Argosy, Vol. 122, No. 1 — page 62: what you’re looking at

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

52 mandibles, sounding their shrill war-cry while cries of agony came from them— blinded, their antennze burnt off, their lid- less eyes scorched by the licking flames, yet going madly forward on flaming feet to attack, ever attack this unknown and unknowable. enemy. Burl made his way slowly over the hills. Twice he saw small bodies of the army ants. They had passed between the widen- ing surfaces their comrades had opened, and they were feeding voraciously upon the hills they trod on. Once Burl was spied, and a shrill war-cry was sounded, but he moved on, and the ants were busily eating. A single ant rushed toward him. Burl brought down his club and a writhing body remained, to be eaten later by its comrades when they came upon it. Again night fell. The sky grew red in the west, though the sun did not shine through the ever-present cloud bank. Dark- ness spread across the sky. Utter black- ness fell over the whole mad world, save where the luminous mushrooms shed their pale light upon the ground and fireflies the length of Burl’s arm shed their fitful gleams upon an earth of fungus growths and mon- strous insects. Burl made his way across the range of mushroom hills, picking his path with his large blue eyes whose pupils expanded to great size. Slowly, from the sky, now a drop and then a drop, now a drop and then a drop, the nightly rain that would continue until daybreak began. Burl found the ground hard beneath his feet. He listened keenly for sounds of danger. Something rustled heavily in a thicket of mushrooms a hundred yards away. ‘There were sounds of preening, and of delicate feet placed lightly here and there upon the ground. Then the throb- bing beat of huge wings began suddenly, and a body took to the air. A fierce, down-coming current of air smote Burl, and he looked upward in time to catch the outline of a huge body—a moth—as it passed above him. He turned to watch the line of its flight, and saw a strange glow in the sky behind him. The mushroom hills were still burning. He crouched beneath a squat toadstool THE ARGOSY. and waited for the dawn, his club held tightly in his hands, and his ears alert for any sound of danger. The slow-dropping, sodden rain kept on. It fell with irregular, drum-like beats upon the tough top of the toadstool under which he had taken refuge. Slowly, slowly, the sodden rainfall con- tinued. Drop by drop, all the night long, the warm pellets of liquid came from the sky. They boomed upon the hollow heads of the toadstools, and splashed into the steaming pools that lay festering all over the fungus-covered earth. ; And all the night long the great fires grew and spread in the mass of already half-carbonized mushroom. The flare at the horizon grew brighter and nearer. Burl, naked and hiding beneath a huge mush-. room, watched it grow near him with wide eyes, wondering what this thing was. He had never seen a flame before. The overhanging clouds were brightened by the flames. Over a stretch at least a dozen miles in length and from half a mile to three miles across, seething furnaces sent columns of dense smoke up to the roof of clouds, luminous from the glow below them, and spreading out and forming an intermediate layer below the cloudbanks themselves. It was like the glow of all the many lights of a vast city thrown against the sky—but the last great city had moulded into fungus-covered rubbish thirty thousand years before. Like the flitting of airplanes above a populous city, too, was the flitting of fascinated creatures above the glow. Moths and great flying beetles, gigantic gnats and midges grown huge with the passing of time, they fluttered and danced the dance of death above the flames. As the fire grew nearer to Burl, he could see them. Colossal, delicately-formed creatures swooped above the strange blaze. Moths with their riotously-colored wings of thirty- foot spread beat the air with mighty strokes, and their huge eyes glowed like carbuncles as they stared with the frenzied gaze of intoxicated devotees into the glow- ing flames below them. Burl saw a great peacock moth soaring above the burning mushroom hills. Its cComiclbooks.com