him entirely or else hated him so vindictively that but for his
wondrous agility and speed and the fierce protection of the huge Kala
he would have been dispatched at an early age.

Tublat was his most consistent enemy, but it was through Tublat that,
when he was about thirteen, the persecution of his enemies suddenly
ceased and he was left severely alone, except on the occasions when one
of them ran amuck in the throes of one of those strange, wild fits of
insane rage which attacks the males of many of the fiercer animals of
the jungle. Then none was safe.

On the day that Tarzan established his right to respect, the tribe was
gathered about a small natural amphitheater which the jungle had left
free from its entangling vines and creepers in a hollow among some low
hills.

The open space was almost circular in shape. Upon every hand rose the
mighty giants of the untouched forest, with the matted undergrowth
banked so closely between the huge trunks that the only opening into
the little, level arena was through the upper branches of the trees.

Here, safe from interruption, the tribe often gathered. In the center
of the amphitheater was one of those strange earthen drums which the
anthropoids build for the queer rites the sounds of which men have
heard in the fastnesses of the jungle, but which none has ever
witnessed.

Many travelers have seen the drums of the great apes, and some have
heard the sounds of their beating and the noise of the wild, weird
revelry of these first lords of the jungle, but Tarzan, Lord Greystoke,
is, doubtless, the only human being who ever joined in the fierce, mad,
intoxicating revel of the Dum-Dum.

From this primitive function has arisen, unquestionably, all the forms
and ceremonials of modern church and state, for through all the
countless ages, back beyond the uttermost ramparts of a dawning
humanity our fierce, hairy forebears danced out the rites of the
Dum-Dum to the sound of their earthen drums, beneath the bright light
of a tropical moon in the depth of a mighty jungle which stands
unchanged today as it stood on that long forgotten night in the dim,
unthinkable vistas of the long dead past when our first shaggy ancestor
swung from a swaying bough and dropped lightly upon the soft turf of
the first meeting place.

On the day that Tarzan won his emancipation from the persecution that
had followed him remorselessly for twelve of his thirteen years of
life, the tribe, now a