The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes Read online

  "As she swam, her deep husky voice sounded for the first time in a sort of gentle song. I couldn't get a word but they were words nevertheless. It was kind of a chant and I could even catch sounds that seemed to rhyme, though not in any tongue that sounded even vaguely familiar and I've heard quite a few.

  "Closer and closer she came and now she was on the edge of a tall patch of some reed which threw a shadow over the water below them. I was holding my breath for I'd seen one of those reeds move just a second earlier.

  "Then, Lucas struck! He'd got in front of the reeds and slid under water until he was behind that great, red-gold shape and then he rose like a dark copper eel, suddenly and smoothly at her back. His long, strong arms locked about her upper torso, sliding under her arms and up behind her neck, a lovely neck but large, suiting the rest of her more-than-normal female proportions. They were so close now that as we waited breathless, her young, pointed breasts thrust at us and I saw the pink of the nipples rising out of that sleek, golden pelt which garbed her body. In a split second Lucas had the woman in the hold Americans call 'Full Nelson,' his hands locked at the back of her neck, holding her pinned fast to his own body, unable to even move.

  As her wide and full-lipped mouth opened, I saw the white teeth, and they looked sharp, the canines almost those of a carnivore. Her great eyes, as strange as a cat's but smokier looking, were wide in shock and surprise. I knew a yell was coming and I determined to try and prevent it. I rose from the cover of leaves and leapt forward into the water. It was not deep and the two in front of me were waist deep only. At the sight of me, her huge, lovely eyes widened even further and almost rolled upward in shock. I had one hand raised, palm out and up, and I hissed 'Quiet' at the frozen face before me.

  "Lucas's voice came from behind her shoulders. 'Don' worry, Sah, I got her good! She don't move unless I let go.' The woman's, or rather girl's for that was what she was, despite her size, a great girl mouth closed in despair. I had my finger at my own closed lips now and it took no knowledge of English to know that I wanted silence from her. In another instant I had one of her upper arms in one of mine and Lucas and I began to push and pull her into the shallows and up on our bank. George came down to help and we soon had her in the ferns where we had been hidden, concealed from sight by greenery from all but a careful search.

  "She stared wildly at first from George to myself and back. Lucas had never slackened his firm grip but had allowed her head to come erect so that it was not bent over, and since he was still crouched behind her, she could see nothing of him.

  "I decided to try my crude Spanish on her. I spoke no Indian tongues and the local Mayas all spoke a crude Spanish, when they felt like it, that is. 'Amigos,' I said, trying to keep my eyes fixed on hers. It wasn't easy. That great, female body, lean-hipped and long-legged and all covered with that extraordinary pelt, like a close-furred golden cat's but even shorter, the amazing hair, the oval face and the full lips, now slightly parted as she panted softly. But the fear and horror were gone from the eyes now and they were sharp eyes, studying us, though still surprised. And, when I'd said 'Friends' in Spanish, they flickered and she stopped twisting her neck and focussed on me alone. At this point, so odd is the human mind, I registered in my mind that below the massive golden belt, the lady wore a smooth leather loin cloth, which was tucked under and up again over her rounded rump. For some reason, this made me feel better, as if things were more proper this way!

  "That thought only took a split second. Then, my brain wiped all else away. For she was talking to me and I could at least partially make sense out of what she was saying. There, if you like, men, was a real thrill and one I had never expected.

  "She kept those extraordinary eyes glued on mine, not looking at all at either Lucas or George, though both were helping keep her pinned. Her voice, which I'd already heard when she was carolling to herself, was deep and throaty. She spoke slowly, as if trying to deal with both unfamiliar speech and concepts. It was an odd tangle, being largely crude Spanish but with many pauses. Mixed in were clicks and gutturals which I guessed were Mayan and Lucas told me I was right later on. Rarely, she'd be at a complete loss and then would come some word utterly alien even to Lucas. This, we soon learnt, was in her own tongue.

  "What I got was roughly this: 'Who are you? Are you from the Land of my people? Are you another of those who writes scrolls? Your eyes, they are of our ancient, lost color! Only once have I ever seen a man like you and those who advise, they killed him. I tried to stop them (it) but it was not good. The poor Pursee!'

  "Even with all the garbled language, that last word got to me. Pursee! That was the first name, even mispronounced, of our long-lost agent, the chap I've called Jones, the man who wrote the report that was so strangely delivered to the Hoopers' boat at night off the mangrove coast Percy, eh?

  "I spoke finally, when she fell silent at last and simply stared up at me. 'What do you know of Percy?' I said in my very crude Spanish. I had no Mayan and her own language was a total blank. 'Who killed Percy? He was my friend. I came to find him. Was it your people?'

  "Those great, smoky-brown eyes widened even more, and that gorgeous mouth opened again. 'He spoke like you do. He did not speak like those young girls the Plan has us take from down below. He spoke like that too, the other man who came and went away when I was little, the one who made our High Women so sick and angry, the one who wrote all the scrolls.'

  "Here she looked thoughtful as one does who tries to remember some forgotten name. She no longer seemed upset or even afraid of us. Then the eyes cleared. 'Labrador, that was his name, my aunt told me. Three names this strange man who escaped us had, Felipe Jose Labrador!'

  "So, someone else had come and seen this weird bunch at close range and even got away with it, which seemed more than our lost agent had done. No doubt some peon or mestizo, some wandering laborer, maybe even a bandit 'Philip Joseph Farmer indeed! As common as Smith in New York and probably an alias, as Pancho Villa had been. But what was that about this unknown's writing scrolls? I asked the lady as best I could, and made sure that Lucas was also listening to it, so that any Mayan that crept in might have a chance of being understood.

  "What came out was a real mélange of everything: Spanish, Mayan and her own gabble a real linguistic stew. I finally put my hand gently over her open mouth to shut her up and nodded to Lucas to tell me what, if anything, he'd got out of this. It was more certainly than I had, but puzzled us both.

  " 'She talk very fast, Sir, and there is much words I don' know at all. But she say this man she call Labrador, he get everyone all excited so they wan' kill him, but he was clever and get out anyway. He tell them the country they come from it sink in the ocean, it don' exist any longer. Then he tell them a man name of Ee Are Bee, he know all about it. And he say, this Labrador fellah, he say maybe there is other city and this other city over in Africa! Yes, a city from this country that sink in the ocean long ago, he say, and this other city it call "Opar." I don' understand what this woman talkin' about, except it mus' be very old.'

  "Now that word 'Opar' stirred some lost memory in my own mind. I took my hand away and our captive raced off into more of her excited speech. I listened to it for a minute and then put my palm back and again looked at Lucas. He seemed more confused than before, but he tried.

  " 'Now she say the people here worship the sun, jus' like them ol' Indios did, them Mayans befoh the priest come. And this place in Africa they do that too.' He paused a second, then scratched his head. 'This man Labrador, he mus' be big liar but they think he smart. He tell them the name of their country that sink in the ocean and they say that is right name, the old name, almost the same as the way they say thot name. An' the name of this country they say sink in the ocean is some funny one. They call the place "Azdante" or "Adantaz," something like that anyways. I think this Felipe Jose Labrador, whoever he was, was some big liar and a bigger storyteller than anyone. But he fool these funny folks good wit' all his talk about sunk countries
and cities in Africa call "Opars" or somethin'. Anyway, Captain, that's what I get out of her talk now and I think I get most of it' Lucas fell silent and three pair of eyes studied my face. I looked down at the giant, chocolate and milk orbs of our captive and made it four pairs studying.

  "Frankly, I was just a bit numb, you know. This weird trip, that peculiar message that started it all, the ape-man monster we'd killed and finally this extraordinary female revelation. Only one continent of civilized humans was ever supposed to have sunk in the sea, as any child knows. Atlantis! The greatest legend of all time, left to future ages by Plato, and no one has ever known whether that Greek genius was writing of actual history or simply inventing mythical Utopias for his own personal philosophy.

  "So there we stayed, for what seemed an hour but was only a minute really, four people full of varying degrees of puzzlement, while the tropic sun beat down and small insects bit us and buzzed off.

  "Finally, I woke myself out of my dreams and returned to reality or what passed for it in this place. I can tell you, it wasn't easy with all of what I'd just heard and what I'd guessed, all churning through my mind."

  The Brigadier sipped from his glass and fell silent, looking off over the library mantle, seeing far-off things we could only imagine. But at this point, my own memory stirred and I recalled something read as a boy in the 10th grade.

  "Excuse me, Sir, but wasn't one of those lost cities in Africa that Tarzan's author invented, wasn't that called Opar?" I shut up as soon as those glacial blue eyes met mine, but then I could see he was laughing and felt a bit easier. The Brigadier didn't like interruptions when he was telling one of his yarns and I was afraid I'd goofed badly, especially since I was often telling the others never to interrupt him.

  "You may have noticed that I was looking at Burroughs' stuff, along with a lot more light fiction when you came in, Parker," he said and now there was an open grin on his smooth face. He looked around, to take in the rest of the listeners.

  "I have a rather good memory, Gentlemen. Intell Training, you know, but some of it's natural, especially for what is now called 'trivia'. That name, the one Lucas had caught, 'Opar', supposedly a place in Africa, that rang an old bell in my mind. That was a so-called 'lost city' of the Ancients in a number of the Tarzan tales, by a writer whose initials were E.R.B.

  "Did this mean that old Burroughs knew a few secrets of the unexplored? No, not to me. To me, it meant this unknown chap Labrador, whoever he was the name means nothing but 'farmer' or 'agricultural laborer' in Spanish, you know, so it was probably an alias but whoever and whatever he was, he must have thought very quickly and stuck in that name from his memory to sway the rulers of this strange area into believing he knew all about 'em and that their alleged culture and ancestry was well known too.

  "Pretty clever, the fellow must have been, since according to our fair captive, he'd impressed the locals well enough to escape from them, which seemed not the normal event at all!

  "When I got this array of thoughts a tiny bit digested, I looked down at our scrumptious prisoner and thought quickly for a change.

  "I told Lucas to try and ask what the woman's name was first and also how she should be addressed, assuming there was some title or other, from 'Your Grace' to 'Madam'. Always best to be polite to women, I've found, and I've been in a few odd places. What we finally got was several long and difficult words in her own tongue, but which ended in 'Loosheer' or at least something like that I tried calling her 'Lucia' and she smiled and seemed to enjoy my pronunciation. She had lovely white teeth but the carnassials or canines were a bit longer than normal and frankly looked as if they might be lethal in biting.

  "It was time to do something. I checked my watch and it was close to Noon. We'd spent over an hour getting this muddled story sorted out and while there was still a lot missing, especially concerning our lost agent, I thought we'd sat around in dangerous country long enough, if not too long. A pack of those giant ape-men, like our visitor of the night before, might appear and we needed nothing less. But what to do next and especially what on Earth could we do with our oversized dazzler, our bepelted figurehead?

  "We all three must have been on at least similar thought tracks. It was young Hooper who cleared the air. 'Lookee heah, Sah. You an' Lucas tell this lady to stay wit' me an' stay quiet 'til you two come back.' He waved his drawn Webley. 'You tell her what this is an' that I kill her dead if she run away or scream out or make trouble. You two better bush men an' can get around faster in this bush than me. So you go take a looksee maybe while I stay an' keep guard here.'

  "Couldn't have been better put, really. The youngest of us was the coolest at this juncture. I thanked him and then Lucas and I, both speaking slowly and carefully, gave the lady orders. She wasn't pleased but she understood them. She said a couple of words, looking at our revolvers, and it was plain even to me that she knew something about firearms, whether her tribe had any or not. And something had to be done soon. The day was drawing on and we had to try and decide something about the future and do it quickly.

  "Between us, we finally got the message across and though she seemed a bit hurt, she finally settled down and curled up. We three synchronized watches and agreed to come back to this spot in two hours or less. We ought to be able to learn something in that amount of time.

  "With Lucas leading, we set off, following the upper stream flowing into the big pool, the path by which our captive had approached it. We kept low, using all the cover there was and along the brook there was a fairish bit. Ducking under big ferns, arums and shrubs that liked damp, we soon found a path, though a little-used one from the look of it. It made me wonder just how important locally our prisoner was. Was this her private trail?

  "Lucas led and I brought up the rear. In no time at all we came to the forest across the plain, following the weedy little gorge of the brook bed the whole way.

  "The sudden shade of the big tropical trees did not make us relax at all. Now we had to look up as well as on all sides. We all recalled our attacker of the previous night. When we finally got to looking about us and down as well, we found we were at what could only be a sort of junction. From a flat place between several towering boles, five or six paths and very well-beaten paths at that, led off like the ribs of a fan, all going somewhat forward. We looked at each other in silence. It was a silent place, with only a few insect hums and distant bird calls. Finally, Lucas crouched and studied the ground at close range.

  "I heard him sniff several times too before he spoke. 'I'm pretty suah she come this way,' he said, pointing at a left-of-center trail. 'That's my best guess anyway.' Then he looked at me, waiting for orders.

  "I nodded. 'Very well,' I said. 'Let's go as we did by the stream, one following the other. But we'll go slow and keep on the very edge of the path, on the left side as close to the trees as one can get' I checked my watch. We'd been away for one quarter of an hour so far. We unclipped our holster flaps and tucked them behind the revolver grips as well as shifting both rifles to the left hand. Then we moved out.

  "For about a half hour there was nothing. Deep green shadows shading to black in places and that winding path. There was no undergrowth, only the great trees, whose trunks and leaves cut off any direct light save for rare gaps where stray sunbeams wandered down through lianas and bromeliads from far above. Then, suddenly, we both halted in our tracks. I didn't need Lucas for we both saw a blaze of light ahead which could only mean a clearing.

  "Lucas fell back to my side and without a word we began to advance in line, slowly and also moving from tree shadows and root boles in an irregular, shifting manner. I noticed in passing that we were now under the reddish, oily boles of a grove of absolutely giant, mahogany trees, the sole decent cash export of this odd little colony. We were moving under the shadows of twenty thousand Hepplewhite or Chippendale chairs and tables.

  "As the light grew closer ahead, so did something else, which was an odor. The other man noticed it before I did but soon even I
got it hard and strong. It needed no breeze to bring us that smell and there was none in any case. We halted in silence again and looked at one another. No words were needed. Whatever we were approaching bore the reek of that monstrous humanoid we had buried only a few hours before!"

  Ffellowes stopped his story at this point and shifted a little in his chair. I saw an odd look come over his face, one almost of chagrin or even embarrassment, both rare to the Brigadier in my experience. Then the expression vanished and in his even tones he began to talk again.

  "I thought of something just now, Gentlemen, a small thing but I should have mentioned it earlier. That unholy stink we had learnt to dread so had not been even faintly apparent on that great, furry beaut' whom we'd taken prisoner." Pause. "If anything at all could be said about the lady's odor, it was very faintly that of a house cat, a pampered one, with a sort of wild, floral trace intermingled." Pause. "Not in the slightest bit repellent, you know. If anything, quite the reverse. Sorry I forgot to mention it earlier.