It was, but the half-famished stranger risked burning for an initial morsel. Without seasoning, as it was, no food had ever tasted better. Only its high temperature restrained him from wolfing it. He ate one quail and half the rabbit before he lay back, at least partially satisfied.
"To answer your questions," he said, "my name is Wood. I am a writer-travel stuff. Thus I capitalize my natural worthlessness, which often finds its expression and its excuse in wanderlust. It has afforded me more than a competence; so that I am now able to undertake expeditions requiring more financing than a steamer ticket and a pair of stout boots.
"Because of this relative affluence you found me alone and on the point of death in an untracked wilderness; but though you found me deserted and destitute without even a crust of bread, I have here in my head material for such a travel book as has never been written by modern man. I have seen things of which civilization does not dream and will not believe; and I have seen, too, the largest diamond in the world. I have held it in my hands. I even had the temerity to believe that I could bring it away with me.
"I have seen the most beautiful woman in the world-and the cruelest; and I even had the temerity to believe that I could bring her away with me, too; for I loved her. I still love her, though I curse her in my sleep, so nearly one are love and hate, the two most powerful and devastating emotions that control man, nations, life-so nearly one that they are separated only by a glance, a gesture, a syllable. I hate her with my mind; I love her with my body and my soul.
"Bear with me if I anticipate. For me she is the beginning and the end-the beginning and the end of everything; but I'll try to be more coherent and more chronological.
"To begin with: have you ever heard of the mysterious disappearance of Lord and Lady Mountford?"
Tarzan nodded. "Who has not?"
"And the persistent rumors of their survival even now, twenty years after they dropped from the sight and knowledge of civilized man?
"Well, their story held for me such a glamour of romance and mystery that for years I toyed with the idea of organizing an expedition that would track down every rumor until it had been proved false or true. I would find Lord and Lady Mountford or I would learn their fate.
"I had a very good friend, a young man of considerable inherited means, who had backed some of my earlier adventures-Robert van Eyk, of the old New York van Eyks. But of course that means nothing to you."
Tarzan did not comment. He merely listened-no shadow of interest or emotion crossed his face. He was not an easy man in whom to confide, but Stanley Wood was so full of pent emotion that he would have welcomed the insensate ears of a stone Buddah had there been no other ear to listen.
"Well, I gabbled so much about my plans to Bob van Eyk that he got all hepped up himself; and insisted on going along and sharing the expenses; which meant, of course, that we could equip much more elaborately than I had planned to and therefore more certainly ensure the success of our undertaking.
"We spent a whole year in research, both in England and Africa, with the result that we were pretty thoroughly convinced that Lord and Lady Mountford had disappeared from a point on the Neubari River somewhere northwest of Lake Rudolph . Everything seemed to point to that, although practically everything was based on rumor.
"We got together a peach of a safari and picked up a couple of white hunters who were pretty well familiar with everything African, although they had never been to this particular part of the country.
"Everything went well until we got a little way up the Neubari. The country was sparsely inhabited, and the farther we pushed in the fewer natives we saw. These were wild and fearful. We couldn't get a thing out of them about what lay ahead, but they talked to our boys. They put the fear o' God into 'em.
"Pretty soon we commenced to have desertions. We tried to get a line on the trouble from those who remained, but they wouldn't tell us a thing. They just froze up-scared stiff-didn't even admit that they were scared at first; but they kept on deserting.
"It got mighty serious. There we were in a country we didn't know the first thing about-a potentially hostile country-with a lot of equipment and provisions and scarcely enough men to carry on with.
"Finally one of the headmen told me what they were scared of. The natives they had talked with had told them that there was a tribe farther up the Neubari that killed or enslaved every black that came into their territory, a tribe with some mysterious kind of magic that held you-wouldn't let you escape, or, if you did escape, the magic followed you and killed you before you got back to your own country-maybe many marches away. They said you couldn't kill these people because they were not human-they were demons that had taken the form of women.
"Well, when I told Spike and Troll, the white hunters, what the trouble was, they pooh-poohed the whole business, of course. Said it was just an excuse to make us turn back because our carriers didn't like the idea of being so far from their own country and were getting homesick.
"So they got tough with the boys. Whaled hell out of 'em, and drove 'em on like slaves. As Spike said, 'Put the fear o' God into 'em', and the next night all the rest of 'em deserted-every last mother's son of 'em.
"When we woke up in the morning there were the four of us, Bob van Eyk, Spike, Troll, and myself, four white men all alone with loads for fifty porters; our personal boys, our gun bearers, our askaris all gone.
"Spike and Troll back-tracked to try to pick up some of the boys to take us out, for we knew we were licked; but they never found a one of them, though they were gone for two days.
"Bob and I were just about to pull out on our own when they got back; for, believe me, if we'd had plenty of it before they left we'd had a double dose while they were away.
"I can't tell you what it was, for we never saw anyone. Maybe we were just plain scared, but I don't think that could have been it. Van Eyk has plenty of nerve, and I have been in lots of tough places-lost and alone among the head-hunters of Equador, captured in the interior of New Guinea by cannibals, stood up in front of a firing squad during a Central American revolution-the kind of things, you know, that a travel writer gets mixed up in if he's really looking for thrills to write about and hasn't very good sense.
"No, this was different. It was just a feeling-a haunting sense of being watched by invisible eyes, day and night. And there were noises, too. I can't describe them-they weren't human noises, nor animal either. They were just noises that made your flesh creep and your scalp tingle.
"We had a council of war the night Spike and Troli got back. At first they laughed at us, but pretty soon they commenced to feel and hear things. After that they agreed with us that the best thing to do would be to beat it back.
"We decided to carry nothing but a revolver and rifle apiece, ammunition, and food, abandoning everything else. We were going to start early the following morning.
"When morning came we ate our breakfasts in silence, shouldered our packs, and without a word started out up the Neubari. We didn't even look at one another. I don't know about the rest of them, but I was ashamed to.
"There we were, doing just the opposite of the thing we had decided on-going deeper and deeper into trouble-and not knowing why we were doing it. I tried to exercise my will and force my feet in the opposite direction, but it was no go. A power far greater than my own will directed me. It was terrifying.
"We hadn't gone more than five miles before we came across a man lying in the trail-a white man. His hair and beard were white, but he didn't look so very old-well under fifty, I should have said. He seemed pretty well done in, notwithstanding the fact that he appeared in good physical condition-no indication of starvation; and he couldn't very well have been suffering from thirst, for the Neubari river was less than fifty yards from where he lay.