Argosy All-Story Weekly, January 13, 1923 — page 35: what you’re looking at

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

ar ereg ee — JUNGLE TEST. quisite vista of jungle. Palms and ferns, entangled with brilliantly colored vines like streamers at a féte, swept downward in a pale red mist toward the mud channels of a river. Red beams of a low sun slanted to- ward crags and down to the caked mud. It was sunrise or sunset, Diane did not care which. She puzzled no more about her present state for her eyes suddenly met the eyes of the dwarf who was looking at her from under tousled white brows. He was one of the characters from her long nightmare, who had assumed the flesh and blood of reality. A vicious little ani- mal he was, squatted on his haunches scarcely seven feet away from her, whereas his true habitat would seem to have been among the flame-colored vines overhead. His knees were pulled up against a pigeon- chest by long hairy arms. They were puny knees scarcely bigger than a child’s. But the crooked shoulders, the biceps, the fists, were abnormal, powerful, almost gorilla- like. He kept swinging the left arm about him describing a big semi-circle with his knuckles in the dirt. Except for this long restless arm he was immovable. It seemed to Diane that the man’s brain was in that arm—that it was like a tentacle or feeler. Then she remembered what had hap- pened. She remembered that night in the dak- bungalow when she had talked drowsily with Surgeon-Major Kesh. She had not fought against the compelling fatigue of her long journey, but she had told the major that Ian Dunboyne was coming for her, and would arrive at any moment. What they had last talked about she could not recall, but she knew definitely now that she had fallen asleep. All during that first restless sleep there had been a consistent drumming in her ears: first her pulse beating against her hot pillow, then the distant tomtoms in Ganj, then the more rapid beating of a horse’s hoofs. This last had partially awak- ened her—at least sufficiently so that she realized that she was struggling against a horrible nightmare. That nightmare was some indescribably horrible presence that had swung into her room from the boughs of the tamarinds out- side. Now as she recalled her dreams she 2A knew that that presence in her room was not a figment of her own brain—but the reality. It was a small hunched figure hanging by one long prehensile limb from the rafters of the ceiling. How she had gotten in that little room she did not know, but she was there—and that Thing was there, hanging from the black rafters like a bat. Moonlight was streaming in; the punkah was flapping. Diane opened her mouth to scream, but fear took her breath. The same fear stupefied her so that she lay in her bed staring fixedly at that huge bat. She knew that the Hindus feared a spirit of evil whom they called Mara. Was this the god? She knew also that nightmares were beings like this supposed to sit upon a sleeper’s chest.. She thought then that she was asleep and dreaming and that if she could awake this Thing would disappear. She fought to awake, and as she fought she saw the Mara hold a smoking light in the palm of his hand, and swing it before the flapping punkah as a monk will swing a censer. The fumes came to her, suffocating with a thick delightful fragrance. After a while a dizzi- ness transported her. She fought no longer to awaken herself. Moments went by and the Mara’s long arm swung like a pendu- lum, almost hypnotizing her with its regu- larity. She closed her eyes and still saw it black and long, rhythmical. Then oblivion. Many events had transpired in that dak- bungalow before the dwarf thag had lulled Diane Herries back to sleep with his smoke drugs. ; During the earlier part of the evening he hid in one of the dry wells. When the shadow of one of the overhanging palmy- rahs protected the well-rim from the light of the moon the thag climbed out and watched as much of the proceedings on the veranda of the dak-bungalow as he could see from his hiding place. He observed that shortly after the white man, Surgeon- Major Kesh, had finished his dinner, a ragged looking native dressed in white tur- ban and soiled chuprassi’s costume, came up from the Ganj road. The dwarf fol- lowed this man into the bungalow, avoiding the bare moonlit space of the chicken yard by swinging from branch to branch in the tamarinds. 497 oe rf ‘ | Vis \! + ne Vien ee st verre? ws : j Eomichboo ) } L AG -_ 4 as xt. A }