music and literature--had thriven upon such enervating
ideals he strenuously denied, insisting, rather, that
they had endured in spite of civilization.
"Show me the fat, opulent coward," he was wont to say,
"who ever originated a beautiful ideal. In the clash
of arms, in the battle for survival, amid hunger and
death and danger, in the face of God as manifested in
the display of Nature's most terrific forces, is born
all that is finest and best in the human heart and
mind."
And so Tarzan always came back to Nature in the spirit
of a lover keeping a long deferred tryst after a period
behind prison walls. His Waziri, at marrow, were more
civilized than he. They cooked their meat before they
ate it and they shunned many articles of food as
unclean that Tarzan had eaten with gusto all his life
and so insidious is the virus of hypocrisy that even
the stalwart ape-man hesitated to give rein to his
natural longings before them. He ate burnt flesh when
he would have preferred it raw and unspoiled, and he
brought down game with arrow or spear when he would far
rather have leaped upon it from ambush and sunk his
strong teeth in its jugular; but at last the call of
the milk of the savage mother that had suckled him in
infancy rose to an insistent demand--he craved the hot
blood of a fresh kill and his muscles yearned to pit
themselves against the savage jungle in the battle for
existence that had been his sole birthright for the
first twenty years of his life.
3
The Call of the Jungle
Moved by these vague yet all-powerful urgings the
ape-man lay awake one night in the little thorn boma
that protected, in a way, his party from the depredations
of the great carnivora of the jungle. A single warrior
stood sleepy guard beside the fire that yellow eyes
out of the darkness beyond the camp made imperative.
The moans and the coughing of the big cats mingled with
the myriad noises of the lesser denizens of the jungle
to fan the savage flame in the breast of this savage
English lord. He tossed upon his bed of grasses,
sleepless, for an hour and then he rose, noiseless as a
