Jane (10 page)

I trusted him with my life.

Finally he strapped around my back an ingenious twisted-vine “harness,” tying it at his front. Mr. Grey was strangely silent, but I caught him watching us intently.

“Well, I guess we’ll be going, then,” I said to the bird.

And then, good Christ, I was flying! First my “ride” had run along thick limbs of the massive fig till the width diminished and Tarzan sprang lightly to another tree, and another, whose branches overlapped in an intricate arboreal web of byways. Reassured as I was by the harness, I held on for dear life, unable to think coherently, my arms wrapped around his chest, my legs his waist. Crossed feet clasped at his belly, my cheek laid flat against the wild man’s back. It had thrilled me, this solitary footrace, twigs and leaves lightly slapping me, a blur of green and glimpses of canopy dwellers passing quickly before my eyes.

Then all at once Tarzan had leaped out—across a void between trees—and we were airborne! My shout of terror ceased abruptly when his hand caught a thick vine, and as we swung in a wide arc, my voice rose again in a high keening wail. Another vine, another wail, and then his foot connected with hard wood. But this for only a moment, long enough for him to grasp an overhead branch. What an extraordinary aerial pas de deux, I thought.

Now to my amazement he brachiated, hand over hand through tangled liana above us, a thick crisscross of branches, creepers, air roots, and vines, this thankfully, blessedly, taking us ever groundward. Another swift dash on foot through a roadway of lower limbs ended with an abrupt thud as finally we landed. Tarzan untied the harness and my feet hit solid ground. He turned and gazed at me with a most self-satisfied look.

The man is a show-off!
He’d known I was safe on his back, but he’d taken no small pleasure in providing me with a thrill. Well, it
had
been thrilling, and if I was perfectly honest I would have to admit I was sorry it was over. He pointed at my knees and questioned if I was steady on my feet (my naked feet!). When I nodded, he turned again and began to walk away, assuming I would follow. For a moment I worried that I was barefooted, but there seemed to be clear, unimpeded single-file paths to walk along. Whether these paths had been made by animals or humans I could not say. Tarzan, however, appeared by his posture and the brief, almost birdlike movements of his head this way and that to be extraordinarily wary. He frequently swiveled to be sure that I was just behind him. Even though he moved with easy grace, I wondered if the forest floor held dangers for him that the canopy did not.

The ever-present sound of running water I’d heard from the nest became louder. We approached a long, black rock escarpment, with ancient trees growing miraculously out of the solid stone, with creepers and flowering plants interwoven on its uneven face. Tarzan disappeared through a narrow gash in the ridge and I followed after him.

Life abounded everywhere I looked. In each crack and crevice grew a delicate flower or lived a creature of such strange and intricate design I pitied Charles Darwin for having missed seeing them, for surely here were species not only startling to the eye but also yet unknown to science.

All at once the unmistakable sound of the waterfall was crashing in front of me. We rounded a rock bend and I found we were standing just behind the roaring liquid curtain. Tarzan took my hand then, for the stone here was slippery, and sharp, too. A fall here could split the skin down to bone.

On the far side of the falls, we emerged at a large pool and its narrow beach of fine black sand. Here Tarzan dropped into a squat, a pose that seemed altogether comfortable for his body. I couldn’t imagine sitting. I’d been immobile with my injuries for what seemed an eternity, then confined to the nest during my recuperation for longer still. I stood gazing at the pool, the low, broad falls and next to it a high flat-lipped cliff. I noticed Tarzan gazing at the cliff with what I imagined was longing. It was odd: While he had quickly and regularly apprehended my innermost thoughts, his mind, except when he chose to converse in words or sign language, was a closed book to me.

He was staring peculiarly at me now. He nodded from myself to the pool.
Jane go in,
he was saying. I could see a narrow, shallow bar of sand at its edge, but beyond that the water looked deep. It would be perfect for a cool swim. When I looked back at Tarzan, however, he was gesturing strangely, with his fingers tugging at the skin of his chest and pinching his thigh.

Then I understood.
He wanted me to undress while he watched!

I shook my head an indignant no! and sat down in the sand some distance from him. What an absurd circumstance this was. While I depended on this man for my very life, trusted that he had never taken advantage of me in my time of extremity, and was my protector in every way, Tarzan possessed a nature as famously prurient as an aristocratic Victorian gentleman.

But oh, how I longed to bathe!

Without a backward glance and feeling more than a bit ungovernable, I stood and walked into the water. It was oddly warm, not as warm as the mineral pools at Bath were, but more than tepid. As I stepped off the ledge into the deep and began to stroke around, I felt a strange confluence of water—cold at the surface, as if issuing from the stream and its falls, and pulsing hot plumes rising from what appeared to be bottomless depths. It was a lovely sensation, even with the vine-laced outfit covering much of my skin, but something about the intemperate mixture troubled me.

I was racking my brain for an explanation when suddenly a strong hand clamped hold of my ankle. I gasped with shock, and a moment later Tarzan exploded to the surface, water streaming off him. On his face was what could only be called an ecstatic grin.

“Tarzan, what is it?” I was unconcerned that the words themselves meant nothing to him, and he seemed to understand. He splashed at the water with his hand. He dove under and popped back up with the same silly smile and pointed at me, crying, “Jane
lul.
No
jai lul
!” I knew that
lul
was water, but what was
jai
?

He swam in mad circles around me, and caught up in his playful spirits, I swam about the pool with a forward stroke and then a backward one. At this last he roared laughing, as though it was the cleverest thing he had ever seen. It occurred to me that the noise of his laughter echoing off the water and the rock cliffs was altogether marvelous—a sound I wished to hear again and again.

Now Tarzan swam to the falls, climbed a ledge, and stood in a broad stance beneath the cascading torrent, looking no less than a majestic god of the forest. He stepped forward and beckoned. As if in a dream—my will subsumed by his, my urge to defy him nil—I simply obeyed. When he reached down his hand I took it, and he lifted me effortlessly to the ledge beside him.

I saw in his expression neither prurience nor lust, just pure joy shining on his face. His arms encircled me and he drew me protectively to him.
Or was it possessively?
I wondered. Whatever it was, was inconsequential, for the feel of my body pressed full against his was extravagantly sensual. Outrageous as it was, there was glory in the moment.

Even destiny.

But this perfect moment—light and glittering halos of sun-splashed spray, the gentle strength of Tarzan, his pulsing warmth beneath the cool smooth skin—ended suddenly. The heavy sum and substance of my past life, and the grim reality of tomorrow, came like the terrible weight of water, crashing down upon my head. My arms, poised to clasp this beautiful man to my heart, fell heavily to my sides. I must not allow myself to be enchanted by this place.

There was far too much left that I must do.

*   *   *

That night sleep failed to come. Lying next to me, Tarzan was restless, tossing about, muttering words in his language and mine. Once he cried out, his arms flailing above his head. At first I willed myself to sleep, annoyed at the nocturnal cacophony and the utter darkness blanketing the nest.

But the far-off whine of a great cat brought home suddenly the miracle of my circumstances, and all at once I perceived the long night ahead as a gift—a deep well of reflection sorely needed if I was ever to leave this prison in paradise and regain my life.

“Remember,” I whispered aloud. “Remember…”

Evangeline

Firsts.

It was a game I had played from the time I was a little girl. It was simple cognizance that a thing—a place, a sight, a sound, a smell, a thought—was my very first experience of it. The playing of the game was so personal to me, so simplistic, I never believed it worthy enough to tell anyone about, even my father. How it worked was that I made mental note of such events as the first jump Leicester and I had made over a stile—I’d been seven; the first time I had worn the men’s trousers under my riding habit. When I took long walks in the greenwood and went off the beaten path, climbing a particular hillock, standing on a particular rock, looking in a particular direction, I would say to myself, “I might be the first human ever to have stood in this exact spot in the whole history of the world.” I thought about the man, how many tens or hundreds of thousands of years ago I didn’t know, who had purposely lit a fire; the woman scouring the shoreline for food who’d been the first to discover that by prying open a bivalve there was flesh inside to eat.

And now standing on King’s Dock at the Port of Liverpool amid the towers and cranes of the waterfront, I heard the chaos of bellowing, hammering, and belching engines, smelled the mixed stench of horses and sweat and urine, and watched the
Evangeline
being loaded with cargo, and I knew that the months to come would provide me the greatest profusion of firsts—a bountiful cornucopia of original and pioneering experiences—that I might ever at one time in my life behold.

The idea made me shiver with delight.

I turned from the long, low-slung cargo and passenger ship to the “Second Port of the Empire,” second only to London, to see dock after dock for seven miles, brilliantly constructed, granite-lipped piers and warehouses, looking for all the world like an immense fortress, and pondered my good fortune.

I was not unaware of the previous blessings of my life. That because of my father’s progressive nature and indulgences I had been afforded freedoms that most women my age—or, for that matter, women of any age—had not. I was about to set off on a scientific expedition into the heart of Africa to search for Mr. Darwin’s missing link fossils with the one man in the world I most loved and admired. It was nearly incomprehensible.

Certainly, I had dreamed about this day. Longed for it. Imagined it a thousand times over, but that the dream should become real, that I was just now standing at the brink of such a grand adventure, seemed all at once to place me in the company of the small coterie of females that I held in a place of the deepest reverence. The Mary Kingsleys of the world.

And just as suddenly, I felt foolish, falsely self-glorified. Mary Kingsley had led
her own
expedition up the Ogowe River. Annie Peck had done the same, ascending the slopes of Peru’s Mt. Huascarán. Lady Hester Stanhope had dressed as a Bedouin and with twenty-two camels taken her caravan across the desert to Palmyra. I was a mere laboratory assistant to my father, and on this safari we both would be in the care of Mr. Conrath.

Ral.

That was what I called him to myself. I would not dream of speaking his given name aloud. It was only after fifteen years of marriage and much cajoling that Mother had given up calling her husband Mr. Porter and agreed to Archie.

Some parts of myself, despite my abhorrence of the values, were still wholly Victorian. Though I had no compunctions about discussing, and now dissecting, the human body, I was still modest about my own. Even with lady’s maids I covered my naked breasts and my lower female parts as I was allowing myself, however infrequently, to be dressed. And I would not bare an ankle, silly as I knew it was. Mother’s influence, much as I hated to admit it, pervaded my life in unexpected and irritating ways.

Perhaps it was a function of my spinsterhood. Most girls of my class, by my age of twenty, had taken part in those most primal of animal acts—copulation and childbirth. I noticed that girls who were wives and mothers—despite their prudish airs—shared an unspoken knowingness, a twinkle in the eye that denoted a sisterhood of sorts, one to which I decidedly did not belong.

Well, if I am a freak, I am quite a happy one. I’m going to Africa, and my companion—besides my dear father—is the indomitable Mr. Conrath.

He was something of an enigma, I thought. And if I was perfectly honest with myself, I would have to acknowledge more than a slight attraction to the man. It was the first real interest I’d felt in my life for anyone of the opposite sex. At the very moment these thoughts crossed my mind, I heard Ral’s voice.

“No! No! Not like that, I said!” His tone was harsh and authoritarian, not the sort of thing I was used to hearing. Ral was dealing with two dozen stevedores loading the
Evangeline
with the provisions and equipment for the “Porter Expedition,” as he called it. All that morning, looking very much the engineer, with a tool belt strapped around his slim waist, he had been barking orders to the dockhands with very limited patience and rising frustration.