Adventure Magazine Cover — page 117: what you’re looking at

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

Go-Fever “Tl send a proxy,” said Petrie. ‘No, I won’t. -We’ll put in and hire an aeroplane. Buy one. Kind of a spiky landing, but I’ve seen worse. Make regular trips to our bank. ‘The Goldseekers’ Special. Mod- ern, speedy, cool and comparatively com- fortable. We could tote out enough. It’s practical, fellows, though I was joking when. I mentioned it.” “Sounds all right, at that,’ said Cole. “We'd get rid of these ants by the air route, anyway. Cooties are love-birds com- pared to ’em.’ “We wouldn’t lose our way,” said Petrie again. “As it is we’ve kept direction and I’ve tried to figure out our leeway. I don’t believe we’re much out of the road.”’ ‘““Hope not,” said Reynolds, gingerly re- filling his pipe. “‘We’re getting shy on water.” ‘“‘We’ve been that way before,” said Cole. “It may rain.” And he looked up at the cloudless sky. The fourth day saw a horn of rock rising above the spinifex clumps in midmorning.. It heightened, bifurcated, showed a spiny back-bone that joined it to lower serra- tions, a pinnacled mass of dark brown with shadows of darker purple. They halted be- fore they -could see the base. The up- thrust seemed to be about half a mile in length from their viewpoint. “How about it, Tom?” Cole asked huskily. Reynolds squinted with his eyes nar- rowed between gummy, inflamed lids. The sand blight had got its work in on all of them. “Hard to tell from here,’ he said slowly. “But I think—fellows—I think we’ve walked straight up to the old dump after all.” CHAPTER VIII GLAMOUR OF GOLD HE winds of untold centuries must have beaten against those obsidian crags mounting above the sand that, might well have slowly risen about them like a flooding sea, year after year, to engulf this sharp re- minder of the times when the earth shook and spouted steam and flame. The siliceous grit had ground and fretted against those pinnacles and failed to blunt them, unless they had eaten away the softer pumice and left only the harder cores of igneous rock II5 fused into volcanic glass, black, and in places only semi-opaque, the shining, polished surfaces flinging back the rays of the sun. Perhaps the wind had worried out the caves that pittied it in places. Perhaps all this was sea-bed, lifted high in some su- preme convulsion that brought the land — smoking from ‘the main. © The supreme effect was primordial. Utter solitude and remoteness from all the world of men. A dinosaur, emerging from the dark mouths of the caves, would have seemed so wholly in keeping with time and place that it was more surprizing not to see it than actually to behold it... Stark and sere they lifted from the sand and the spinifex. The scene held all three of them in a sort of hypnosis. Petrie found himseif chanting improvisations. “In the beginning there was rock and sand and spiny grasses. So it was before things came to be and after all were ended. - Desolation and the desert—the abomination of desolation.”’ Here was the goal they had come far to find and fought to reach. The treasure- box that held the gold they sought. Yet the frowning ‘mystery of the mass with its turrets, buttresses and spires, its naves and transepts, its yawning doorways, kept them back as if they had come across the castle of a wizard, the black cathedral of a fiendish creed. ‘“‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter there,”’ said Petrie in a high voice that broke the tension. Cole looked at him anxiously, fearful that he was delirious. The food, eaten cold, the stale water and sour damper, had given all three of them mild dysentery, but ever since they sighted the first lava peak the attack had become severe with Petrie, though he had insisted upon pushing on, staggering now and then yet making light of it. “Yl take the gold cure,” he told them laughingly. “T’ll own up I’d like some hot grub, but there’s no prospect of it in this wilderness and the sight of Tom Reynolds’ glittering lode will work wonders.” Now his eyes were a little glazed and his talk was off balance from the rational. They might get no fire here, Cole told him- self, but they would make Petrie rest up, they would stake their claims, gather what MICLOOOK C@ inn