Book: Return to the jungle

Who wants to return to the stuffy, evil cities of a civilized man, when the vast expanses of the great jungle promise peace and freedom?

He lay in this way for a while, watching the lights of the steamer gradually diminish and disappear, and it did not even occur to him to cry for help. He never turned to anyone for help, and it’s not surprising that he didn’t think about it now. He always counted only on his own courage and resourcefulness, and since the time of Kala, he had no one who could answer his call. It was too late when he caught himself.

Animals are nobler than people, they do not condescend to cowardly intrigues.

He knew that he was about to die, but he did not feel fear. For an inhabitant of a violent jungle, death is common. The law of nature tells them to stubbornly hold on to life, but it does not teach them to fear death.

“Civilized skills, God forbid,” grumbled Tarzan. - The rules of the jungle do not allow pointless cruelty. There we kill for food, out of self-defense, or fighting for our girlfriends and protecting the young. Always, as you see, in full agreement with our highest natural law. And here! Fi! Your cultured person is more cruel than animals. He kills as a joke, and worse, he uses a sense of blogging, a sense of brotherhood, to lure his victim.

The conditions in which I grew up and was brought up instilled in me the consciousness that in a person, as in an animal, only that which develops his spiritual and physical prowess is valuable. And I just as willingly acknowledge Kala as my mother, as I do the poor, unhappy little Englishwoman who died a year after she gave birth to me. Cala, wild and cruel, was always kind to me in her own way. I must have been feeding on her hairy chest since the day my mother died. She fought for me with the wild inhabitants of the forest and with members of her own tribe with all the fury of genuine motherly love. And I, for my part, I loved her too, Paul. And he himself did not understand how much he loved until the merciless spear and poisoned arrows of the black Kulonga took her away from me. I was still a child then, and I threw myself on a lifeless corpse and sobbed in despair, as a child sobs over its own mother. To you, my friend, she would seem a disgusting, ugly creature, but I found her beautiful - this is how love transforms what you love.

... and she gave Tarzan such a lovely smile that he felt: a man could decide on a much greater feat just to deserve such a smile.

God! he said to himself. - They are all the same. They cheat, kill, lie, deceive, and all this because of what the animals of the jungle would refuse: because of the money that can give them the refined pleasures of the weak. Wretched habits make them slaves to their unhappy fate, and they are firmly convinced that they are the kings of creation, enjoying the only precious thing in life.

Tarzan returned to his chair on the deck and plunged into reflections and recollections of those already numerous examples of human cruelty, human selfishness, anger, which he had to witness from the day when four years ago, in the jungle, his gaze fell for the first time on another a human being - on the black Kulonga, whose spear put an end to the life of Kala, a huge female monkey, and thereby deprived young Tarzan of the only mother he knew.