“After all,” he said to himself, “what is Bomba but a thing of the jungle? They would be ashamed to show him to their white friends. And yet that thing of the jungle saved their lives. Bomba’s knife was good when they needed it. Bomba’s arrows were good. But now they have forgotten him as the jungle forgets the mists after the sun has risen.”
But into these gloomy ponderings shot a gleam of hope. Japazy still was left! He might tell him of his parents, who they were and where they lived. If he did, Bomba would search out those parents, even if they were at the other end of the world. How glad he would be to see them! And how glad they would be to see him!
But would they be glad? Or would they, too, be ashamed of Bomba, the boy of the jungle, the boy of the puma skin, the boy who tore his food with his fingers when he ate, the boy who had shyly watched Gillis and Dorn at their meals and wished that he could eat as they did.
But no! That lovely woman who had smiled down at him from the picture in the hut of Sobrinini, if she were indeed his mother, would not be ashamed of Bomba. She would gather him to her heart. She would kiss him, as the woman with the golden hair had kissed him when he had saved her from the headhunters of Nascanora.
For some time past, as he journeyed on engrossed in thought, Bomba had been conscious of a rumbling in the distance. It was so far away that he had paid little attention to it. Now it had grown louder, and it forced itself upon his attention.
Was it thunder? The sky was azure and the sun was shining with dazzling brilliance. The sound could not be thunder.
Then the truth broke upon Bomba. It was the roar of the Giant Cataract!
That mighty body of water was miles and miles away, but the sound carried far in the clear air.
Bomba was perhaps twenty miles to the left of it. Now he hastened to make the distance still greater. For at the Giant Cataract was the village of Nascanora, he whose nose Bomba had crushed, he who was reserving a special place on the top of his wigwam for the head of the jungle boy who had shamed him before his followers and defied him.
Bomba described a wide semicircle that would bring him to the river he sought many miles above the Giant Cataract. He had little fear of meeting any headhunters in the district toward which he was heading, for they were probably imbued with same superstitious fear of Japazy and Jaguar Island that had possessed Ashati and Neram, and would give the region a wide berth. Still, it was well to take no chances, and he drove from his mind for the moment all thoughts of his parentage and devoted himself strictly to the matter in hand.