The Curious Quests of Brigadier Ffellowes (35 page)

             
The Brigadier sipped from his glass and fell silent, looking off over the library man
tl
e, 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 un
cl
ipped 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.

             
"Well, Lucas held up one hand to me in silence. Then he pointed to the forward path and tapped his own chest and shaded his brows with the other hand. Finally he pointed to me and then to the ground behind a giant tree. The whole message took one second. He would scout and I would remain and wait
.
I simply nodded and got behind the tree. I'm fairish in the woods but was not a patch on Lucas and we both recognized the fact
.

             
"It seemed a long time to me, once he had gone, moving off in the direction we'd been going, not on the path but near it and as silently as any native hunter I've ever seen. I've seen a goodish few in many parts of the world, so that's no mean compliment!

             
"It wasn't really much actual time at all, no more than a few moments, he suddenly
reappeared from behind the next tree to mine, coming back as noiselessly as he had left 'Follow now, Captain,' he murmured, his mouth next to my ear. 'Is very old city, close in front; very old, broken-up place, the kind place science men come from all over to look at an' study.'

             
" '
Do'you
mean an ancient Mayan ruin?' I whispered back. 'No!' came the quick reply. 'I got Mayan blood with French an'
Spaniol
too. I know the Mayan stuff an' I got plenty Mayan
frens
' too, and I can speak Mayan a bit
.
I know their old places, like
Xunantunich
, which is not too far
Nort
' of where we are an' I been to lots more up in Quintana
Roo
. This place, she's, well, different
—'
He paused a second,
obviously trying to find some descriptive phrase in his slurred English. He soon gave up and shrugged. 'I tell you this,
Sar
. This place no more like any Mayan place than that stink of that hairy man we kill, the stink we smell now, like sputa's perfume!'

             
"I couldn't help smiling and he gave one of his rare half-smiles back. The analogy was crude but effective. If the place he was describing was no more Mayan than that foul odor we'd learnt to know was like a whore's perfume, it must be very different indeed!

             
"Well, there was no time for being humorous. I, in turn, tapped his shoulder and pointed to the trail's right, then tapped my chest and pointed to its left 'Go very slow and stay even with me,' I breathed. He understood at once that I was telling him I couldn't match his pace or his stealth in his own jungles and nodded. And so we set off, one on either side of the path where there was little scrub due to the dense foliage overhead and the shade it gave. The chief obstacles were the giant tree roots, some types of which spread out in huge flanges, tall as a man where they joined the tree."

             
The Brigadier took a long drag on one of his thin cigars. Around us the big room was quiet, the few lamps illuminating only their own corners. I think the thick, old carpets added to the hush by absorbing sound. The roar of New York traffic was a monotonous and unheard or unnoticed hum, and only an occasional siren or police car whoop-whoop even drew one's attention to it
.
We, his audience, were like children told to be quiet or we'd get no story. We moved only when we had to, breathing as quietly as we could.