Argosy, September 1955 — page 130: what you’re looking at

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

128 JOHN WYNDHAM any gaps: it’s all Badlands. There’s a mighty big river-mouth there, with Badlands up both sides, so you turn south till you pick up the coast again. When the first sailors came to those parts, they were pretty scared. They felt they were leaving all purity behind and sailing farther and farther away from God. They all knew that if you walk on Badlands you die, and they’d never expected to see them so closely with their own eyes. But what worried them most was to see how a lot of things that are against God’s laws flourish there just as if they had a right to. And it’s a shocking sight, too. You can see giant, distorted heads of corn growing higher than trees; you see huge saprophytes on rock pinnacles, trailing fathoms of aerial roots in the wind; some places there are colonies of huge fungi that you’d take at first sight for boulders; some of the suc- culents are like big barrels, as large as small houses, and with spines ten feet long. You see plants that grow on the cliff-tops and send long green cables down a hundred feet and more into the sea. ‘There are hundreds of kinds of queer things, and scarcely a normal one among them—it’s a kind of jungle of Deviations, for miles and miles. Just occasionally you may see an animal, but there don’t seem to be many of them. There are a few birds, and once or twice people have seen flying things in the distance with a motion that didn’t look right for birds. It’s an evil land, and many a man after seeing it has sud- denly understood for the first time what might happen here, but for the Purity Laws and the Inspectors. But the Badlands aren’t the worst. Farther south you begin to see patches where only the coarser plants will grow, and poorly, at that. ‘Then there are stretches, maybe forty or fifty miles long, where nothing grows. All the coast is empty and black and hard. The cliffs stand up, all harsh and stark, out of the sea; and in that sea there are no fish, no weeds, not even slime. There’s death in the water there. Even the barnacles and the fouling on a ship’s bottom drop off, and leave her hull clean. ‘There are no birds. The land and the sea and the sky are all empty: it is all deso- late, nothing moves except the waves, lapping on a cinder shore. It is a fearful place; a land so damned that ships put about and run out to sea for fear of it. : But it hasn’t always been like that. There have been some ships that risked sailing closer inshore, and they reported that in some places they were able to see great stone ruins protruding from the black, naked ground. There was no doubt that they were artificial; they might, they thought, be remnants of one of the Old People’s cities. But no one knows any more about that, for nearly all the men who were in those ships died of strange sicknesses, and those who survived were never the same men again. The Badlands, with stretches of the utterly dead lands, go on for hundreds of miles down the coast. So far that on earlier comicbooks.coh ” a) >