DURING the afternoon of the day that Tarzan discovered the camp of the conspirators¹, a watcher upon the crumbling² outer wall of the ruined city of Opar descried³ a party of men moving downward into the valley from the summit of the encircling cliff. Tarzan, Jane Clayton, and their black Waziri were the only strangers that the denizens⁴ of Opar had ever seen within their valley during the lifetime of the oldest among them, and only in half-forgotten legends of a by-gone past was there any suggestion that strangers other than these had ever visited Opar. Yet from time immemorial a guard had always remained upon the summit of the outer wall. Now a single knurled and crippled man-like creature was all that recalled the numerous, lithe⁵ warriors⁶ of lost Atlantis. For down through the long ages the race had deteriorated⁷ and finally, through occasional mating with the great apes, the men had become the beast-like things of modern Opar. Strange and inexplicable⁹ had been the providence¹⁰ of nature that had confined this deterioration¹¹ almost solely¹² to the males, leaving the females straight, well-formed, often of comely¹³ and even beautiful features, a condition that might be largely attributable to the fact that female infants possessing ape-like characteristics were immediately destroyed, while, on the other hand, boy babies who

分享到：