Adventure Magazine Cover — page 88: what you’re looking at

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

78 So.gee SHE was so wretched that Lassiter USS length and he sat at the slenderness of her waist. They remained thus in silence, voltuin aud presently the strange comfort that lovers give each other crept slowly over them both. It dulled their sadness. It hushed the trickle of minutes in a pool of timelessness. The man looked sadly at the shadows about her eyes, at the little hollow at the base of her throat. Her hair seemed dark as if she were sick, and her eyes remained steadfastly on his. Presently she whispered with a faint smile that she had prayed every evening since they first knelt by the web of the sun that he should come to believe in Pachacamac— and now he had. “T shall become a vestal of the Sun,” she told him. Their mood fell into a sort of adagio. The flattery of the cloister came to Lassiter pensively. He thought of himself as high priest, and of vestals, unused, holding a sort of faint violet sweetness. The possibility of a sort of happiness began to limn itself even on the murderous background of Motobatl. No doubt that mood laid hold of the girl even more strongly, for she was a child with a child’s dreaminess. He sat looking down at her, holding her hands, filled with her sweetness. A ray of the declining sun sifted through the paddlewood and its pool of light wore slowly across the floor. The perfume of the jungle breathed in upon them. A fly droned above the cordage of the hammock, and a last, when it settled on the strange rope of which the bed was made, it zinged away as if again the devil of insects were in pursuit. The girl’s gaze grew dreamy. Her breath- ing became quite regular. Her eyes drooped. Her anxieties of the preceding days, the torments of a girl’s first love, the sleepless and terrible night she had spent in the temple, all rushed upon her as she lay re- laxed and at peace with the man she loved. She looked dewy in her sleep. Her eyes were like pale blue water-lilies above the crimson flowering of her lips. Now and then her fingers clutched Lassiter’s at some impulse of her nerves. The promoter realized that now was the painless time for him to go. He loosed his fingers gently from her hand; he lifted his prevailed upon her to lie at full Adventure weight carefully from the hammock and stood clear. It swung the hammock a little, but she slept with the limp soundness of thirteen. The promoter stood looking down at her. The little cubicle seemed filled with light and perfume emanating from the sleeping girl. A great sadness came over the man. Had Birdsong lived, in this sweet flower garden he would have found rest and peace, the sweet communion of long nights and tenderness by day He picked up his packs guardedly and for another moment hung looking at her with his burden. He was doing her a great, great kindness to preserve her beauty from the pain and murder of child-bearing in Moto- batl; he was doing her a great, great good- ness to preserve her faith and to resign her heavy bosom to the chill purity of the tem- ple. This was the great kindness and the great goodness of Charles Lassiter’s life. On his way out, his eyes rested a moment on his untouched portion of the marriagé feast. XIV THE chronic suppression of society 1 prevents a man from bewailing his griefs openly and sanitarily. Prob- ably ages of fighting and military training has taught the mind the wisdom of the generalissimo who stands off cool and collected, thinking what best may be done in the emergency, even while his army breaks and perishes. Charles Lassiter deliberately ceased think- ing of the mestizo girl almost as soon as he left the paddlewood. He avoided things that would remind him of her. He made a quarter of a mile circuit through the steamy jungle around the baobab where Prymoxl still toiled at the wedding feast. He struck in toward the lake at an angle that would miss the cow-tree forest. His bags were heavy; the afternoon painfully bright and hot. The glare hurt his eyes, and he felt weary and old. He kept his mind on the surface of things, so thinly on the surface of things that it was a sort of vacancy. When he looked at the palm fronds, at the reach of the lake toward the teocalla, these things simply were. With an effort he banished all mental association or aura of beauty. A cow must look at a landscape in some such fashion. From the lake shore he saw some white NOOK (©