as manifested in the display of Nature's most terrific forces, is
born all that is finest and best in the human heart and mind."

And so Tarzan always came back to Nature in the spirit of a lover
keeping a long deferred tryst after a period behind prison walls.
His Waziri, at marrow, were more civilized than he. They cooked
their meat before they ate it and they shunned many articles of food
as unclean that Tarzan had eaten with gusto all his life and so
insidious is the virus of hypocrisy that even the stalwart ape-man
hesitated to give rein to his natural longings before them. He
ate burnt flesh when he would have preferred it raw and unspoiled,
and he brought down game with arrow or spear when he would far
rather have leaped upon it from ambush and sunk his strong teeth in
its jugular; but at last the call of the milk of the savage mother
that had suckled him in infancy rose to an insistent demand--he
craved the hot blood of a fresh kill and his muscles yearned to pit
themselves against the savage jungle in the battle for existence
that had been his sole birthright for the first twenty years of
his life.





3

The Call of the Jungle