to the safety of
a higher limb, looked down with grinning face into the gleaming yellow
eyes of the other wild beast that glared up at him from beneath, and
with taunting insults flaunted the tender carcass of his kill in the
face of him whom he had cheated of it.

With his crude stone knife he cut a juicy steak from the hindquarters,
and while the great lion paced, growling, back and forth below him,
Lord Greystoke filled his savage belly, nor ever in the choicest of his
exclusive London clubs had a meal tasted more palatable.

The warm blood of his kill smeared his hands and face and filled his
nostrils with the scent that the savage carnivora love best.

And when he had finished he left the balance of the carcass in a high
fork of the tree where he had dined, and with Numa trailing below him,
still keen for revenge, he made his way back to his tree-top shelter,
where he slept until the sun was high the following morning.

Chapter 4

Sheeta

The next few days were occupied by Tarzan in completing his weapons and
exploring the jungle. He strung his bow with tendons from the buck
upon which he had dined his first evening upon the new shore, and
though he would have preferred the gut of Sheeta for the purpose, he
was content to wait until opportunity permitted him to kill one of the
great cats.

He also braided a long grass rope--such a rope as he had used so many
years before to tantalize the ill-natured Tublat, and which later had
developed into a wondrous effective weapon in the practised hands of
the little ape-boy.

A sheath and handle for his hunting-knife he fashioned, and a quiver
for arrows, and from the hide of Bara a belt and loin-cloth. Then he
set out to learn something of the strange land in which he found
himself. That it was not his old familiar west coast of the African
continent he knew from the fact that it faced east--the rising sun came
up out of the sea before the threshold of the jungle.

But that it was not the east coast of Africa he was equally positive,
for he felt satisfied that the Kincaid had not passed through the
Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and the Red Sea, nor had she had time to
round the Cape of Good Hope. So he was quite at a loss to know where
he might be.

Sometimes he wondered if the ship had crossed the broad Atlantic to
deposit him upon some wild South American shore; but the presence of
Numa, the lion, decided him that such could not be the case.

As