Adventure Magazine Cover — page 168: what you’re looking at

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

162 and arms were flecked with blood. But Gil- ford thought only of his eyes, as, inch by inch swearing most foully in his agony, he sank into the dust. And then, vaguely, he knew that the lashings of the hippo hide had ceased. There Was a new commotion all about him; the confusion of upraised voices speaking in a guttural tongue, and the threshing of strug- gling bodies. He could hear Soliden’s voice and that _of Yuleela. But there was a third voice he did not recognize. And suddenly the struggling stopped; the voices became mere whisperings that drifted farther and farther away until there was nothing left save the hellish fury in his eyes. WHEN Gilford awoke or returned to consciousness—and he was not sure whether he had gone to sleep or fainted—he was alone. The uncanny silence that enshrouded him had, if anything, grown deeper and the sound of his own voice was hollow and unreal. He did not know whether it was night or day. No one answered his hoarse calls for help. The camp of the Little Rawyafa had apparently been deserted. Gilford tried to sit quite still and think this over. The pain in his eyes had dulled so that he was more aware of the stiff aches about his shoulders and arms, but when he tried to lift his eyelids to see, he bent his head quickly, flung his arm across his eyes and crouched away from the glinting stab of light as from the point of a rapier. It told him, however, that he was not altogether blind, and after a while he strug- gled to his feet and stood with his back to the wall trying to achieve a more coherent grasp of the situation. Evidently he had been purposely deserted at Soliden’s instigation. The camp was Soliden’s and the camp headman and his gang were also, without much doubt, of Soliden’s selection, and would, of necessity, depart when he did. Where Soliden had gone, whether he would come back or not and whether Grant at the Rawyafa headquarters was likely to come down that way in a day or a week, were questions that suggested themselves to Gilford in the course of his desperate attempt to think in a straight line. But there were no answers to these ques- Adventure tions and cohesive reasoning did not remain with Gilford long. His pains and the terror of his blindness would send his mind wan- dering off at a tangent that ultimately led him into fantastic realms of thought until he discovered himself groping his way through a maze of highly colored impos- sibilities, or found himself in a wilderness that was as black and pitiless as death itself. There were moments when Gilford wanted to die. There were others when he wanted more than anything to live and to see, so that he could find Soliden and write “Paid” in large, red letters at the bottom of the account. Just then he was afraid to move. tried to find his way to the window, then realized that he was safer where he was. He argued with himself about this for hours that were, to him, like many days. And it was the one subject on which reason tri- umphed in spite of panic and the frantic need of the touch of a human hand and the sound of a voice other than his own. He knew, if it were day, the sun would kill him in short order, because he had no sun helmet, and he would—if he ever found it at all—probably take hours to discover the hut he had slept in. If it were night, he would be likely to break his neck, or walk into the creek or wander off into the bush, which would be the worst of all. Every little while, as the hours dragged on, he would try to reach the window, but always he would stop, pull himself desper- ately together again, and sit down on the floor and wait. When he did this, he would also hold his head between his knees, fold his arms about them, and excluding the light as well as he could, would try to open his eyes. The experiment was an expensive one, and the result unlovely. Face down upon the floor, gripping his head tightly in his arms, Gilford writhed in his pain and clung to his reason with the frenzied clutch of the man who knows that madness is upon him. Sometimes he could hear the scuffing rush of a house lizard as it pounced upon an un- wary moth, and then would follow the furious burring flutter of the moth’s wings He at regular intervals until the lizard had com- | pletely conquered, and silence fell again. Even the creeping life in the surrounding bush seemed to have gone farther away, and as Gilford strained his ears to listen, COMiCoooks C@