Adventure Magazine Cover — page 26: what you’re looking at

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

16 bit of cord he had salvaged from the trag- edy. It was a piece of silk cord about an inch and a half long, greasy from years of handling. The Stendill agent looked at the shred of silk around which Chombo had woven such a fantasy. He avoided expressing his skep- ticism by inquiring after the present state of Chombo’s mother’s soul. Chombo hoped the good woman had been in Paradise for several years. During the last mile or two, Chombo had talked with a certain nervous haste and many glances out over the boulder-strewn mountainside. Now that he had finished, he walked on a bit farther with some desul- tory conversation, then made his adieus and turned back to Bujeo. At first he moved off on the return trail with sufficient dignity, but the farther he got from the white men the more quickly he stepped. At seventy-five paces, he began to trot. Ata hundred yards he was in full flight, running as if the very King of the Jivaros were on his heels. The white men watched him curiously, until his poncho diminished to a bit of flut- tering red far down among the gray stones, and he vanished around a turn in the trail. III CHOMBO MEONE’S flight down the mountainside lent a certain authenticity to his story which his words had failed to convey. For several moments, Lassiter stood looking down the trail, speculating on what the Bujean could have seen years ago that sent him homeward today at such a scamper. Then, too, the fact that Chombo possessed a@ piece of silk cord grew upon the promoter as rather inexplicable. Troglodytes, such as the Quichuas, are not given to silks. Birdsong accepted Meone’s narrative in word and substance. The Indian had adventured with the devil, and straight ahead lay the battle-ground where he, Ezekiel Birdsong, would meet and conquer the infernal hosts with the sword of the spirit. He prodded his mule forward. What daunted the Indian spurred the zealot. The terrane up which the expedition toiled smacked of Chombo’s narrative. It was of volcanic origin and it stretched up- ward as scoriated as the slopes of Hinnon Adventure itself. It was a formidable landscape. It appeared to Lassiter as if a vast, gray flood had _ been transfixed in stone in the instant of tumultuous descent. In one place its stony waves still lashed at the sky; in another, huge swirls from some long cooled maelstrom still held its contour; in yet others washes of vitreous green slag simu- lated the troughs of a stormy sea. This huge and strange terrane led upward, apparently to a plateau, which formed a pass through the snowy barricade of the Andes. : A cold wind swept down from the snow fields and worried at the men’s ponchos and at the Bible packs. The trail which they had followed so far ceased to exist on the lava field. They worked upward by guess and chance. Their progress upward became a tortuous ant-like twisting with endless hesitations, back-turnings and re- tracings. Indeed the hugeness of their surround- ings dwarfed men and mules to the propor- tions of insects. They might very well have been a little string of ants creeping upward on the obscure and twiddling errand of such creatures. It all must have affected Ezekiel Bird- song’s imagination as the very outlands of hell. He was a Parsifal riding against the battlements of Klingsor, or rather, since the Arkansan’s mind was untouched by the Wagnerian cycle, he was a child of the living God challenging the regents of Sin and Death. | Lassiter often looked at him, a short, compact, sun-burned man with oily black hair, shoving at his mule, steadying his pack and shouting his lugubrious hymns— Lassiter often looked at him, and the thought came to the Stendill agent more than once that the apostles of Christ, the fishermen and publicans who had made these Bible packs possible, must have been just such tough, sun-browned, indomitable rustics. At other times the promoter in Lassiter asserted itself. He thought of the tourist trade. He visioned these cyclopzen scenes unrolling beneath the hull of a dirigible. What a tourist-catcher it would be! It would soon instate itself in the world’s imagination as one of those obligatory tours, such as the Alps, the Yosemite, the Pyramids, the Grand Cajion, Stratford on Avon, which all real personages perform, DOOLK (©