Ki-Gor: The Complete Series Volume 1 by John Peter Drummond

Author:John Peter Drummond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Action and Adventure
Publisher: Altus Press

Ki-Gor—and the Forbidden Mountain

Chapter I

“WELL! That seems to be that!” Helene shook her curly red locks in exasperation and glared at the retreating backs of their half dozen skinny-legged Congo blacks.

“What’ll we do, Ki-Gor?” The American girl turned to her companion. “Oh, it makes me sick! When I think of all that beautiful equipment we started out with, and how it’s gradually dribbled away, until we’re just down to the bare necessities”—she waved a brown hand at the several packing-cases that strewed the ground around her—“and now what happens! The last of the porters refuse to go any further! We can’t carry all these boxes, Ki-Gor. What are we going to do?”

The giant white man sat down on one of the packing-cases, a ghost of a smile lurking in his lean, bronzed face.

“There’s nothing to do, Helene,” he said simply, “but leave the boxes here and go on by ourselves without them. We can pick a few things out and take them along but not very many.”

Ki-Gor looked up the path where the last of the deserting porters was disappearing around a bend. Unlike Helene, he did not blame the porters for running away. Right from the beginning, this ulendo, this journey to an undisclosed destination, had been dogged by ill fortune. Helene had insisted that she was going to take a few properties of civilization in with them, and to Ki-Gor’s consternation, had assembled a vast quantity of stores, furnishings, weapons, clothes—even bottled water—a load which had required a safari of sixty porters to carry. In vain had Ki-Gor protested against the idea and pointed out that he and Helene had been safe and comfortable before, when they had lived in the jungle equipped with only a knife and an assegai. But, although the pampered daughter of civilization deeply loved the primitive jungle man, she insisted on having her own way in this matter.

“You say,” she had said, “we are going to make a long trek to a place which you think will make us an ideal home. Why can’t we take a few things with us to make that home even more ideal?”

In the end, Ki-Gor had had to give in and organize the safari, although he would have much preferred to have had no carriers at all-garrulous Bantu who would trot home afterwards, broadcasting the location of the snug retreat he had selected for the “ideal home.” Consequently, he had not been too disturbed when the safari had run into bad omens—little happenings which had frightened the porters into deserting in twos and threes. Ki-Gor distrusted all Bantu people in general, and they knew it, and they feared him in return.

Until finally, the last six porters had deserted on the edge of the vast, miasmic swamp which stretched before them now.

“Ju-ju, Bwana,” they had muttered, eyes rolling, and dumped their loads and trotted off in the other direction.

That happened about noon-time. Two hours later, Ki-Gor and Helene had pierced deep into the eternal twilight of the swamp along a narrow spur of high ground.

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