The Return of Tarzan quotes

And yet withal bound down by silly customs that make them slaves to their unhappy lot while firm in the belief that they be the lords of creation enjoying the only real pleasures of existence.

In the jungle one would scarcely stand supinely aside while another took his mate. It is a silly world, an idiotic world, and Tarzan of the Apes was a fool to renounce the freedom and the happiness of his jungle to come into it.

”

The memory of her half-veiled eyes and perfect lips as she had stood smiling up into his face as he bade her goodbye remained with him for the balance of the day.

Olga de Coude was a very beautiful woman, and Tarzan of the Apes a very lonely young man, with a heart in him that was in need of the doctoring that only a woman may provide.

As the countess turned back into the room after Tarzan’s departure, she found herself face to face with Nikolas Rokoff.

De Coude was a Frenchman.

Frenchmen are impulsive.

He threw his arms about Tarzan and embraced him. Monsieur Flaubert embraced D’Arnot. There was no one to embrace the doctor. So possibly it was pique which prompted him to interfere, and demand that he be permitted to dress Tarzan’s wounds.

Far up in the mountains he heard a lion roar.

How much safer one was, he soliloquized, in the haunts of wild beasts than in the haunts of men.

Never in all his jungle life had he been more relentlessly tracked down than in the past few months of his experience among civilized men. Never had he been any nearer death.

It is as though Numa, the lion, had induced Tantor, the elephant, and Histah, the snake, to join him in attempting to kill me. I would then never have known what minute, or by whom, I was to be attacked next.

But the brutes are more chivalrous than man⁠—they do not stoop to cowardly intrigue.

”

So Tarzan came to his cabin unattended, and a few moments later was curled up in the mildewed remnants of what had once been a bed of grasses.

Thus easily did Monsieur Jean C. Tarzan slough the thin skin of his artificial civilization, and sink happy and contented into the deep sleep of the wild beast that has fed to repletion.

Yet a woman’s “yes” would have bound him to that other life forever, and made the thought of this savage existence repulsive.

And Tarzan had to be contented with that arrangement, though he would have liked it well enough to have set off the next morning—he was as impatient as a child.

Really Tarzan of the Apes was but a child, or a primeval man, which is the same thing in a way.

The next day but one a small party of hunters returned to the village from the south to report a large herd of elephant some miles away.

But he did think of D’Arnot, and a grin of amusement showed his strong white teeth as he pictured the immaculate Frenchman’s expression could he by some means see Tarzan as he was that minute.

Poor Paul, who had prided himself on having eradicated from his friend the last traces of wild savagery.

“How quickly have I fallen!” thought Tarzan;

Here he again found a suitable perch from which he could watch the preparations of the raiders. It occurred to him that he might have considerable more fun with them, so again he called to them through his improvised trumpet.

“Leave the ivory!” he cried. “Leave the ivory! Dead men have no use for ivory!”

Some of the Manyuema started to lay down their loads, but this was altogether too much for the avaricious Arabs. With loud shouts and curses they aimed their guns full upon the bearers, threatening instant death to any who might lay down his load.

“The kegs are filled with gunpowder,” said Spider, in a low tone, turning to those aft. And so it proved when the last had been opened.

“Coal oil and gunpowder!” cried Monsieur Thuran. “Sapristi! What a diet for shipwrecked mariners!”

With the full knowledge that there was neither food nor water on board, the pangs of hunger and thirst became immediately aggravated, and so on the first day of their tragic adventure real suffering commenced in grim earnest, and the full horrors of shipwreck were …

“You knew the pig?” asked Thuran, with a sneer.

“I knew the man,” she replied. “The only real man, I think, that I have ever known.”

There was something in her tone of voice that led the Russian to attribute to her a deeper feeling for his enemy than friendship, and he grasped at the suggestion to be further revenged upon the man whom he supposed dead by besmirching his memory …

But the time came when for the sake of decency he was compelled to don it, and even the misery of their condition could not prevent Jane Porter from laughing heartily at sight of him.

Later, Thuran also found it necessary to construct a similar primitive garment, so that, with their bare legs and heavily bearded faces, they looked not unlike reincarnations of two prehistoric progenitors of the human race. Thuran acted like one.

Nearly two months of this existence had passed when the first great calamity befell them. It was prefaced by an adventure which came near terminating abruptly the sufferings of two of them—terminating them in the grim and horrible manner of the jungle, forever.

“It is the duty of a high priestess to instruct, to interpret—according to the creed that others, wiser than herself, have laid down; but there is nothing in the creed which says that she must believe.

The more one knows of one’s religion the less one believes⁠—no one living knows more of mine than I.

”

Tarzan dropped his eyes to the ingot he had brought away with him. For a moment he examined it by the moon’s bright rays, then he raised his head to look out upon the ancient piles of crumbling grandeur in the distance.

“Opar,” he mused, “Opar, the enchanted city of a dead and forgotten past. The city of the beauties and the beasts. City of horrors and death; but⁠—city of fabulous riches.”

The ingot was of virgin gold.

Long since he had given up every intention of returning to civilization, and now he had decided to see no more his black friends of the Waziri. He had foresworn humanity forever.

He had started life an ape⁠—as an ape he would die.

He could not, however, erase from his memory the fact that the woman he loved was within a short journey of the stamping-ground of his tribe; nor could he banish the haunting fear that she might be constantly in danger.

“If I didn’t know the dear old fellow so well by now,” Tennington remarked to Miss Strong, “I should be quite certain that he was—er—not quite right, don’t you know.”

“If it were not so pathetic it would be ridiculous,” said the girl, sadly.

“I, who have known him all my life, know how he worships Jane; but to others it must seem that he is perfectly callous to her fate.

“Who is she?” asked the high priestess, pointing at the unconscious woman.

“She is mine,” said Tarzan of the Apes.

For a moment the girl of Opar stood wide-eyed and staring.

And when finally she mustered courage to open her eyes, the sight that met them confirmed her fears, for she saw that she was being borne through a leafy paradise in the arms of her dead love.

“If this be death,” she murmured, “thank God that I am dead.”

“You spoke, Jane!” cried Tarzan. “You are regaining consciousness!”