Jane (23 page)

Tarzan—a human animal—was a fine specimen of
Homo sapiens sapiens.

Of course I had known, intellectually, that the human species was nothing more than the most highly evolved creature of the animal kingdom, remarkable for its self-awareness and imperative toward culture, language, and philosophy—none of which were to be found in other species. But the base animal quality of humans was almost always avoided in my world. Not a decade before, the merest glimpse of a woman’s ankle, even one that was heavily stockinged, was thought altogether scandalous. Even piano and furniture legs were considered unseemly and swathed in brocaded draperies and fringe. Now here I was, moving barefooted, bare-ankled, and bare-legged along the limbs of an African forest canopy with a nearly naked man.

Indeed, following behind Tarzan I was acutely aware of how very little of him was covered by his loincloth. His genitalia were hidden by what was little more than a ragged flap of soft hide, a fact for which I was alternately grateful and mildly frustrated. I wondered why, when his buttocks were quite exposed, he chose to hide his male parts. I remembered the sorry, shriveled bits on my Cambridge cadaver and was certain that my admirer’s would be a sight prettier than that. I had only once seen a naked boy—in the River Cam—or, to be more precise, when he’d been pulled out after a harrowing rescue. He’d fallen into the flood-swollen stream, and his clothes had been torn clean off him by the rushing water. I, watching as he’d been dragged onto shore barely alive, had not been able to take my eyes off those fascinating fleshy parts before a blanket had been thrown around him. As an only child—and a girl—I had never had the opportunity to observe young male bodies. Now I could feast my eyes on what I imagined was a perfect specimen of manhood.

Tarzan’s back was a masterpiece of musculature. Under the slightly tanned skin rippled and bulged two mighty triangular trapezii, massive latissimi dorsi running from armpit to waist, a spinal column sunk within a deep canal and bordered on either side by a column of little erector spinae and intertransversarii muscles connecting one vertebra to another. The proud, well-formed head sat atop a powerful neck with its two brilliantly defined sternocliedomastoid muscles, providing maximum flexibility and strength.

I could not decide whether I was more fascinated by Tarzan’s arms and hands or his buttocks. The forearms were nearly as large as the upper arms, with the most massive wrists I had ever seen on a human being—even the masons who worked on the manor’s stonework. His hands themselves were living machines that allowed him feats of unbelievable strength yet were capable of the most extreme dexterity and tenderness. The thought of those hands moving over my body in the Waziri hut made me suddenly weak and giddy, and I admonished myself to concentrate lest I lose my footing and fall to my demise.

A moment later, however, I found myself contemplating Tarzan’s thighs. They were meaty and well formed, with a quality that hardened them to steel when in use and softened them when at rest. The feet, and his toes in particular, could curl around a limb and grip with astonishing tensile power. But the man’s arse, I thought, was one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World …

Well, honestly, I must stop these licentious observations!
I could tell myself all day long I was studying his magnificent physique “in the name of science,” but that was blatant self-deception, and I was mortified by my prurient motivations.

For the next little while I lost myself in the challenge of this remarkable passage through the trees. But soon enough my concentration was broken by the sight of the astonishing body ahead of me. Tarzan brachiated through the tangle of vines and branches and liana with the ease of an ape, but more impressive still—and terrifying to watch—were his leaps across chasms with no hand- or footholds at all. He was flying though the canopy with the grace and confidence of a bird. I wondered if he knew how frightened I was every time he defied gravity that way. He would set his sight on a distant tree crotch or limb, leaping upon the vine that would begin the great arcing flight. Then his hands would release their hold, he surrendering himself to his confident calculations,
soaring free,
and always landing with graceful precision on his target.

I really must concentrate on my footing,
I thought.
Really.

Though I was aware we were traveling west, back the way we had come, it took me by surprise to recognize the fig tree that cradled Tarzan’s nest among the other green behemoths of the forest, but we passed it from a distance, never bothering to stop there. I thought to ask Tarzan why we would not be pausing at his home before continuing west, but then it occurred to me that all of this forest was his home. His
kingdom.
How at ease he was in every way. It reminded me of watching my mother in the flower garden in front of the manor or moving through the house from room to room, making sure every painting, every chair, the fold of every upholstery skirt was in place, beds made precisely the way she expected them to be done.

My mother is a widow,
I suddenly thought,
and believes she has lost her only child.
I did not like to think of Mother with pity, but she was most certainly in a piteous state. In another way, though, as I contemplated my own position now—engaged in the greatest adventure of my life—I realized the part that my mother had played in this strange and wonderful destiny. For so long she had represented all that was repressive about my existence. The strictures to which I was constantly forced to adhere. The social conventions that ordered so much of my world. I had come to believe my mother was my enemy—everything that the daughter wished desperately to avoid emulating in a woman. But now I could see I had been viewing her quite superficially. Every annoyance, every burst of rebellion had been a reflex on my part, like the knee jerk that happened when a nerve on the lower patella was knocked with a doctor’s mallet. But suddenly I could see that Samantha Edlington had had to rebel against her own parents in order to marry an American commoner, even one with a medical degree and a good head on his shoulders. She had been destined for marriage with a peer of the English realm, one who would have enhanced the Edlington wealth and influence, and carried on the bloodlines of the British aristocracy. Instead she fell madly for Archie Porter, her own sort of “wild man,” and married for love, an altogether untoward state of affairs for a girl of her station.

Without my mother’s initial courage and rebellion against tradition, I realized, there would have been no progressive father to insist upon educating his daughter at Cambridge University, no assisting him in his home laboratory, no expedition to Africa for a twenty-year-old English girl who had been allowed to avoid any unwanted marriages till nearly the age of spinsterhood. I would not now be following on the heels of a large, handsome, feral creature who could swing through the vines and liana with the grace of an ape, who could speak in the voices of wild animals, and who knew of Bowie knives and the tender way a human mother checked her child’s forehead for fever. Silently, I thanked my mother and blessed her. I promised myself that as soon as I was able, I would make my way back to England to inform Mother that she had not lost her daughter as well as her husband, and to properly mourn Father’s death.

But just now Tarzan had paused in his forward motion through the canopy. He turned back to me with palm outward. Stop. Quiet. Look. Just below us was a family of lowland gorillas, peaceably feeding on vegetation. Some dozed in the branches. Tarzan and I, while I had been daydreaming of my mother and father, had been descending, so that the ground was within sight. Here I observed juvenile apes playing on the forest floor, smaller females lazily grooming a formidable silverback male.

With no warning to me, Tarzan hooted out a greeting to the little colony of gorillas. Nearly every one of them looked up into the branches above and Tarzan was spotted. I was farther back and hidden from their view. There was no alarm in the animals, though several hooted back. One youngster, half the size of the females, set up a screech and instantly began climbing through the branches in our direction. Though it was small for a gorilla, I felt a thrill of fear shudder through my body, for it was quite as large as I was. And who knew how strong? Tarzan’s arms were outstretched when the beast leaped at him. He was nearly bowled over by the furred missile, but a moment later they were wrestling playfully as two friends might do. The play ceased abruptly when the young ape caught sight of the strange white-skinned female partially hidden in the foliage. With Tarzan leading along the thick limb, the pair of them came toward me. I hardly breathed.

Tarzan pulled me from my hiding place and quickly put both arms around me, a signal to the gorilla that this was no one to fear. Then he leaped to a nearby branch, allowing the gorilla to view me more, and I sensed above all a shy quality in the youngster. I had never seen a living ape in such close proximity. The London zoo had several sad specimens in cages, and I’d had occasion to view, in my father’s collection of comparative anatomy, body parts of the species. But here was a living, breathing, and quite curious western lowland gorilla inching toward me and reaching out one of its long arms in my direction. I looked to Tarzan for guidance in behavior, but his face was passive, unalarmed. It reminded me very much of my father’s expression when he had introduced me to a new wonder of nature from his pantry, one that would no doubt repulse or terrify most well-bred ladies. He had expected more from me than a turned-up nose or a shriek of disgust, as now Tarzan seemed to be expecting more from me than fright at this novel experience.

I inhaled deeply and reached out my hand to the creature who was reaching out to me. The instant our fingers touched, the young ape grabbed my wrist, causing me to cry out, despite the obvious lack of malevolent intent. The gorilla’s hand was warm and strong and leathery. Feeling suddenly confident and wishing to prove my bravery to Tarzan, I moved toward the beast. But a tiny slip of the foot found me teetering dangerously and, with a shriek, losing the branch entirely. Now I hung terrified by one arm in midair, grasped by the ape with effortless strength. Aside from the hoots and grunts from the colony below, I heard, much to my indignant fury, Tarzan
laughing.
The gorilla hauled me up in an easy sweep and set me back on the limb. Tarzan swung down and, all smiles, embraced me. Then he gave the youngster a playful cuff on the head to thank it. Having had enough of the white-skins’ company, it descended and rejoined its family members below.

There I was, in Tarzan’s arms again. I had nearly plunged to my death and yet could not deny the ridiculous feeling of safety thus embraced and, more surprising, my utter contentment. Still, he had just put me in peril, allowing me to fall, only to be saved by a young gorilla.

And he had laughed about it!

I gave Tarzan a sharp poke in the chest and assumed the angriest expression I could muster. “You let me fall,” I said and completed the spoken thoughts with gestures to the same effect.

“
Bolgani dan-do amba
Jane,” Tarzan replied.

“
Bolgani
means ‘gorilla’?” I asked.

“
Bolgani
gorilla,” he said, pointing to the apes below and nodding.
“Dan-do amba,”
he added insistently.

I did not understand the meaning of the phrase.

Tarzan clasped both his hands together in a facsimile of the young beast’s arm clutching my arm. He thought for another moment. “Stop,” he said. It was an English word he had learned. Then he pantomimed falling.

“
Dan-do ambo
means ‘stop fall’?” I guessed.

He nodded.

I found myself delighted at the communication. It was impossible to stay angry at Tarzan. This was how the two of us were proceeding with our joint education. A new word spoken would be quickly translated into the other’s language. Our vocabularies for nouns were growing quickly. We had just learned another verb.

Then Tarzan was on the move again. I marveled at the dogged persistence with which my friend was heading toward his chosen destination. Wherever it was, it must mean a great deal to him.

Toward the end of the day when the forest undergrowth darkened and the patches of dappled light grew golden with the coming sunset, Tarzan’s movements became slow and wary. He stopped often and lifted his head, sniffing the air. Now he kept me close behind him, many times reaching out his hand to help me, where before he had encouraged independent movement. Then he stopped altogether.

Before us was a massive tree, the species of which I could not determine, for it was dead, with no living leaves on its many crisscrossing limbs and branches. We approached from halfway up its trunk and now Tarzan tightly grasped my hand, leading me in the failing light up and up into those branches, and closer to its trunk.

It was clear that Tarzan had made this particular climb many times, and equally clear that this particular tree was the mysterious chosen destination. Having reached the trunk, Tarzan suddenly disappeared into a hole in its woody side. He turned and faced outward, very much the same as the grey parrot in the fig tree did from his nest hole.
Is this a nest in which the two of us are going to spend the night?
Tarzan reached out his hand and guided me up over the lip of the hole. Inside I was startled at the light that poured in from above, much more than illuminated the forest canopy. I gazed upward and saw that the trunk was entirely hollow, and it was sunlight that lit the great tubular giant, both above our heads and below our feet.

Tarzan began to descend, using sturdy foot- and handholds, encouraging me to follow him. I hesitated, for this was quite a daunting proposition. By now, I reckoned, we must be two hundred feet above the forest floor. One slip of my foot and—if not
dan-do amba
like I had been by the
bolgani
—I would tumble down the wooden well to my death. Tarzan was patiently awaiting my first step downward, his hand stretched up to assist the foothold. I should not delay. We were losing the light, and climbing down the hollow trunk in the dark would be suicidal. I steeled myself in the same way I did before taking a high jump on Leicester’s back and lowered one-half of my body, seeking the foothold. The feeling of Tarzan’s hand on my ankle caused an upwelling of relief substantial enough that I was able to release the grip of the opposite hand and find the lower handhold—a gnarled nub of air root.