Tarzan the Untamed · Chapter
Came Tarzan explained
Tarzan infiltrates a strange city, evades a lion, and fights a guardsman on a rooftop.
What happens
Tarzan infiltrates a strange city, evades a lion, and fights a guardsman on a rooftop. Meanwhile, Lieutenant Thompson reports finding Smith-Oldwick's plane and a mysterious city to Colonel Capell and General Smuts, who plan a rescue mission. Tarzan tracks the scent of Bertha Kircher and Smith-Oldwick through the city streets, observing bizarre behavior among the inhabitants.
Themes in this chapter
Survival and Adaptation
Tarzan uses his jungle instincts to escape a lion, fight a guardsman, and track scents in an unfamiliar urban environment.
Madness and Rationality
The city's inhabitants exhibit bizarre behaviors: a naked man screaming, a woman walking on all fours, and a victor leaping to his death after a rooftop fight.
Characters to notice
- Tarzan
Leaps for vines to escape a lion, fights and kills a guardsman on a rooftop, then tracks the scent spoor of Bertha Kircher and Smith-Oldwick through the city.
- Lieutenant Harold Percy Smith-Oldwick
His plane is found in a narrow gorge; his scent is detected by Tarzan in the city streets.
- Fräulein Bertha Kircher
Her scent spoor is picked up by Tarzan as he tracks through the city.
- Lieutenant Thompson
Reports finding Smith-Oldwick's plane and a mysterious city to Colonel Capell and General Smuts.
- Colonel Capell
Commands the Second Rhodesians; receives Thompson's report and coordinates the rescue plan with General Smuts.
- General Jan Smuts
Visits headquarters, discusses the search for Smith-Oldwick, and orders a small force to establish a base and advance toward the city.
Key passages
“As Tarzan leaped for the vines he realized that the lion was close upon him and that his life depended upon the strength of the creepers clinging to the city walls; but to his intense relief he found the stems as large around as a man's arm, and the tendrils which had fastened themselves to the wall so firmly fixed, that his weight upon the stem appeared to have no appreciable effect upon them.”
Tarzan jumps for the vines, hoping they will hold his weight as the lion closes in, and is relieved to find them thick and firmly attached.
Tarzan's escape from Numa using the city's vines.
“The elder officer looked at the younger compassionately. 'You're all wrought up, Thompson,' he said. 'Go and take a good sleep. You have been on this job now for a long while and it must have gotten on your nerves.'”
Colonel Capell dismisses Thompson's report of a city as a product of exhaustion.
Skepticism about the discovered city.