T’zan wandered toward the water because he was thirsty. His throat was dry, and the noises Tantor made reminded him that he had not seen his friends in a long time. But when the jungle Lord arrived at the waterhole, all he found was plowed-up ground fast- drying under a merciless sun.
T’zan looked around awhile, poking at steaming piles of elephant dung with his bare feet, then he noticed something strange lying in the reeds. Upon closer inspection he discovered the item that seemed out of place was in fact a human hand severed clean from its owner as though it had been struck by a single blow from an extremely powerful blade. And the strangest thing of all, the thumb and two fingers clutched a reed almost as if the hand was attempting to write the name of its separator in the mud.
T’zan bent forward to touch the hand, then finally raised the grisly trophy to his sensitive nostrils as he murmured, “The Moving Finger writes; and having writ, moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, nor all they Tears wash out a Word of it.”
Dark clouds hung over the land, and the heavy sky took on the mournful glow of twilight even though it was just past noon. A tiny sun shrunk into a pale, murky disk, high and far away, and the once familiar jungle became caged by harsh shadow lines that divided each tree from the next as though iron bars had been dropped all along the jungle trail.
T’zan shook his giant frame like a lion, and then he turned away and made his painful way through the circular paths toward his home. All along the journey T’zan seemed to feel the presence of invisible men lurking behind the twisted, blackened boles of the forest. And no matter how quickly he turned his head, the flitting wraiths were always able to slink out of his sight before he could focus on their fleeting movements.
Just as T’zan reached the spacious veranda of his jungle dwelling he heard a strange flapping in the air behind him, and he wheeled around as quick as Sheeta, the leopard, only to face, once again, the blankness of dark, green leaves; yet he thought he heard the scuttling away of some tiny thing that scratched through the underbrush like a lizard.
“Who’s there?” the man spoke into the fading light.
There was no answer.
“Curiouser and curiouser,” T’zan half whispered to himself, as he took tentative steps toward the tall grass that pulled itself back into place blade by blade.
“Something is happening here,” thought T’zan, And then he spied a piece of paper on the ground.
“Ah-ha!” cried the crafty warrior as he sprang forward and clutched the fluttering clue. “Now we shall see what is going on!”
As pieces of paper go, it was not much to speak of, for it was but the size of a small magazine, and yet it was much more than this as T’zan found out as he unfolded it, layer upon layer, until it extended nearly three feet stretched between his outspread arms. And yet there was not a single letter printed upon any of the tiny squares.
“This cannot be!” cried T’zan as he twisted the ribbed strip around and around again. He held it up to the dim light of the pale sun that now seemed to be but a pin point in the sky; yet nothing was revealed.
“Bother!” said he of the bronze complexion, and he sat on the ground like a tired bear.
All around him the invisible men snickered and danced in glee.
Finally the day ended. Tiny panels folded in upon one another like the layers of a screen. Grey elephants lay flat upon pale green grass next to the flattened brown of the waterhole. The comic book was rolled up like the dim sun, and the first stars began to twinkle on the horizon as the boy shoved it into his back pocket and began his steps toward the supper table, Mother, and home.