Adventure Magazine Cover — page 94: what you’re looking at

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

oo "BA and a white light upon the raison d’étre of the hippopotamus’ mouth, for another. Thereafter Ol’? Makaw cooled down, and ponderous, and once more sedate, wandered off on the other side of the river to find a few hun- dredweight of that precise kind of long coarse grass he most affected for his wholesale supper. And it was during the course of this ramble that he came upon the fence. It was quite a good fence—for natives. It was quite three feet high, and I feel almost certain it might have kept out a flock of sheep from the shambas— English, fields—of mealies, beans and pump- kins it protected beyond, but any self-respect- ing bull would have simply strolled through it, or a crusty old cow either, for that matter. But it stopped OV Makaw. I say that this low structure stopped the four-ton “‘hippo.”” Why? Why, my friends, because it was artificial. That ‘was the rub—the fence was artificial. Enough. Apparently OP? Makaw possessed more brains than people gave him.credit for; . More anyway than his cousins the bush pigs, or the ugly warthogs, or many of the antelope folk. Ina country, however, where anything artificial in your path may turn with discon- certing suddenness into a ten-foot pit-fall, staked and spiked at the bottom, too, or a weighted spear-head dropping on to the scruff. of your neck from nowhere, you do.wisely to avoid things artificial—especially if they are not accompanied by fire, which always drove the hippo into a sudden rage—with care and pre- cision, and to stick to good old Nature. Where- fore, O? Makaw did just that—for though pumpkins are good, life is better—and got back to the river with a whole skin and a full stom- ach—my, but it took some filling—as day was beginning to dawn. The sun, with swords of gold ‘cutting the carded night mists asunder along the river hol- low, brought the white hunter, more or less con- trolling a double five hundred express rifle, a terrible weapon, a regular siege gun. Appar- ently having his fire put out still rankled with him. : “Where,” hippo?” But the “hippo” was not. The river was bare. No reed or cover broke its oily current, but no head of Ol) Makaw com- ing up to breathe broke it either. The magic— black magic, the hunter said it was as he tramped the banks and the heat began to make him sweat—was complete. Ol Makaw, thick skin, tusks, and all—all thir- teen feet of him—had apparently dissolved with the mistsofdawn, Wherefore, after two hours, the hunter gave it up. He had to; his stock of language ran out. Yet Ol’ Makaw was there all the time, good sirs and mesdames, truly. There, and only two hundred yards away. growled he, “is that—(Assuan) Adventure It was but a little pool, a backwater, covered — with green slime; overarched with palmites and scrub, full of the nests, as they were gigantic hanging pears, of weaver finches; ringed with tall acacia trees; horrible with scum-covered water turtles, crocodile, and water snakes; abede of night herons, divers, hammerhead storks, pennant-winged nightjars, and myriads of little silvery fish. Across one end of his pool lay a fallen tree, bearded with curtain moss, heavy with weed; and exactly under it, festooned with green scum, the two ears, like knobs, two eyes on knobs, and ‘two nostrils opening upwards—exactly five inches above the surface—of O]’ Makaw rose from time to time to learn how the world was. getting on. At the slighest rustle he sank; at the least whiff of tainted air he went under. You could have searched for half a week and never found him; would never have thought probably of looking for so vast a bulk in so confined a space, when there was so much room outside. wap THE glaring day boiled itself out; the swift dusk of the tropics slid into night. , The camp and the white hunter—de- layed somewhat by the search for the stam- peded donkeys and the one mule—had passed on, leaving all once more to mystery, silence, and the “discomfortable” moon. Then, and not till then, knowing apparentie very well that no power on earth would tempt the local natives out of their stockaded village after ‘‘the hour of pride and power, of talon and tusk and claw,” Ol Makaw drifted out of his retreat and down river toward Lake Zim. For years it had been the custom of this lonely old bull to perform a little evening ritual—to slip down river to a sand-bank that partly, except in the rainy season, stretched out between its. mouth and the salt waters of Lake Zim; to climb out thereon, and send forth, over the dark mysterious watery waste of the lake, his grunt- ing roaring challenge. ‘That accomplished, he would shut his appalling mouth with a clash like the closing of a strong-room doors, and stand motionless, chin en sand, listening for the an- swering antediluvian bellow from his own kind that never came. Ol Makaw showed, shadowy, tremendous, ~ and a-magnified in the gloom as he left the water without a sound—and that is not easy to do—and hoisted himself -slowly upon the sand-spit. He stood there for a moment, a stu- pendous relic of the past, just as his ultimate dim ancestor may have stood looking out over that unchanging immemorial wilderness: scene in the Tertiary Age: Then he opened the red portcullis of his mouth to deliver his nightly challenge, drew a deep breath (as only sub- marine beasts can) and—shut it again! That thunderous defiance was, for the first time COMICLOOOKS (C@