Argosy, Vol. 120, No. 1 — page 11: what you’re looking at

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

THE ARGOSY | SATURDAY, APRIL 17, 1920 ve oe No. 1 ly Gordon Mac Creagh. Author of “Tagt And Some Diplomacy,” ete. CHAPTER I. JEHANNUM OF THE JUNGLE, UNGLE! Moist, lushy, sunless! Dim beneath the towering blanket of foliage with the twilight greenness of deep water! Miles of it! Five thousand square miles without a break, except where the dry winds of the hot season withered the hill- tops and left them sticking out like bald heads accentuated by a scattering, bristly growth..of huge teak trunks whose roots tapped deep springs which reached the sur- face a thousand feet lower down in thin trickles of ooze. The first crushing impression of the dim depths was of intolerable, stifling silence; for nothing moved, nothing spoke. Nothing seemed to, that is to say; for the teeming animal life of the trackless underbrush went about, their mysterious errands with soft- footed secrecy; and it was not till the ear had attuned itself to the unaccustomed vi+ brations that it was able to recognize their myriad voices as a single, vast, sublimated hum. Men there were none; for this was the 1 Ancosy | \ ragged, undulating borderland between the Lushai Hills and the northerly state of Manipur, a far, outlying district which had been shoveled onto the already harassed province of Eastern Bengal and Assam for administration—which administration con- sisted of sending presents to the chiefs and asking them please to be good. | The border was an uncertainly defined no man’s land, in which the-long-limbed, stark- naked Naga tribesmen of the north politely refrained from getting into conflict with the dark and sturdy aboriginal Kukis and Lushais of the southern hills; and which the wily hillmen left with equal courtesy to their belligerent neighbors rather than argue about it—particularly since there was noth- ing to argue about. Since, then, this uninviting tract was not altogether safe for anybody else to be prowl- ing about in, it was quite safe enough to be comfortable for a white man. At all events, so thought the white man who lay carelessly confident on his back on one of the bald hilltops with hts head pillowed in his folded hands, watching a distant colony of circling kites with narrow-eyed: suspicion. GOMmlepoo (-) CO