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were, of course, compelled to carry all the camp equipage and loot and thus

heavily burdened, half starved and without water, they soon commenced to die

like flies.

"We had not been in the desert land long before the Arabs were forced to kill their

horses for food, and when we reached the first gorge, across which it would have

been impossible to transport the animals, the balance of them were slaughtered

and the meat loaded upon the poor staggering blacks who still survived.

Thus we continued for two more days and now all but a handful of blacks were

dead, and the Arabs themselves had commenced to succumb to hunger and

thirst and the intense heat of the desert. As far as the eye could reach back

toward the land of plenty from whence we had come, our route was marked by

circling vultures in the sky and by the bodies of the dead who lay down in the

trackless waste for the last time. The ivory had been abandoned tusk by tusk as

the blacks gave out, and along the trail of death was strewn the camp equipage

and the horse trappings of a hundred men.

"For some reason the Arab chief favored me to the last, possibly with the idea that

of all his other treasures I could be most easily transported, for I was young and

strong and after the horses were killed I had walked and kept up with the best of

the men. We English, you know, are great walkers, while these Arabians had

never walked since they were old enough to ride a horse.

"I cannot tell you how much longer we kept on but at last, with our strength

almost gone, a handful of us reached the bottom of a deep gorge. To scale the

opposite side was out of the question and so we kept on down along the sands of

what must have been the bed of an ancient river, until finally we came to a point

where we looked out upon what appeared to be a beautiful valley in which we felt

assured that we would find game in plenty.

"By then there were only two of us left--the chief and myself. I do not need to tell

you what the valley was, for you found it in much the same way as I did. So

quickly were we captured that it seemed they must have been waiting for us, and

I learned later that such was the case, just as they were waiting for you.

"As you came through the forest you must have seen the monkeys and parrots

and since you have entered the palace, how constantly these animals, and the

lions, are used in the decorations. At home we were all familiar with talking

parrots who repeated the things that they were taught to say, but these parrots

are different in that they all talk in the same language that the people of the city

use, and they say that the monkeys talk to the parrots and the parrots fly to the

city and tell the people what the monkeys say. And, although it is hard to believe,

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Tarzan the Untamed