Adventure Magazine Cover — page 40: what you’re looking at

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

30 speak a word of warning about “the filthy vanity of the flesh. For some queer reason this stricture rather pleased both the friends. They were warm from the glow of self-sacrifice. Birdsong had cached all his Bibles except one pack. Now he chose two more packs, a little one for Lassiter. The caching was simple, a mere piling of the books in the cavetto of this vast entablature that ringed a twenty-mile circumference.* There was no danger to the Bibles from rain or snow on account of the overhang. Lassiter hefted his pack, got it on to his shoulder and moved tentatively down the ledge he had seen from the rim. It was considerably wider than he had thought, and it caused him to renew his speculation concerning the possibility of landing a horse on its surface. The horse might have stuck, but the question arose why any one would want a horse in such a place. It did not seem to be a road down after all. Lassiter was forced to walk with his pack of Bibles on his outer shoulder, and to hold on to the cusps, or air pockets, in the outsweep of lava above his head. The ledge dwindled to a shelf, and after forty or fifty yards, the shelf became a mere wrinkle in the face of the mile-high wall. It occurred to Lassiter, as he inched along that this little fold could very well slant back up the caveito, or turn straight down, or tail out to nothing in the vast concavity. He had assumed, since a rope led to it, that ~ it was a path down. But as the way grew less and less practicable, he realized that he was down there, and he could never reclimb that hundred and fifty feet of rope and regain the rim. His fingers grew tired of clinging to the abrasive lava, and sore. If the thing that attacked the camp were a monkey, how x could three men with packs hope to dupli- - cate its simian descent? A kind of amaze- ment grew in Lassiter that he had followed Birdsong so rashly. On the heels of his amazement followed the repentance of a man who has committed a generous, im- pulsive act. * The circumference of the truncated volcano, Mo- tobatl, is twenty-two miles and one hundred and seventy yards at the rim, north and south, and three hundred yards less than that figure, east and west. At its base it is exactly twenty-four miles north and south; twenty-three, two hundred and thirty east and west. "Mr. Lassiter’s descriptions are necessarily impressionistic. This and other corrections are made in no spirit of captiousness, but Te to give any interested reader or traveler correct etails evident, Adventure There is a cliché current in moralistic circles that no one ever regrets an unselfish act. In reality few deeds bring more bitter penitence. When a man acts selfishly and loses, he has the consolation of knowing he did the best he could for himself. It was a mistake of the head, not of the heart. But when he acts charitably, he is nearly always motived by some unaccus- tomed impulse that springs abruptly into action, moves him to some rash goodness, then cooling, leaves its victim to medita- tion and remorse. So Lassiter crept along, abusing himself for having wandered into this vertical cul de sac, for marooning himself, on the face of a gigantic cliff. Bidens on the other hand footed the wrinkle with entire self- confidence. And even that displeased Lassiter. Why had he followed such a goat- ish fellow? So profound was his disgust, it actually tickled his pneumogastric nerve into the first faint flutterings of nausea. Around a turn in the precipice, sure enough, the unevenness they followed smoothed out, but at its end, another silken rope dropped to a thread-like walkway sixty or seventy feet below. It became after all, they were following a hazardous, but defined trail down this mile of concavity. The two men passed their packs to Bird- song, who shot them down, then the col- porteur went; Nunes strapped on Lassiter’s loops, and the promoter followed the missionary. After them came Nunes with a flourish. Along this crease Lassiter was forced to lift his inner foot high and bend his knee outward before it had room to pass between his outer leg and the cliff. .His Bible pack raked the wall and pressed him gently out- ward. The Stendill agent kept his eyes rigidly on his footing, its ups and downs, and in- equalities. He tried to receive no impres- sion of the landscape far below him. But he could not avoid sensing the illumi- nation of his situation. The cliff that swung otit over his head shut off all sunshine, but a strong greenish reflection beat up from the landscape below on the under side of the cliff. It poured up through his legs. He could see it shining under the brim of his sombrero. No matter how rigidly he avoided seeing the landscape, that up-beating brilliance DOO (C©