CONNEXIONS
She remained removed from the savage law of the jungle, both distant and distinct from the natural order of the world around her. Dressed in crinoline and lace, with an English birth and education and a childhood and family in Baltimore, she was genteel even beneath the sag of the canvas tent and the damp of the overhanging branches.
Gently, Jane Porter reached out with lace-gloved hands and drew the curtain that divided the artificial civilisation of the tent's interior and the imposed awkwardness of the camp. The shadow of the beautiful, if terrible, jungle stretched long over them like a dark mark upon the soil.
Before her the camp lay in disarray, any glimmer of civilisation she might have hoped to preserve within the sanctity of the tent shattered by the arrival of the three jovial newcomers; the most curious of which was the boy whose nationality remained so decidedly intangible that he was almost akin to the child in that delightful novel by Mister Kipling.
When he had first arrived Jane had attempted to inquire where he had come from. His answer had come in the form of a broad, relaxed smile and the phrase 'Destiny Islands'.
She wasn't quite sure if that was supposed to be the name of a ship or a plane or whether it was an actual location but whatever the case he had never elaborated.His two companions, a disproportionate duck and a dog (at least she presumed he was a dog) were even more extraordinary and certainly not something she could have easily believed had it not been for her already fantastical surroundings...and Tarzan.
It was his grace and the extraordinary events of his life that allowed her to believe in the boy and his strange companions and that gave her strength to face the curious beasts formed from shadow and the ill temper that had taken hold of Clayton. It was through him that she had the strength to see fantastic things.
For a moment she imagined herself a faerie princess, dancing in the embrace of the lord of a great castle; a great cloak of purple velvet hanging over his broad shoulders and her dress transformed from pale lemon crinoline to gorgeous silks and satins. She gazed up into his deep, feral eyes and found herself overwhelmed by his animal presence.
Abruptly she smiled, shaking the daydream away and feeling perhaps a little unnerved. She loved the displaced Lord of Greystoke because of his communion with animals, not because of his bestial nature. He was, first and foremost, a man.
Also like the boy of Mister Kipling's fable, he was a product of a tradition more natural than the civilisation she struggled to preserve in these savage settings. He was apart from all the noise and cruelty of cities and towns, the only human heir to a nobler manner of life.
And yet she was unable to completely bury the niggling thought that perhaps, in some perverse way, these two states of beings were conjoined.She couldn't shake the words Clayton had spoken before he had disappeared into the jungle the night before.
'This world...is connected.'