A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 77: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

*) “Y ¢- Per a Fy Py a = re a, aE Pie THE SMOKING LAND 77 that the Strait of Magellan was a regular death trap, they swung to the north and started hammering away at the north- west passage. “Tmagine a very blunt-bowed ship put- ting out of the port of Bristol with a crew of seventy-nine gentlemen adventures, common sailors, officers, and what-not, plus one lone woman. “Keep your mind on the woman, in particular, because she’s important. Her name is Sylvia.” I stood straight up from my chair and looked at him. “All right,” said Darrell, grinning at me in a ‘strange way. “Your guess is ‘right. She's the ancestress, fifteen or twenty generation, back of your own Sylvia. But now imagine that ship be- tween Greenland and the coast, using up every advantage of what must have been wonderfuly favoring winds, and an ex- ceptional clearness of sea. They actually swung around the northern coast of the continent, and got on toward the Behring Sea; and then they were caught in the inevitable ice jam. But to make their luck stranger and more perfect, the captain, his wife, and some twenty or thirty other survivors, were carried by the ice-currents until they were in view of the Smoking Land. They made the shore, and the Esquimaux they found here were friendly to them. “The captain and his wife were the king and queen, as you might say, of that little group. The ship was broken up, and here was no chance of using it again. The men intermarried with the Esquimaux, and their descendants, rto this day, are the inhabitants of the land. That’s why the complexion, is prevailingly white. “But the captain and his wife, mind you, kept apart from the rest, as a sea- captain was bound to do. And eventually they had children—a son and three fine daughters, and as the daughters got to the marriageable age, they were married to the lads who had been mere ship’s boys on the voyage out, not gentlemen adventures ; and they were taken into the family of their wily old father-in-law of a captain. For he intended to raise up a dynasty of pure white blood to rule the land. And that is exactly what happened. Por you find, ia the mountain here, what they call the Wise Men, the direct des- cendants of the captain and the first Sylvia, and you find the rest of the land filled with a people of mixed blood, a sort ef white Esquimaux. “To keep the Esquimaux thoroughly in order, that captain—his name was Philip Grey—devised a religion for them, out of their own beliefs plus a few in- ventions of his own, one of which was a ‘goddess’ for the people to worship. The goddess was not only invented, but she was reinforced with a few gunpowder miracles and such, until the Esquimaux were thoroughly awed. Then they were given a steady succession of priestesses, and the priestesses were of the pure blood of the rulers of the land. Don't you see the idea? Pick out a girl child, and educate her like her white fel- lows, but simply see that she is taught to believe in the goddess. She remains close to her parents, in the hands of the whites, a tool and a mouthpiece out of which the Esquimaux are easily and perfectly ruled. Ts that clear?” “Philip Grey must have been a genits,” said I. 66, JE WAS one of the world’s great men, in his own way,” said Darrell. “There's no doubt of that. And he founded a race up here of which the world is pretty sure to hear one day. “But to go on. The country filled, eventually, with a mixed breed, who knew nothing about their half-white ancestry, who followed the faith ofthe goddess, who performed the orders which her priestess passed down from the Wise Men, and who acted as the servants and the guards of the all-whites. “The whites remained a handful of men and women; and today they are further segregated. Up to the age of—I think it’s twenty-five—every young man is educated like his fellows. He may have a command in the guards, or he may turn into a great hunter, but if at the age of twenty-five he shows that he has trustworthy powers, and a brain and a will, he is brought be- fore the Wise Men, and initiated into their orders. “The Wise Men saw, early in the game, that brains were their tools. So brains were what they used. They could not Oo " comichooks.