Tarzan and the Madman

Tarzan and the Madman

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Chapter ONE..Friends Or Enemies

MAN HAS FIVE SENSES, some of which are more or less well developed, some more or less atrophied. The beasts have these same senses, and always one and sometimes two of them are developed to a point beyond the conception of civilized man. These two are the sense of smell and the sense of hearing. The eyesight of birds is phenomenal, but that of many beasts is poor. Your dog invariably verifies the testimony of his eyes by coming close and smelling of you. He knows that his eyes might deceive him, but his nose never.

And the beasts appear to have another sense, unknown to man. No one knows what it is, but many of us have seen demonstrations of it at one time or another during our lives-a dog suddenly bristling and growling at night and glaring intently and half-fearfully at something you cannot see. There are those who maintain that dogs can see disembodied spirits, or at least sense their presence.

Tarzan of the Apes had the five senses that men and beasts share in common, and he had them all developed far beyond those of an ordinary man. In addition, he possessed that strange other sense of which I have spoken. It was nothing he could have defined. It is even possible he was not aware that he possessed it.

But now as he moved cautiously along a jungle trail, he felt a presentiment that he was being stalked-the hunter was being hunted. None of his objective senses verified the conclusion, but the ape-man could not shake off the conviction.

So now he moved even more warily, for the instinct of the wild beast for caution warned him not to ignore the portent. It was not fear that prompted him, for he did not know fear as you and I. He had no fear of death, who had faced it so often. He was merely activated more or less unconsciously by Nature's first law-self-preservation. Like the dog that senses the presence of a ghost at night, he felt that whatever had impinged upon his consciousness was malign rather than beneficent.

Tarzan had many enemies. There were his natural enemies, such as Numa the lion and Sheeta the panther. These he had had always, ever since the day he had been born in the lonely cabin on the far West Coast. He had learned of them even as he suckled at the hairy breast of his foster-mother-Kala the great she-ape. He had learned to avoid them, but never to fear them; and he had learned how to bait and annoy them.

But his worst enemies were men-men whom he had to punish for their transgressions-African natives and white men, to him, Gomangani and Tarmangani in the language of his fierce, shaggy people.

Numa and Sheeta he admired his world would have been desolate without them; but the men who were his enemies he held only in contempt. He did not hate them. Hate was for them to feel in their small, warped brains. It was not for the Lord of the Jungle.