Jane (48 page)

gash
   tooth/tusk

go
   black

gomi
   root

gumado
   sick

gumado b’nala
   sick in the head

gund vando
   good chief

har
   battle

hay-ee
   help

histah
   snake

ho
   many

jai
   brave/Tarzan’s half-sister

jar
   magic

kagada
   surrender/I do surrender

kagado
   surrender/do you surrender?

kak
   or

kal
   milk

kalan
   female

kambo
   jungle

kin-ga
   mating

ko
   mighty

kob
   hit

koho
   hot

korag
   destroy

ko-sabor
   mighty lioness

kudu
   sun

lu
   fierce

lu har
   fierce battle

lul
   water

manu
   monkey

mat
   of

mel-cot
   hide/hidden

m’wah
   blue

m’wah wa-usha
   blue-green leaf

neeta
   bird

nene
   beetle/bug

numa
   lion

olo
   wrestle

osha
   flower

pacco
   zebra

palu
   son

pan-tho
   memories, tales, legends

popo
   eat

rok
   frog

rut
   tough

sha-ka
   beyond comprehension

sheeta
   leopard

sord
   bad

talu
   daughter

tand
   no

tandanda
   forget

tantor
   elephant

tar
   white

tar-zan
   white-skin person

tat
   insect

tat
   wing

tug
   want

uglu
   hate

unk
   go

usha
   leaf

uta
   danger

utor
   fear

vando
   good

wa
   green

walla
   house

wappi
   antelope

yad
   ear

yat
   eye

yati
   sight

yud
   come

yud b’zan
   come groom fur

yuto
   cut

yuto-gash
   cut with teeth

yuto yat
   cut eye

zabalu
   sister

zan
   skin

zu
   big

zu-tat
   insect

Zu-dak-lul
   big water/Atlantic Ocean

zu-vo tand
   defy

zu-zu-vo
   strong

This glossary is an abridged version of
The Tarzan Encyclopedia,
   a complete Mangani-English dictionary, its language created by Edgar Rice Burroughs and compiled by John Harwood and Allan Howard. The full encyclopedia can be found online at
www.robinmaxwell.com
or
www.tarzan.com
.

Author’s Note

Tarzan was my first heartthrob. After all, what girl wouldn’t crave the undying affection of a gorgeously muscled, scantily clad he-man (and an English lord, at that) living free from the confines of civilization in a lush paradise? Though an avid reader of Tarzan comic books, I’d never read a single Edgar Rice Burroughs novel. Yet Tarzan and Jane were as hardwired into my fantasy life and consciousness as any other characters in popular culture.

As an eight-year-old girl, I watched with slack-jawed wonder as a blond Amazon—Irish McCalla—in her tiny leopard skin dress and thick gold upper-arm bracelets swung through the vines in the thrilling TV series
Sheena Queen of the Jungle.
And who didn’t love the Johnny Weissmuller Tarzan films with the peppery sophisticate Maureen O’Sullivan as his “mate,” Jane? I waited breathlessly for
Greystoke
but was sorely disappointed by the filmmaker’s decision to keep their Jane (Andie MacDowell) from setting foot in Africa till the last frame of the movie.

I’d just completed my manuscript of
O, Juliet
when the question arose via agents and publishers as to the subject of my next novel. I’d had a ball with my take on Shakespeare’s
Romeo and Juliet,
fleshing out the characters, their world and families, and expanding the time line from three days to three months. As I was riding down the road one day with my husband, Max, he wondered if I might want to choose another pair of literary lovers rather than a historical character. When I told him I liked the idea, he asked who they would be. Not three seconds passed before I blurted out, “Tarzan and Jane!”

“Where did that come from?” Max wanted to know. At the time I had no memory of Sheena or the old Weissmuller/O’Sullivan movies, but the images must have been bubbling in the depths of my subconscious just waiting to erupt like magma from a dormant volcano.

The new idea took me by surprise and started keeping me up at night. I was fortunate that two of my dearest friends—the writing/producing team of Alan J. Adler and Susan Jeter—had been dealing with the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate on a screen adaptation of ERB’s novel
The Outlaw of Torn,
and I knew from their experience that one trod on the copyright or trademark of any Burroughs creation at his or her own peril. Of course I desperately wanted the blessings and authorization for my idea from the heirs and estate of this iconic and massively prolific author.

To that end I had my trusted entertainment attorney, Phillip Rosen, contact ERB, Inc., on my behalf. Before I knew it, the two of us were on a conference call with the company’s president, Jim Sullos. “What’s this great new idea you’ve got?” he demanded. It was the easiest, shortest, one-sentence pitch of my entire writing career. “The Tarzan story from Jane’s point of view,” I replied. And with the same lightning speed as I had plucked the idea from my brain, Jim exclaimed, “I love it! It’s original. It’s never been done like this before.” I sagged with relief. The first and most important hurdle had been cleared.

I also learned in that phone call that the one hundredth anniversary of the first episode of
Tarzan of the Apes
—a serial in the pulp fiction magazine
All-Story
(October 1912), later published as the first Tarzan novel—was just three years away. Considering how long it would take me to write
Jane,
and how long it would take to see publication, we were on schedule for its fortuitous release in the “Tarzan Centennial Year.”

This was getting exciting.

After a marathon five-hour pitch session at the ERB office and archive in Tarzana, California (where else?), the estate approved my story line, and Jim Sullos became
Jane
’s first and most ardent champion.

A bona fide Tarzan fanboy with a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the vast collection of the “Tarzan Universe”—books, comics, artwork, memorabilia, dictionaries, and bestiaries—Jim provided me with every resource I could possibly need to write my novel, a book he began referring to as “the next Tarzan classic.” He was as tickled as I was that this would be the first Tarzan title ever written by a woman.

We spent many long hours discussing the ERB novels (many of which I had, by now, read), comparing the original characters and stories with my own take, on such topics as the age at which Tarzan was abducted by the Mangani (not a year old but four years old); the reason Jane and her father go to Africa in the first place (treasure hunting versus paleoanthropological exploration); and how to handle the couple’s physical relationship (“tastefully”).

Jim always kept in mind the Burroughs Bibliophiles, a worldwide organization of aficionados who share a love for the works and characters of ERB—who would surely scour my manuscript with a fine-tooth comb looking for discrepancies or any desecration of their favorite author’s intent. I am eternally grateful for Jim’s understanding that while an homage to
Tarzan of the Apes, Jane
was a stand-alone novel, and a too-strict adherence to the original work would put a stranglehold on my creativity.

John R. Burroughs, the only living grandson of ERB, was another champion of
Jane
from the beginning. Having his support meant the world to me.

The research phase was more fun than a barrel of Mangani. Aside from my exotic and erotic jungle and wild man fantasies, I was for the first time free to indulge in some of my greatest longtime passions—human evolution and the mysterious “missing link” fossils and creatures found all over the world. From a very young age I’d also been fascinated by and read voraciously about ancient and antediluvian civilizations, and accounts of the geological cataclysms that had ended them. Had I not become a writer, I feel sure I would have made my career as a paleoanthropologist or archaeologist.

As it always—happily—happens when I’m researching a novel, exactly the right books find their way into my hands. Perhaps the most important one this time was
The Man Who Found the Missing Link: Eug
è
ne Dubois and His Lifelong Quest to Prove Darwin Right
by Pat Shipman. The title tells it all. Dubois’s discovery of Java man (
Pithecanthropus erectus,
later redesignated
Homo erectus
) in 1891 gave me a plausible missing link species upon which to base the Mangani. But learning in Shipman’s book that Darwin’s insistence that the
real
missing link would be found in Africa gave Jane and Archie (faithful Darwinists) the motivation to go to the “Dark Continent” on expedition. It was heartbreaking to hear of the lambasting Dubois took from the scientific community—it nearly broke him—but the support of his old professor, Ernst Haeckel, kept him sane. While my dates are off by seven years (I needed to take some artistic license to make my story line work), Dubois did actually present
Pithecanthropus erectus
during the Fourth International Zoological Congress at Cambridge (1898) and was hooted and howled at by the audience until Haeckel stepped forward to defend his student’s thesis. Much of Haeckel’s speech in
Jane
are his words, verbatim, from that spirited defense.

A more glaring discrepancy in dates concerns the Boy Scouts of America, an organization that was not yet in existence when Archie Porter was a boy. Again, I unapolgetically claim poetic license, remembering the rich tradition of ERB. If a man can go to sleep in an Arizona cave and wake up on Mars, I reckon my readers will indulge me on a wonky fact or two.

In July 2010, just as I was about to write of Jane being introduced to the Mangani at the Great Bower,
National Geographic
published a story about a team of paleoanthropologists, Tim White, Berhane Asfaw, and Giday WoldeGabriel, who, fifteen years before, had discovered in the Middle Awash area of Ethiopia a full skeleton of
Ardipithecus ramidus
(“Ardi”). The female, with its straight leg bones giving it a human, upright, bipedal stance, also had opposable big toes perfect for grasping branches and the face and skull of a chimp. It was to my eye the closest creature to a missing link that I had ever seen. To my pleasure (and Charles Darwin’s, if he had been alive), it was found in Africa. While Ardi’s discoverers knew the species was too primitive to have the power of speech, I borrowed one of ERB’s most important conceits about the Mangani—that not only could they make meaningful sounds but they also had language. Asserting this kind of artistic freedom is one of the greatest joys of being an author of fiction. I cut out the artist’s rendering of what “Ardi” would have looked like and taped it over my desk. I dubbed her “Kala of the Mangani.”

Finding Mary Kingsley’s
Travels in West Africa
—in particular her exploration of the Ogowe River—was like striking gold. There was a reason I had Jane read directly from her well-worn volume. As she opined to Captain Kelly, she was unable to top Kingsley’s extraordinary descriptions. Neither could I.

I wanted the Waziri to have a basis in reality, so I followed to its end point one of the lines of the Bantu diaspora out of Cameroon (some four thousand years ago). There I placed the tribe’s village, a few days’ journey inland from the Gabon beach where ERB’s
Fuwalda
mutineers had set the Claytons with all their belongings.

Minnesota governor Ignatius Donnelly’s
Atlantis: The Antediluvian World
was a big bestseller of the nineteenth century that sparked huge controversy about the lost continent. William Flinders Petrie—the premier Egyptologist of his time—did stumble on what he believed was the rubble of the ancient Egyptian labyrinth at the Fayum Oasis. He also famously bragged that when he died he wanted his head cut off and his brain studied for science. His wish was, in fact, granted, though the famous noggin was lost during the years of the Second World War … then later recovered.

I had also made contact with Helen J. Blackman, a scholar who had written extensively on the history of Cambridge University. She led me to several important books for my research about what life was like for an intelligent, progressive young woman during the Victorian and Edwardian years.
Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood
was insanely relevant, as it was an autobiography of Gwen Raverat—Charles Darwin’s granddaughter—who grew up in Cambridge society and was precisely Jane Porter’s age.