earth shoulder-to-shoulder, our backs against the mud wall. After a time I slept, my head upon Tarzan’s shoulder, but he sat silent vigil till the sun showed its first faint light through the Waziri village trees.
* * *
The quake had brought me to my senses. I’d have had to have been drunk on palm oil wine or unnaturally aroused by the frenzied dancing to be so intoxicated as to lose all inhibitions as I had. Perhaps it had been the lewd details of Cecily Fournier’s escapades in France that had ignited my passions. Yet this morning I felt no mortification in Tarzan’s presence. I’d made my change of heart very clear once I had awoken sitting on the hard ground outside the hut. And his even-temperedness at the rejection after so tempestuous a seduction did nothing but improve my regard for his character.
I must stop at once any thought of a romance with Tarzan.
It was simply absurd. He had taken me to the Waziri village with the intention of learning news of Father’s whereabouts and the Porter Expedition. And what of Ral Conrath?
The village women had pressed ground banana meal cakes on us just after the sun rose. Chief Waziri and Ulu were overseeing the clearing of rubble from a collapsed portion of the men’s house, and so Tarzan and I left quietly on foot. To my surprise, we continued to head east.
Not far out of the village I stopped him. Looking him straight in the eye this morning, I found, was more difficult than I had at first supposed it would be. His gaze was soft and affectionate and, I thought, a bit amused. But there was business to be accomplished, and I wasted no time.
“I must find my father,” I reminded Tarzan and gestured back toward the village as if to ask what he had learned there.
He nodded, then looked at the ground. He walked away from me, still looking down. I followed, becoming annoyed. But then he squatted and beckoned for me to join him. He had found a patch of soft earth and was smoothing it with the palm of his hand. He was creating a clean slate for us to “talk,” and began by signaling that the Waziri had indeed seen much. I knelt beside him.
He first drew the stick figure of a female, clearly myself. Next to this was a figure with male genitals that was connected by a single line at the chest to me. This Tarzan named “Jane fah-thah.” A second male he drew he pronounced
“sord.”
It meant “bad.” This had to be Ral Conrath.
Fascinating how clearly his evil nature showed itself,
I thought. I could see Tarzan’s mind working before he put his finger in the dirt again. The next figure lacked breasts, but neither did it have male genitals. Tarzan had begun to make small squares around the four figures—the Porter encampment, I surmised—when I realized the third male must be D’Arnot: a weak man with no testicles.
Concentrating deeply, Tarzan drew to one side of the camp four large triangles together. This had to be the range of mountains to the east at the base of which we now were located. Outside the camp he drew a fourth man. Yabi, I thought. Now using his drawings, hand signals, and the words we knew between us, Tarzan explained what the Waziri had seen happen in our camp.
After Yabi had left, Ral had climbed the largest of the mountains. “Sumbula,” Tarzan declared, placing his finger on the peak.
“This is Sumbula?” I asked. It was the single Waziri word Ral had insisted D’Arnot should have knowledge of and was furious when the Frenchman declared his ignorance of it. In the Waziri mind it was also in some way yoked to last night’s earthquake.
Pointing alternately to the figures of Ral and Sumbula Tarzan repeated “
sord
” several times. Ral and Sumbula were both somehow bad. Then indicating my father, Tarzan pantomimed what could only be illness. I felt my eyes beginning to sting, remembering that terrible moment when I realized his heart might be failing.
According to the Waziri telling, and true to the facts as I knew them, Archie had gone in the tent. The weak man, D’Arnot, had followed.
Tarzan gave me a look I could not wholly read. I wondered if this man experienced astonishment, for when he said, “Jane go Sumbula,” I was sure his expression was one of amazement.
“Yes, I did go up Sumbula.” My heart was beginning to pound, remembering the awfulness of that day. How my life had forever changed the morning I followed Ral Conrath up the mountain.
“Jane Sumbula
sord,
” Tarzan said, looking grim.
I thought hard. This story was being told through Waziri eyes. They had known Ral to be a bad man. They saw Sumbula as somehow bad. And I, ascending Sumbula, was
sord
as well. I waited for the next piece of the puzzle to be revealed.
But now Tarzan was showing Ral descending the mountain.
“Wait,” I said, stilling his hand. “On Sumbula”—I touched my two eyes—“what did the Waziri see?”
Tarzan shook his head violently. “Waziri no go Sumbula. No Sumbula!”
Ah,
I reasoned,
Sumbula must be taboo to the Waziri.
If they would not climb the mountain, they could not have seen what happened. But never mind. I knew very well what had occurred up there.
“Tarzan,” I said, pointing to the story drawn on the ground, “where are
you
? Where is Tarzan?”
“Jane here,” he answered unflinchingly and pointed to the peak of the mountain. “Tarzan here.” He pounded the very same spot with his finger. Then he held my eyes and I felt warmth between my thighs. My face grew red remembering the previous night. Now I was sure—Tarzan had indeed been following me since the Mbele elephant hunt. He had followed me up Sumbula, despite the Waziri taboo. And now I understood by the passion with which he spoke the last simple phrase that he meant to be with me always.
Jane here. Tarzan here.
“Good. Go on,” I said, forcing myself to calm. “The
sord
man comes down Sumbula.”
“Jane no come Sumbula.”
I nodded. Here was the business I had been waiting to know. Had been terrified to learn.
“Jane fah-thah,” Tarzan began and then with clenched fist screwed up his face in a fierce grimace, widening his eyes and clenching his jaws.
“Oh!” I cried. “He was angry. My father was angry with the
sord
man.” I clutched Tarzan’s arm with the greatest relief.
Archie was not dead!
“Sord
man, fah-thah…” He gave me a short shove with both hands.
“They scuffled. More, tell me more!”
“Jane fah-thah an-gree. Jane fah-thah go Sumbula.”
“Oh, no! He climbed the mountain?” I clutched unconsciously at my own heart. “Where is my father?” I was shouting. “Where is my father?!”
Tarzan grew quiet. He looked pained and confused, frustrated without the words he needed. Finally, he wiped the dirt slate clean and drew two male figures standing a distance apart, a line connecting their shoulders, and a horizontal male figure floating above the ground between them. “Go,” Tarzan said. “Jane fah-thah go.”
I stared at the drawing.
They’d carried him away! In a hammock suspended on a pole! He must have collapsed. He must have been very ill.
Then slowly, with a look of the greatest sadness, Tarzan traced with his finger an oblong box around the figure of Archie Porter.
“No!
No!
No, oh please no…” I folded over my knees and began to wail. The sound filled the trees and caused the creatures of Eden to answer with their own howls and lamentations. I felt the touch of Tarzan’s gentle palm on my back, but there was nothing, nothing on the face of the earth, that could assuage the agony of this loss.
I sobbed and keened and whimpered like a little girl. I wept until I was empty, drained of all feeling, hard and hollow as a newly forged bell. When finally thoughts returned, sly creeping things, seeking the darkest corners of my mind, I knew at once that I had been wrong. Very wrong.