Adventure Magazine Cover — page 144: what you’re looking at

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

LW Bag _ a wed ‘ a ye + 4} * , i" RD ee Sota mie hm ete hin fe J 3 Mee Lh THE TEMPLE OF THE TEN by H.Bedford -Jones and W.C.Roberfson Author of “The M essenger,”” “Other Men’s Shoes,” etc. CHAPTER I THE PROFESSOR JOINS EVERN fired again. This time a crinkle of grim amusement drew down the wrinkles about his stark blue eyes. He had dropped one of the filthy Mongolian guides who had led him into the trap. His sun- blackened face was leathery, harsh, very keen. He seemed to ignore the stench of the rotting camel whose body served him as a breastwork. -On the hairy fore-shoulder were laid three cartridges—his last three. This is an age of specialization, as folk are apt at saying without comprehending their own words.. Severn was a specialist in Chinese ethnic and lingual affairs. His work on Irano-Sinica was a classic of re- search. His monograph of six hundred pages on the admirable. Chinese system of transcribing foreign words was a monument of philology. He had proved that the an- thropomorphic conceptions in ancient Chi- nese religion were not really anthropomor- phic at all: His specialization led him to spend a year in Chinese Turkestan, working up gradu- ally across the Shamo Desert toward Mon- golia, and studying the dialects. This was now the tag-end of the year—a year of ethnic triumph, a year of personal disaster. His wife had died in his arms and lay buried in the Gobi. A collection of Indo-Scythian documents had been burned by lazy camel- a men. Severn himself had been partially frozen during a storm on the Hu-shan gravel steppes. A drowned camel had carried down all his instruments.and personal be-, longings excepting a rifle. Through all this and much more Severn had come unembittered, gravely silent, with’ the same kindly, searching blue eyes and - the same gentle deftness that made men love him. And now, at the year’s end, he had come to life’s end also. Severn fired again, and his smile vanished. A miss; he did not like to miss. He had been ten hours without food or water, ex- cepting such as he could get from the humps of the rotting Bactrian. Now he put his re- maining cartridges into the magazine and waited. His last day on earth! A bullet snicked through the camel’s fore-shoulder, spatted on a boulder and whanged off into space. Behind Severn lay a frightful Odyssey, begun in the Chinese Turkestan deserts. Now he was somewhere at the edge of the Khangai plateau. At the back was the Gobi, or as the Chinese term it, the Shamo; ahead lay the Sajan range and Lake Baikal. Eastward lay Karakorum, the desolate ruins of the capital of Genghis Khan. Clad in Mongol skins, bearded and haggard, Severn was scarce recognizable as a white man. | He lay in a little hollow among ancient); - boulders, rising ground all around. It was» not a good position, but he had not chosen it. About him rose the rim of the hollow, a, circular horizon perhaps a quarter-mile in 134 JOO (Q) com (C@)