As far as I know the first Earl of Whimsey has nothing to do with this
story, and so we are not particularly interested in the fact that it
was not so much the fine grade of whiskey that he manufactured that won
him his earldom as the generous contribution he made to the Liberal
party at the time that it was in power a number of years ago.
Being merely a simple historian and no prophet, I cannot say whether we
shall see the Earl of Whimsey again or not. But if we do not find the
Earl particularly interesting, I can assure you that the same may not
be said of his fair daughter, Lady Barbara Collis.
The African sun, still an hour high, was hidden from the face of the
earth by solid cloud banks that enveloped the loftier peaks of the
mysterious, impenetrable fastnesses of the forbidding Ghenzi Mountain
range that frowned perpetually upon a thousand valleys little known to
man.
From far above this seeming solitude, out of the heart of the densely
banked clouds, there came to whatever ears there might be to hear
a strange and terrifying droning, suggesting the presence of a
preposterous Gargantuan bumble-bee circling far above the jagged peaks
of Ghenzi. At times it grew in volume until it attained terrifying
proportions; and then gradually it diminished until it was only a
suggestion of a sound, only to grow once again in volume and to again
retreat.
For a long time, invisible and mysterious, it had been describing its
great circles deep in the concealing vapors that hid it from the earth
and hid the earth from it.
Lady Barbara Collis was worried. Her petrol was running low. At the
crucial moment her compass had failed her, and she had been flying
blind through the clouds looking for an opening for what now seemed an
eternity of hours to her.
She had known that she must cross a lofty range of mountains, and she
had kept at a considerable altitude above the clouds for this purpose;
but presently they had risen to such heights that she could not
surmount them; and, foolishly, rather than turn back and give up her
projected non-stop flight from Cairo to the Cape, she had risked all in
an effort to penetrate them.
For an hour Lady Barbara had been indulging in considerable high
powered thinking, intermingled with the regret that she had not started
thinking a little more heavily before she had taken off, as she had,
against the explicit command of her sire. To say that she was terrified
in the sense that fear had impaired any of her faculties would not be
true. However, she was a girl of keen intelligence, fully competent to
understand the grave danger of her situation; and when there loomed
suddenly close to the tip of her left wing a granite escarpment that
was lost immediately above and below her in the all enveloping vapor,
it is no reflection upon her courage that she involuntarily caught her
breath in a quick gasp and simultaneously turned the nose of her ship
upwards until her altimeter registered an altitude that she knew must
be far higher than the loftiest peak that reared its head above any
part of Africa.
Rising in a wide spiral, she was soon miles away from that terrifying
menace that had seemingly leaped out of the clouds to seize her. Yet
even so, her plight was still as utterly hopeless as it well could be.
Her fuel was practically exhausted. To attempt to drop below the cloud
banks, now that she knew positively that she was among lofty mountains,
would be utter madness; and so she did the only thing that remained to
her.
Alone in the cold wet clouds, far above an unknown country, Lady
Barbara Collis breathed a little prayer as she bailed out. With the
utmost meticulosity she counted ten before she jerked the rip cord of
her chute.
At the same instant Fate was reaching out to gather other threads--far
flung threads--for his tiny fragment of her tapestry.
Kabariga, chief of the Bangalo people of Bungalo, knelt before Tarzan
of the Apes many weary marches to the south of the Ghenzi Mountains.
In Moscow, Leon Stabutch entered the office of Stalin, the dictator of
Red Russia.
Ignorant of the very existence of Kabariga, the black chief, or of Leon
Stabutch or Lady Barbara Collis, Lafayette Smith, A.M., Ph.D., Sc.D.,
professor of geology at the Phil Sheridan Military Academy, boarded a
steamship in the harbor of New York.
Mr. Smith was a quiet, modest, scholarly looking young man with horn
rimmed spectacles, which he wore not because of any defect of eyesight
but in the belief that they added a certain dignity and semblance of
age to his appearance. That his spectacles were fitted with plain glass
was known only to himself and his optician.
Graduated from college at seventeen the young man had devoted four
additional years to acquiring further degrees, during which time
he optimistically expected the stamp of dignified maturity to make
itself evident in his face and bearing; but, to his intense dismay,
his appearance seemed quite as youthful at twenty-one as it had at
seventeen.
Lafe Smith's great handicap to the immediate fulfillment of his
ambition (to occupy the chair of geology in some university of
standing) lay in his possession of the unusual combination of brilliant
intellect and retentive memory with robust health and a splendid
physique. Do what he might he could not look sufficiently mature and
scholarly to impress any college board. He tried whiskers, but the
result was humiliating; and then he conceived the idea of horn rimmed
spectacles and pared his ambition down, temporarily, from a university
to a prep school.
For a school year, now, he had been an instructor in an inconspicuous
western military academy, and now he was about to achieve another of
his cherished ambitions--he was going to Africa to study the great
rift valleys of the Dark Continent, concerning the formation of which
there are so many theories propounded and acclaimed by acknowledged
authorities on the subject as to leave the layman with the impression
that a fundamental requisite to success in the science of geology is
identical to that required by weather forecasters.
But be that as it may, Lafayette Smith was on his way to Africa with
the financial backing of a wealthy father and the wide experience that
might be gained from a number of week-end field excursions into the
back pastures of accommodating farmers, plus considerable ability as a
tennis player and a swimmer.
We may leave him now, with his note books and seasickness, in the hands
of Fate, who is leading him inexorably toward sinister situations from
which no amount of geological knowledge nor swimming nor tennis ability
may extricate him.
When it is two hours before noon in New York it is an hour before
sunset in Moscow and so it was that as Lafe Smith boarded the liner
in the morning, Leon Stabutch, at the same moment, was closeted with
Stalin late in the afternoon.
"That is all," said Stalin; "you understand?"
"Perfectly," replied Stabutch. "Peter Zveri shall be avenged, and the
obstacle that thwarted our plans in Africa shall be removed."
"The latter is most essential," emphasized Stalin, "but do not belittle
his abilities. He may be, as you have said, naught but an ape-man;
but he utterly routed a well organized Red expedition that might have
accomplished much in Abyssinia and Egypt but for his interference.
And," he added, "I may tell you, comrade, that we contemplate another
attempt; but it will not be made until we have a report from you
that--the obstacle has been removed."
Stabutch swelled his great chest. "Have I ever failed?" he asked.
Stalin rose and laid a hand upon the other's shoulder. "Red Russia does
not look to the OGPU for failures," he said. Only his lips smiled as he
spoke.
That same night Leon Stabutch left Moscow. He thought that he left
secretly and alone, but Fate was at his side in the compartment of the
railway carriage.
As Lady Barbara Collis bailed out in the clouds above the Ghenzi range,
and Lafayette Smith trod the gangplank leading aboard the liner, and
Stabutch stood before Stalin, Tarzan, with knitted brows, looked down
upon the black kneeling at his feet.
"Rise!" he commanded, and then; "Who are you and why have you sought
Tarzan of the Apes?"
"I am Kabariga, O Great Bwana," replied the black. "I am chief of the
Bangalo people of Bungalo. I come to the Great Bwana because my people
suffer much sorrow and great fear and our neighbors, who are related to
the Gallas, have told us that you are the friend of those who suffer
wrongs at the hands of bad men."
"And what wrongs have your people suffered?" demanded Tarzan, "and at
whose hands?"
"For long we lived at peace with all men," explained Kabariga; "we did
not make war upon our neighbors. We wished only to plant and harvest in
security. But one day there came into our country from Abyssinia a band
of _shiftas_ who had been driven from their own country. They raided
some of our villages, stealing our grain, our goats and our people, and
these they sold into slavery in far countries.
"They do not take everything, they destroy nothing; but they do not go
away out of our country. They remain in a village they have built in
inaccessible mountains, and when they need more provisions or slaves
they come again to other villages of my people.
"And so they permit us to live and plant and harvest that they may
continue to take toll of us."
"But why do you come to me?" demanded the ape-man. "I do not interfere
among tribes beyond the boundaries of my own country, unless they
commit some depredation against my own people."
"I come to you, Great Bwana," replied the black chief, "because you are
a white man and these _shiftas_ are led by a white man. It is known
among all men that you are the enemy of bad white men."
"That," said Tarzan, "is different. I will return with you to your
country."
And thus Fate, enlisting the services of the black chief, Kabariga,
led Tarzan of the Apes out of his own country, toward the north. Nor
did many of his own people know whither he had gone nor why--not even
little Nkima, the close friend and confidant of the ape-man.