Argosy, September 1955 — page 28: what you’re looking at

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

~ SUMMER IN SALANDAR A blazing tropical sun, an almost-deserted island, a lonely young man and a girl—alluring—enigmatic— irresistible .. . It sounds like an enchanted idyll, but with H. E. Batés to spin the plot, there 1s mystery too, and perhaps something even darker. By H. E. BATES ANSON lifted one corner of the green gauze window-blind of the shipping office and watched, for an indifferent moment or two, the swift cortége of a late funeral racing up the hill. It flashed along the water-front like a train of cellulose beetles, black and glittering, each of the thirty cars a reflection of the glare of sun on sea. | He wondered, as the cars leapt away up the avenue of jade and carmine villas, eyeless in the bright evening under closed white shades, why funerals in Salandar were always such races, un- pompous and frenzied, as if they were really chasing the dead. He wondered too why he never saw them coming back again. They dashed in black undignified weeping haste to somewhere along the sea-coast, where blue and yellow espada boats beat with high moon-— like prows under rocks ashen with burnt seaweed, and then vanished for ever. He let the blind fall into place again, leaning spare brown elbows on the mahogany lid of his desk. He was thinking that that evening a ship would be in. It could not matter which ship—he was pretty sure it was the Alacantra—since nobody in their senses ever came to Salandar in the summer. ‘There would in any case be no English passengers and he would meet it out of pure routine. After that he would go home to his small hotel and eat the flabby oil-soaked espada that had as much taste in it as a bath sponge and drink export beer and read the English papers of a week last ~ Wednesday. In the street outside, men would sit on dark doorsteps and spit golden melon seeds into the gutters. The flash of an open- 7 air cinema down the street would drench the plum-black air above = the surrounding courtyards with continuous gentle fountains of comichooksxcorn