Jane (24 page)

Thus we descended slowly, but with ever more assurance. Once we had lowered ourselves three-quarters of the way down the trunk, Tarzan stopped and, standing on what appeared as a broad ledge, helped me down to firm footing. I doubted I could have made that feeling of gratitude understood, but the rush of relieved tension in my muscles was so intense I nearly wept. I became quickly aware, however, that Tarzan was in a state of
increased
tension and awareness, and also that there was a foul odor wafting around our heads.

He was peering out a hole in the trunk. Coming to his side on the ledge I could see below me what appeared in the disappearing light to be a nesting ground for a huge family of
bolgani,
already tucked into the crooks of trees making ready for sleep. But here, at the view hole, the stink was nearly unbearable. When Tarzan gently pulled me back, I questioned him about the smell. He directed my sight in the final rays of sunlight to a dead, decaying monkey carcass hanging just under the opening.

When I signaled that the gruesome bit of carrion should be disposed of, Tarzan shook his head in a vigorous
no!
Well, I thought, a further explanation would have to wait till tomorrow. Just now Tarzan was guiding me to a place on the ledge and motioning that I stretch my whole body out. He lay next to me, his body facing out into the abyss. I knew that the closeness would, on this precipice, lead to nothing resembling the lustful gropings in the Waziri hut, and that the morning light would reveal not only the bizarre necessity for the dead monkey hanging a few feet away but also the great mystery that lay below in the gorillas’ nesting grounds.

I wrapped my arm around Tarzan’s waist, breathing in his rich musky scent, and closed my eyes.

As it had every night since I came into his company, sleep took me instantly.

Mangani

I woke as Tarzan pulled out of my grasp and in the weak dawn light filtering in from above made his way across the ledge to the view hole. He stood just above the rotting monkey carcass, clearly unperturbed by its foul odor, then turned and beckoned to me. I had not seen such a look in the man’s eyes before, not when he was swimming in his favorite pool or communing with a beloved animal friend, or even gazing at me with obvious affection. The expression was at once hopeful and anticipatory, furious and fearful. He reached out his hand to help me negotiate the ledge with its dangerous drop and, thus assisted, I came to stand side by side with Tarzan at the blind.

The lowland gorillas in their nests below were beginning to stir. I counted more than five dozen hominids, adults and the young. Some began feeding immediately from piles of food they had placed in their nests the night before. Several
balu
descended to the ground and began frolicking and wrestling with one another on the thick bed of leaves and moss that covered the forest floor.

I had begun to wonder what significance this particular band of
bolgani
had for Tarzan when one of the females stood up in her nest.
Were my eyes deceiving me?
The furred, massive-bodied tree dweller had a backward-sloping skull and the face of an ape, but the creature was most definitely
not
an ape. She stood far too upright—like humans did. Others stood now. The largest of them were over six feet tall. The long bones of their arms and legs, like human limbs, were not bowed but
straight.
The creatures were not bent over, and their knuckles did not scrape the ground. Like human hands, theirs hung just at knee level.
Good grief, what was I seeing?!
Their fingers were excessively long. Their big toes—contrary to the rest of their very human legs—were not parallel with their other toes but set at right angles to their feet, a configuration that would allow them to grip all the way around a tree limb, like an ape’s would do. On closer examination, their broad furred faces were more like a chimpanzee’s than a gorilla’s. The backward-sloping skulls could not leave much room for a large human-sized frontal lobe and cortex of the brain, yet the entire skull was much larger than a gorilla’s, therefore allowing for a decent-sized brain. They were neither human nor Neanderthal, nor even what Java man must have looked like.

And what was this? The sounds coming from the creatures—it was a kind of
language,
guttural and very rudimentary. Some sounds were those Tarzan used as words. Were these beings using words, even small phrases, to communicate with each other?
But this would mean the species—and yes, it was most decidedly a new species—had the physical equipment for speech!

I argued silently with myself. Surely this was impossible. Even if the creatures could manage a few word-sounds, could they possess the mental capacity to understand spoken language?

I watched as a mature female called in “words” to a small juvenile on the ground to join her on the tree limb where she squatted, and within moments he left his playmates and climbed to her side. She took him to her teat to feed. Now I observed two males who were attempting—with words I dared to believe were colored with
inflection
—to lure a young female down from a higher limb to join them in mutual grooming.

I felt my heart pounding hard in my chest. I was barely breathing. This could not be.
Could not be!
It contradicted everything I had been taught about evolution and the extinction of species. But seeing was believing. And right now, before my eyes, I was observing an entire colony of
living missing links
!

“Mangani,” Tarzan said to me, not in his usual bold style of speaking but in a whisper. It was then I realized the import of the rotting monkey corpse hanging below the view hole. Tarzan did not want these creatures to know that they were being spied upon from the tree trunk. The carrion flesh would hide our human scent.

My mind was utterly shattered. Before me was the greatest discovery in the history of biological science. My thoughts raced in several directions at once, and I strove to rein them in, to begin formulating questions, ones that Tarzan, even with his limited vocabulary, would be able to answer. First, I must know why he had come so far out of his way to make this tribe—the Mangani—known to me.

But now, standing so close to Tarzan, I became aware that my friend was more than excited. He was agitated. He, too, was attempting urgent communication with me about the creatures.

“Tell me about the Mangani,” I said very quietly.

Tarzan nodded, then gestured to the female I had seen call to the small child who was still feeding at her breast.

“Muh-thah,” Tarzan whispered.

“Yes, that is a mother.”

“Tarzan muh-thah.”

I shook my head. “No, not Tarzan’s mother.”

Tarzan grew visibly frustrated. “No Tarzan muh-thah,” he agreed. “Mangani Kala Tarzan muh-thah.”

I thought hard. Did Tarzan want me to understand that he knew this nursing female was not his mother, but that
another Mangani female called Kala
had given birth to him?

It was an outrageous idea, but it indeed appeared to be what he thought.

All at once Tarzan grew ecstatic. He was directing my sight to a well-formed adult female, gracefully brachiating her way through the treetops of the Mangani encampment.

“Jai!” he exclaimed, forgetting to keep his voice down.

“Who is Jai?”
Jane lul. No jai lul,
I remembered.

Tarzan’s face twisted with the exertion of difficult thought. Finally he smiled. “Tarzan Kala
balu.
Jai Kala
balu.
”

Mad as his logic was, I felt obliged to foster understanding and not split hairs. Tarzan was saying that he and Jai had the same mother.

“Jai is Tarzan’s sister?” I said.

“Sis-ter,” he repeated. He had never before heard the English word. But he pulled me to him and hugged me fiercely—in thanks for understanding, I presumed.

Tarzan’s sister, and a beloved sister at that,
I thought. I must formulate my ideas into words I could make Tarzan comprehend. In reality, his mother could not possibly be one of these Mangani females, and Jai was not his sister. How on earth had he come to believe such a preposterous delusion?

“Kala Tarzan muh-thah,” he began. He balled his hand into a fist and, pounding the center of his chest, made the universal symbol of strong love. “Tarzan
eta balu.
”

I remembered
eta
as the word for “small” or “weak.” So Tarzan, improbable as it might seem, had been raised from a child by a female Mangani named Kala. I watched as Tarzan—unable to find the proper words—pantomimed loving care and tender affection for a little creature in a mother’s lap. He held an imaginary infant at his left breast and smiled. “Tarzan,” he said. Then he held another imaginary babe to his right breast. “Jai.”

So Kala had suckled them both.

Lost in pleasant memory now, Tarzan’s face grew animated. “Tarzan
ee
Jai
zu, zu-vo.
” He signed that the two little ones had grown big and strong. Now he was smiling broadly. “Tarzan
ee
Jai
olo.
”

I shook my head.
“Olo?”

Tarzan grabbed me and made as if to wrestle. Clearly, he and his sister had play-wrestled with each other growing up, as many young animals were known to do in order to learn the art of fighting—as I had seen the juvenile Mangani do this morning.

“Where is Kala?” I asked Tarzan.

“Kala
bund.
”

I had never learned Tarzan’s word for “dead,” but by the grim expression on my friend’s face, the meaning of
bund
was all too apparent. And clearly, he did not wish to elucidate any further on that subject.

Regardless of Tarzan’s odd misconceptions about his parentage, I found it impossible to tear my gaze from this stunning discovery. I was speechless. Paralyzed with wonder. If only I had pen and paper to begin recording my momentous findings and drawing the living missing link species in detail. But truly, I was satisfied for now just to stand and observe, to allow the enormity of it all to settle into my brain.

Pithecanthropus aporterensus erectus
I would name the creatures, in memory of my father. Oh, how I grieved that he had left this world without seeing them. It was a universe of importance beyond the pile of petrified bones that we had come seeking in West Africa. What on earth would Eugène Dubois think when he saw
P.a.e.
? Imagine the furor this would create within the scientific community. Tarzan had not the slightest conception of what a crucial and magnificent gift he had given me.

Given the world.

Just then Tarzan, at my side, began to bristle. All the muscles in his body grew rigid, and with unconscious roughness he pushed me away from the view hole. A sound came rumbling from deep in his throat. A dangerous growl.

“Tarzan, what do you see?”

He seemed to me, at that moment, to be lacking all control of his senses. This frightened me. I knew his power. He had killed a giant cat single-handedly in my defense. But here in the hollow tree blind I was in no danger. What had so upset him? I placed a gentle hand on Tarzan’s arm. When he did not respond, I took his face in both of my hands and forced him to look at me. What I saw in his eyes was murder.

“Kerchak,” was all he said before stepping aside to let me back at the spy hole.

Standing tall and upright in a nest far above the others—one that I had not previously noticed—was the most fearsome creature upon which I had ever laid eyes. While he was surely Mangani, he far outstripped in size and proportion every other member of the tribe. If my eyes were not deceiving me, he stood at least six and one-half feet tall and weighed in excess of three hundred and fifty pounds, every ounce of it muscle, bone, and sinew. His chest and shoulders were massive. But his posture, and the cowering stance of the others below him who had, like myself, just become aware of his wakeful state, told a further story than simply one of a physically dominant male of the species.

Every single Mangani, despite its age or sex, lived in abject terror of the one Tarzan called Kerchak.

In ominous silence, he began making his way down to the lower nests, brachiating with arms the size of tree limbs. As he approached the blind, I caught a full view of him. It came as a shock to see that Kerchak was disfigured. One of his eyes was missing, the socket a sunken black mass. The other glimmered with silent threat. A huge diagonal scar across the whole of his face had healed, but it made the monster’s countenance even more horrifying. There was quiet menace in every movement. If he approached a nest, mothers would pull their young closer. Males simply turned and disappeared into the greenery. As Kerchak went down, he picked morsels of food from the nighttime stores of the bowers, but no Mangani dared challenge the theft. When he reached the ground, a roundish clearing of beaten-down grasses, he settled himself into a seated position and began chewing on the berries and shoots he had taken from the others.