Adventure Magazine Cover, December 18, 1919 — page 66: what you’re looking at

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

t pt ty a gy Ba Abr? eit Pe oe og Pie | | 3 “PF . ‘ Lea te VRE : 4 = ' a ees ; a ie a mS aE Gt Aer ho an dill sph 1)5 ‘ , f\ , ous wish. He stretched his arms to grasp his prize and burst asunder.” The smith wasted his strength in fret- ting and irritation; he began to fear and hate the gulleys as much, for the derision they cost him as for the,labor and delay, yet he doggedly kept his set pace through the first half of the swing toward the baobab tree, not so far behind schedule as to take thought and caution when - the Kanuri pointed out enticing pasture at the bottom of a long dip in the plateau. “QO. Strong White Man Learned in the Magic of Metals, what is domain without pasture that feedeth the ox and the sheep? Can man live by earth alone?” they tauntingly tempted. The teasing finally stung him so that he deviated from his course to include the pasture. There he discovered the use of the peeled wands, for the Kanuri with the bundle planted a wand at his outer- most boundary. There were other wands planted there, too, a score, perhaps— tombstones of failures gone before. The wand was: planted to uproarious laughter. They had a great joke on the white man, if only he knew it. They laughed in their hollow throats, in their deep abdomens. The smith tried to close his ears to it and close his mind to the doubts and phantoms conjured up by those failures gone before. “They bit off more’n they could chew, and it’s me as have to thank ’em for leav- ing the chance to me,” he told himself, yet he could not stop worrying about those failures. He took the long up-hill climb to the plateau, fretting while the ant-hill was lost to view, for he wanted the goal al- ways comfortably in sight. Again and again it was lost behind the undulations. Then he could only estimate his position. Another discovery began to worry him, The baobab that had stood out so clear in the dawn now seemed to have grown strangely remote. It looked like a column of smoke suspended over a bush fire. The land seemed to have undergone a sinister transformation. He could not understand the change between the clear- ness of dawn and the blur of the heat haze. It worried him and he was not used to worry. 7 “There's some trick; there’s some 52 : Adventure trick,” he kept reiterating with pathetic insistence. The earth burned through his sandals. The heat and the sun-glare began to bother him. His turban afforded his eyes no protection. Then the harmattan, as regular in these lands as noon itself, blew its stifling breaths and swung fine sands into his inflamed eyes. The grit worked under his swollen lids, cutting like sharp-edged flints against the tor- tured balls, and the wind flapped and en- tangled his loose burnoose about his legs. He seemed to make no _ progress toward the baobab. He should now be resting in its shade, according to his mapped schedule. He wanted to lop off his circuit, but it was becoming an ob- session with him to swing out the full . route and turn the laugh on his tor- ; mentors, whose guttural whisperings, | permeating the soft pounding of the hoofs, nettled him to imagining jibes and jeers. He hated their cool comfort in their deep-seated saddles, their black feet planted comfortably in wide, wooden stirrups, the harmattan ballooning their burnooses. To his salt-sweated, rage- filled vision, they seemed inhuman, bil- — lowy grotesques—just black eyes, black hands, black feet stuck on swollen bags —Frankenstein monsters out to make a sport of him. Wetting his lips and parched throat at the water gourd, he trudged on toward the deceptive baobab now clearly defined in trunk, branch, twig, now lost in a swirl of sand. The sun crossed the meridian. Still he dogged on. Suddenly the tree appeared directly before him. He gravitated toward it and tumbled to a heap in its friendly shade. The Kanuri unhorsed and squatted around him like penguins, calmly in- . quisitive of the distressed shipwrecked stranger thrown up on their desolate shores—penguins with hateful proverbs. “Gedi kanadiben tsaknawa’—At the bottom of. patience there is heaven— scoffed one, and another capped it jocu- larly— “Tama sugo diniabe’—Hope is the pillar of the world. They planted a wand in the graveyard | of wands by the baobab—planted it to loud, explosive laughter. Eomichbooks (E@