Jungle Tales of Tarzan quotes

Teeka, stretched at luxurious ease in the shade of the tropical forest, presented, unquestionably, a most alluring picture of young, feminine loveliness.

Or at least so thought Tarzan of the Apes, who squatted upon a low-swinging branch in a nearby tree and looked down upon her.

The spurt of red blood brought a shrill cry of delight from Teeka. Ah, but this was something worth while! She glanced about to see if others had witnessed this evidence of her popularity.

Helen of Troy was never one whit more proud than was Teeka at that moment.

If Teeka had not been so absorbed in her own vaingloriousness she might have noted the rustling of leaves in the tree above her—a rustling which was not caused by any movement of the wind, since there was no wind.

For half an hour Tarzan sprawled there upon Tantor’s back.

Time had no meaning for either of them.

Life, as they saw it, consisted principally in keeping their stomachs filled. To Tarzan this was a less arduous labor than to Tantor, for Tarzan’s stomach was smaller, and being omnivorous, food was less difficult to obtain.

“Beyond this line you cannot pass, for my medicine is strong medicine,” he cried. “Stop, or you will fall dead as your foot touches this spot.

My mother was a voodoo, my father was a snake; I live upon lions’ hearts and the entrails of the panther; I eat young babies for breakfast and the demons of the jungle are my slaves.

I am the most powerful witch-doctor in the world; I fear nothing, for I cannot die. I—” But he got no further; instead he turned and fled as Tarzan of the Apes crossed the magical dead line and still lived.

“So you are God!” he cried.

“If you be God, then Tarzan is greater than God,”

and so the ape-man thought. “I am Tarzan,” he shouted into the ear of the black.

Strangely, he did not give the victory cry over the vanquished Histah. Why, he could not have told you, other than that to him Histah was not an animal. He differed in some peculiar way from the other denizens of the jungle.

Tarzan only knew that he hated him.

At the pool Tarzan drank his fill and lay stretched upon the soft grass beneath the shade of a tree. His mind reverted to the battle with Histah, the snake.

Yes, Tarzan had found God, and he spent the whole day in attributing to Him all of the good and beautiful things of nature; but there was one thing which troubled him. He could not quite reconcile it to his conception of his newfound God.

Who made Histah, the snake?

But Tibo, the little black boy, lacked the divine spark which had permitted Tarzan, the white boy, to benefit by his training in the ways of the fierce jungle. In imagination he was wanting, and imagination is but another name for super-intelligence.

Imagination it is which builds bridges, and cities, and empires.

The beasts know it not, the blacks only a little, while to one in a hundred thousand of earth’s dominant race it is given as a gift from heaven that man may not perish from the earth.

but even her great mother love was sorely taxed to find the courage to send her forth into the black jungle toward the distant hills and the uncanny abode of Bukawai, the unclean, and his devils.

Mother love, however, is one of the human passions which closely approximates to the dignity of an irresistible force.

It drives the frail flesh of weak women to deeds of heroic measure. Momaya was neither frail nor weak, physically, but she was a woman, an ignorant, superstitious, African savage. She believed in devils, in black magic, and in witchcraft.

Tibo alone was more terrified than Tibo even among the apes.

Real and apparent dangers are less disconcerting than those which we imagine, and only the gods of his people knew how much Tibo imagined.

He had been but a short time in his hiding place when he heard something approaching through the jungle. He crouched closer to the limb upon which he lay and prayed that Tarzan would return quickly.

He came softly, as was his way. Before he reached the spot he heard strange sounds—the sound of a woman laughing and of a woman weeping, and the two which seemed to come from one throat were mingled with the convulsive sobbing of a child.

Tarzan hastened, and when Tarzan hastened, only the birds and the wind went faster.

And as Tarzan approached the sounds, he heard another, a deep sigh. Momaya did not hear it, nor did Tibo; but the ears of Tarzan were as the ears of Bara, the deer.

“For Teeka there is Teeka’s balu,” he soliloquized; “for Sabor there are balus, and for the she-Gomangani, and for Bara, and for Manu, and even for Pamba, the rat; but for Tarzan there can be none—neither a she nor a balu.

Tarzan of the Apes is a man, and it must be that man walks alone.

”

Lord Greystoke was hunting, or, to be more accurate, he was shooting pheasants at Chamston-Hedding.

Lord Greystoke was immaculately and appropriately garbed⁠—to the minutest detail he was vogue.

To be sure, he was among the forward guns, not being considered a sporting shot, but what he lacked in skill he more than made up in appearance.

“The lions seek their prey,” he murmured to himself, looking up once again at the swift-flying clouds. The moaning rose to a great volume of sound. “They come!” said Tarzan of the Apes, and sought the shelter of a thickly foliaged tree.

Quite suddenly the trees bent their tops simultaneously as though God had stretched a hand from the heavens and pressed His flat palm down upon the world.

“They pass!” whispered Tarzan. “The lions pass.” Then came a vivid flash of lightning, followed by deafening thunder. “The lions have sprung,” cried Tarzan, “and now they roar above the bodies of their kills.”

Tarzan understood nothing the witch-doctor said, therefore he did not reply, but only stared straight at Bukawai with cold and level gaze. The hyenas crept up behind him. He heard them growl; but he did not even turn his head.

He was a beast with a man’s brain.

The beast in him refused to show fear in the face of a death which the man-mind already admitted to be inevitable.

Behind him the black-maned lion, head flattened, tail extended, racing, a jungle thoroughbred, across the sunlit clearing.

Ah, but this was life! With death at his heels, Tarzan thrilled with the joy of such living as this; but would he reach the trees ahead of the rampant death so close behind?

Gunto swung from a limb in a tree before him. Gunto was screaming warnings and advice.

He foresaw what might happen should the great carnivora of the jungle turn their serious attention upon the tribe of Kerchak, the great ape, but equally he thought upon the wild scramble of the apes for safety when Numa first charged among them.

There is little humor in the jungle that is not grim and awful.

The beasts have little or no conception of humor; but the young Englishman saw humor in many things which presented no humorous angle to his associates.

… abroad alone, for Tarzan was a man-thing and sought amusement and adventure and such humor as the grim and terrible jungle offers to those who know it and do not fear it—a weird humor shot with blazing eyes and dappled with the crimson of lifeblood.

While others sought only food and love, Tarzan of the Apes sought food and joy.

One day he hovered above the palisaded village of Mbonga, the chief, the jet cannibal of the jungle primeval. He saw, as he had seen many times before, the witch-doctor, Rabba Kega, decked out in the head and hide of Gorgo, the buffalo.

The ape-man gasped for breath. Cold sweat stood out from every pore, there was a great sickness at the pit of Tarzan’s stomach.

Tarzan of the Apes had dreamed his first dream.

For a long time he sat watching for Numa to climb into the tree after him, and listening for the sound of the great wings from above, for to Tarzan of the Apes his dream was a reality.

The sentinels, now from habit become a fixed tribal custom, either relaxed their vigilance or entirely deserted their posts, as the whim seized them. The tribe was far scattered in search of food.

Thus may peace and prosperity undermine the safety of the most primitive community even as it does that of the most cultured.

Even the individuals became less watchful and alert, so that one might have thought Numa and Sabor and Sheeta entirely deleted from the scheme of things.

The little monkey danced about, all excitement. His chief diversion in life was to bring about bloody encounters between the larger denizens of the forest, that he might sit in the safety of the trees and witness the spectacles.

He was a glutton for gore, was this little, whiskered, gray monkey, so long as it was the gore of others⁠—a typical fight fan was the graybeard.

The apes hid themselves in the shrubbery beside the trail along which the two stranger bulls would pass. Teeka trembled with excitement. She had heard the words of Manu, and she knew that the hairless ape must be Tarzan, while the other was, doubtless, Taug.

Tonight the women of the old witch-doctor would moan and howl. Tomorrow he would be forgotten.

Such is life, such is fame, such is power⁠—in the center of the world’s highest civilization, or in the depths of the black, primeval jungle.

Always, everywhere, man is man, nor has he altered greatly beneath his veneer since he scurried into a hole between two rocks to escape the tyrannosaurus six million years ago.

Tonight the women of the old witch-doctor would moan and howl. Tomorrow he would be forgotten. Such is life, such is fame, such is power—in the center of the world’s highest civilization, or in the depths of the black, primeval jungle.

Always, everywhere, man is man, nor has he altered greatly beneath his veneer since he scurried into a hole between two rocks to escape the tyrannosaurus six million years ago.

The morning following the disappearance of Rabba Kega, the warriors set out with Mbonga, the chief, to examine the trap they had set for Numa.