12
La Seeks Vengeance
Swinging back through the jungle in a wide circle the ape-man came
to the river at another point, drank and took to the trees again
and while he hunted, all oblivious of his past and careless of his
future, there came through the dark jungles and the open, parklike
places and across the wide meadows, where grazed the countless
herbivora of the mysterious continent, a weird and terrible caravan in
search of him. There were fifty frightful men with hairy bodies
and gnarled and crooked legs. They were armed with knives and
great bludgeons and at their head marched an almost naked woman,
beautiful beyond compare. It was La of Opar, High Priestess of
the Flaming God, and fifty of her horrid priests searching for the
purloiner of the sacred sacrificial knife.
Never before had La passed beyond the crumbling outer walls of Opar;
but never before had need been so insistent. The sacred knife was
gone! Handed down through countless ages it had come to her as a
heritage and an insignia of her religious office and regal authority
from some long-dead progenitor of lost and forgotten Atlantis. The
loss of the crown jewels or the Great Seal of England could have
brought no greater consternation to a British king than did the
pilfering of the sacred knife bring to La, the Oparian, Queen and
High Priestess of the degraded remnants of the oldest civilization
upon earth. When Atlantis, with all her mighty cities and her
cultivated fields and her great commerce and culture and riches sank
into the sea long ages since, she took with her all but a handful
of her colonists working the vast gold mines of Central Africa.
From these and their degraded slaves and a later intermixture of
the blood of the anthropoids sprung the gnarled men of Opar; but
by some queer freak of fate, aided by natural selection, the old
Atlantean strain had remained pure and undegraded in the females
descended from a single princess of the royal house of Atlantis
who had been in Opar at the time of the great catastrophe. Such
was La.
Burning with white-hot anger was the High Priestess, her heart a
seething, molten mass of hatred for Tarzan of the Apes. The zeal
of the religious fanatic whose altar has been desecrated was triply
enhanced by the rage of a woman scorned. Twice had she thrown her
heart at the feet of the godlike ape-man and twice had she been
repulsed. La knew that she was beautiful--and she was beautiful,
not by the standards of prehistoric Atlantis alone, but by those
of modern times was La physically a creature of perfection. Before
Tarzan came that first time to Opar, La had never seen a human male
other than the grotesque and knotted men of her clan. With one of
these she must mate sooner or later that the direct line of high
priestesses might not be broken, unless Fate should bring other men
to Opar. Before Tarzan came upon his first visit, La had had no
thought that such men as he existed, for she knew only her hideous
little priests and the bulls of the tribe of great anthropoids
that had dwelt from time immemorial in and about Opar, until they
had come to be looked upon almost as equals by the Oparians. Among
the legends of Opar were tales of godlike men of the olden time
and of black men who had come more recently; but these latter had
been enemies who killed and robbed. And, too, these legends always
held forth the hope that some day that nameless continent from
which their race had sprung, would rise once more out of the sea and
with slaves at the long sweeps would send her carven, gold-picked
galleys forth to succor the long-exiled colonists.
The coming of Tarzan had aroused within La's breast the wild hope
that at last the fulfillment of this ancient prophecy was at hand;
but more strongly still had it aroused the hot fires of love in
a heart that never otherwise would have known the meaning of that
all-consuming passion, for such a wondrous creature as La could never
have felt love for any of the repulsive priests of Opar. Custom,
duty and religious zeal might have commanded the union; but there
could have been no love on La's part. She had grown to young
womanhood a cold and heartless creature, daughter of a thousand
other cold, heartless, beautiful women who had never known love.
And so when love came to her it liberated all the pent passions of
a thousand generations, transforming La into a pulsing, throbbing
volcano of desire, and with desire thwarted this great force of
love and gentleness and sacrifice was transmuted by its own fires
into one of hatred and revenge.
It was in a state of mind superinduced by these conditions that La
led forth her jabbering company to retrieve the sacred emblem of
her high office and wreak vengeance upon the author of her wrongs.
To Werper she gave little thought. The fact that the knife had
been in his hand when it departed from Opar brought down no thoughts
of vengeance upon his head. Of course, he should be slain when
captured; but his death would give La no pleasure--she looked for
that in the contemplated death agonies of Tarzan. He should be
tortured. His should be a slow and frightful death. His punishment
should be adequate to the immensity of his crime. He had wrested
the sacred knife from La; he had lain sacreligious hands upon the
High Priestess of the Flaming God; he had desecrated the altar and
the temple. For these things he should die; but he had scorned
the love of La, the woman, and for this he should die horribly with
great anguish.
The march of La and her priests was not without its adventures.
Unused were these to the ways of the jungle, since seldom did any
venture forth from behind Opar's crumbling walls, yet their very
numbers protected them and so they came without fatalities far along
the trail of Tarzan and Werper. Three great apes accompanied them
and to these was delegated the business of tracking the quarry, a
feat beyond the senses of the Oparians. La commanded. She arranged
the order of march, she selected the camps, she set the hour for
halting and the hour for resuming and though she was inexperienced
in such matters, her native intelligence was so far above that of
the men or the apes that she did better than they could have done.
She was a hard taskmaster, too, for she looked down with loathing
and contempt upon the misshapen creatures amongst which cruel Fate
had thrown her and to some extent vented upon them her dissatisfaction
and her thwarted love. She made them build her a strong protection
and shelter each night and keep a great fire burning before it
from dusk to dawn. When she tired of walking they were forced to
carry her upon an improvised litter, nor did one dare to question
her authority or her right to such services. In fact they did not
question either. To them she was a goddess and each loved her and
each hoped that he would be chosen as her mate, so they slaved for
her and bore the stinging lash of her displeasure and the habitually
haughty disdain of her manner without a murmur.
For many days they marched, the apes following the trail easily
and going a little distance ahead of the body of the caravan that
they might warn the others of impending danger. It was during a
noonday halt while all were lying resting after a tiresome march
that one of the apes rose suddenly and sniffed the breeze. In a
low guttural he cautioned the others to silence and a moment later
was swinging quietly up wind into the jungle. La and the priests
gathered silently together, the hideous little men fingering their
knives and bludgeons, and awaited the return of the shaggy anthropoid.
Nor had they long to wait before they saw him emerge from a leafy
thicket and approach them. Straight to La he came and in the
language of the great apes which was also the language of decadent
Opar he addressed her.
"The great Tarmangani lies asleep there," he said, pointing in the
direction from which he had just come. "Come and we can kill him."
"Do not kill him," commanded La in cold tones. "Bring the great
Tarmangani to me alive and unhurt. The vengeance is La's. Go; but
make no sound!" and she waved her hands to include all her followers.
Cautiously the weird party crept through the jungle in the wake of
the great ape until at last he halted them with a raised hand and
pointed upward and a little ahead. There they saw the giant form
of the ape-man stretched along a low bough and even in sleep one
hand grasped a stout limb and one strong, brown leg reached out
and overlapped another. At ease lay Tarzan of the Apes, sleeping
heavily upon a full stomach and dreaming of Numa, the lion, and
Horta, the boar, and other creatures of the jungle. No intimation
of danger assailed the dormant faculties of the ape-man--he saw no
crouching hairy figures upon the ground beneath him nor the three
apes that swung quietly into the tree beside him.
The first intimation of danger that came to Tarzan was the impact
of three bodies as the three apes leaped upon him and hurled him to
the ground, where he alighted half stunned beneath their combined
weight and was immediately set upon by the fifty hairy men or as
many of them as could swarm upon his person. Instantly the ape-man
became the center of a whirling, striking, biting maelstrom of
horror. He fought nobly but the odds against him were too great.
Slowly they overcame him though there was scarce one of them that
did not feel the weight of his mighty fist or the rending of his
fangs.
