PROJECT ASHABI
African Stories. Limitless Worlds.
PROJECT ASHABI
African Stories. Limitless Worlds.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Orphaned on the western coast of Africa, young John Clayton is raised by the great apes as Tarzan and defends his jungle homeland.
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CHAPTER I. Out to Sea CHAPTER II. The Savage Home CHAPTER III. Life and Death CHAPTER IV. The Apes CHAPTER V. The White Ape CHAPTER VI. Jungle Battles CHAPTER VII. The Light of Knowledge CHAPTER VIII. The Tree-top Hunter CHAPTER IX. Man and Man CHAPTER X. The Fear-Phantom CHAPTER XI. “King of the Apes” CHAPTER XII. Man’s Reason CHAPTER XIII. His Own Kind CHAPTER XIV. At the Mercy of the Jungle CHAPTER XV. The Forest God CHAPTER XVI. “Most Remarkable” CHAPTER XVII. Burials CHAPTER XVIII. The Jungle Toll CHAPTER XIX. The Call of the Primitive CHAPTER XX. Heredity CHAPTER XXI. The Village of Torture CHAPTER XXII. The Search Party CHAPTER XXIII. Brother Men CHAPTER XXIV. Lost Treasure CHAPTER XXV. The Outpost of the World CHAPTER XXVI. The Height of Civilization CHAPTER XXVII. The Giant Again CHAPTER XXVIII. Conclusion
I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale.
When my convivial host discovered that he had told me so much, and that I was prone to doubtfulness, his foolish pride assumed the task the old vintage had commenced, and so he unearthed written evidence in the form of musty manuscript, and dry official records of the British Colonial Office to support many of the salient features of his remarkable narrative.
I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it _may_ be true.
The yellow, mildewed pages of the diary of a man long dead, and the records of the Colonial Office dovetail perfectly with the narrative of my convivial host, and so I give you the story as I painstakingly pieced it out from these several various agencies.
If you do not find it credible you will at least be as one with me in acknowledging that it is unique, remarkable, and interesting.
From the records of the Colonial Office and from the dead man’s diary we learn that a certain young English nobleman, whom we shall call John Clayton, Lord Greystoke, was commissioned to make a peculiarly delicate investigation of conditions in a British West Coast African Colony from whose simple native inhabitants another European power was known to be recruiting soldiers for its native army, which it used solely for the forcible collection of rubber and ivory from the savage tribes along the Congo and the Aruwimi. The natives of the British Colony complained that many of their young men were enticed away through the medium of fair and glowing promises, but that few if any ever returned to their families.
The Englishmen in Africa went even further, saying that these poor blacks were held in virtual slavery, since after their terms of enlistment expired their ignorance was imposed upon by their white officers, and they were told that they had yet several years to serve.
Arthur Conan Doyle
