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
sacrilegious 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.