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It was indeed quite preposterous, yet he saw it all with his own eyes it was nothing less than Histah, the snake, wreathing his sinuous and slimy way up the bole of the tree below him Histah, with the head of the old man Tarzan had shoved into the cooking pot the head and the round, tight, black, distended stomach.
She hurled taunts at them for their cowardice, and called them vile names, such as Histah, the snake, and Dango, the hyena. She threatened to call Mumga to chastise them with a stick Mumga, who was so old that she could no longer climb and so toothless that she was forced to confine her diet almost exclusively to bananas and grub-worms. The apes who were watching heard and laughed.
Instantly a brown hand leaped forth and seized the mottled neck, and another drove the heavy hunting knife to the hilt into the little brain. Convulsively Histah shuddered and relaxed, tensed and relaxed again, whipping and striking with his great body; but no longer sentient or sensible. Histah was dead, but in his death throes he might easily dispatch a dozen apes or men.
"Dango, eater of carrion," he called them, and he compared them most unfavorably with Histah, the snake, the most loathed and repulsive creature of the jungle. Finally he threw handfuls of earth at them and bits of broken twigs, and then the lions growled and bared their fangs, but none of them advanced. "Cowards," Tarzan taunted them. "Numa with a heart of Bara, the deer."
Yet Tarzan did not hesitate more than had Teeka, but leaped upon Histah with all the speed and impetuosity that he would have shown had he been springing upon Bara, the deer, to make a kill for food.
He looked all around him with his keen, jungle-trained eyes, but he saw naught of the old man with the body of Histah, the snake, but on his naked thigh the ape-man saw a caterpillar, dropped from a branch above him. With a grimace he flicked it off into the darkness beneath.
But Tarzan, swifter than his heavy fellows, distanced them all. It was he who was first upon the scene. What he saw sent a cold chill through his giant frame, for the enemy was the most hated and loathed of all the jungle creatures. Twined in a great tree was Histah, the snake huge, ponderous, slimy and in the folds of its deadly embrace was Teeka's little balu, Gazan.
Tarzan had drawn his knife and this he now plunged rapidly into the body of the enemy; but the encircling folds promised to sap his life before he had inflicted a death wound upon the snake. Yet on he fought, nor once did he seek to escape the horrid death that confronted him his sole aim was to slay Histah and thus free Teeka and her balu.
At least he sometimes thought so, but always at the thought there rose within him a strange revulsion of feeling, which he could not interpret or understand he simply knew that he hated the Gomangani, and that he would rather be Histah, the snake, than one of these.
Now it was little Manu, the monkey, who chattered and scolded at the mighty Tarmangani and in the next breath warned him that Histah, the snake, lay coiled in the long grass just ahead. Of Manu Tarzan inquired concerning the great apes the Mangani and was told that few inhabited this part of the jungle, and that even these were hunting farther to the north this season of the year.
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