Adventure Magazine Cover — page 89: what you’re looking at

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

The Web of the Sun rolling clouds drift up out of the Amazon valley above the eastern rim of Motobatl. Their whiteness turned the sky above them to an indigo and the palisades to a cardinal, His mind did not combine these three bril- liancies into a harmony. The hillock which hid the Web of the Sun lifted its mystery between him and the temple. His eyes rested on it with a stunned man’s quietism. Only when he passed it and waded through the hot sand around the swing of the lake did the memory of* Tilita assail him. In this blistering place he had kissed and embraced her. An ache struck through his mind, like the start of a broken tooth. The promoter made a har- ried movement. He swung his bags to his other shoulder and scrambled back to the surface of things. He looked behind him. ‘The sun was an hour and a half high. A fisherman rowed his boat toward a reedy island. Far up the beach Lassiter could see the black dots of two human figures coming toward him. No doubt it was some of Birdsong’s men bringing a sacrifice to atone for their im- piety. So he walked on, considering Birdsong’s murder very quietly, without the faintest condemnation or approval. It was war, a move in a chess game. The pawns of life took first this position and that. Birdsong was dead; he was stepping into the archi- episcopal chair; Gogoma would paint—it was a hot day. Quiz-Quiz, the hunchback, stood at Nunes’ bolsa with its queer top where it lay at the edge of the piazza. Whether the acolyte were waiting for him or not, Lassiter did not know. The crooked little man took one of the bags and the two proceeded across the vast piazza that quivered in the heat. The columns of the facade seemed to tremble. The hexagonal tufa blocks stung Lassiter’s feet. The sun stuck a hot brand to the back of his neck. The piazza seemed endless. The hunchback piloted him to- ward the southern side entrance. Half-way across the piazza the Stendill agent peered back through the flame of sunshine. The distant figures had enlarged. They were almost to the net, and were run- ning. With vast relief, Lassiter stepped out of the heat into the chill hypogeum. Its gloom and chill fell like a lotion on his eyes. As he 79 moved inside he thought he heard a distant shouting, or, more likely, it was some vari- ation in the coughing and sucking of the whirlpool far to the north. The southern entrance let mto a mere tunnel that penetrated inward twenty or thirty steps, then led into another tunnel that ran north and south at right angles. This passageway gave on an endless row of cenobitic cells parallel with the cliff out- side.* The hunchback led the way to one of these cells, put Lassiter’s bag inside, glanced about for a moment to see that everything was in order, then explained that this would be the novitiate’s room and retired. The promoter stood looking about him. A hole through ten feet of stone admitted a ray of light into the chamber. The only furnishing was a sort of stone couch or table. The walls of the cell were roughly hewn, but the surface of the couch was not only polished, but into it was worn the im- pression of a human form. How many anchorites for how many centuries had stretched themselves on it to hard repose! Ale and stood looking around the ex- pressionless hole. The floor, also, was worn into distinct grooves by the tramping of feet. The thought of such a stream of life eddying out of the warmth and sunlight of the crater to stagnate in this chill hole oppressed Lassiter. To what dull end they had gravitated. The promoter sat down on his couch and looked at his bags. He did not open them, nor make any of those little arrangements of housekeeping which a man performs even to camp for a night. It seemed not worth while. Indeed, the mental basis of every home-keeping gesture in man are a mate and children. By his desertion of Tilita, this had been torn from Lassiter’s brain. So he sat on the couch in silence. The air shaft gave a yellowish circle of light on the opposite wall. It showed the grain of the volcanic stone. Presently the promoter became aware of a faint odor of the cow- tree milk in the close air. Lassiter straight- ened and savored the air almost in surprize. It was the odor of milk. Then he realized LASSITER put his bags in a corner *The temple of the Sun in - Motobatl was probably the most populous cenobite known to history. Twenty- two hundred and sixty-five cells honeycomb the cliff. The whole object of this vast institution was to rethice the birth rate of the imprisoned nation by celibacy. MICLOOOK (©