Avon Fantasy Reader No. 11 — page 44: what you’re looking at

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

In person Mogglesby, the hero of this West African chronicle, was not a prepossessing man, He was huge and sun baked. He looked like a great sagging brown leather edition of a medical book describing what whisky and the native women will do to an Englishman in equatorial Africa. The only suggestion the writer received of the extraordinary physical strength ascribed to Mogeglesby by the doctor's saga was a very slight inci- dent. The wicker table on the governor’s piazza holding the gin and soda sat at a little distance from Mogglesby’s chair. Once, when he wanted to refill his glass, he reached with a little grunt of inconvenience, got his thumb and finger on the edge of the table and lifted it to him—lifted, not dragged, for dragging would have upset the bottles. This really must have been a feat of strength, but at the time it was done so casually that no one gave it any particular notice, and the writer barely recalls the incident. At the time, the governor was talking about the hinterland of -his prov- ince. He said the customs and practices of the Baloongas were very unso- cial, that he tried to discourage them but they broke out again at-any_pop- ular excitement. “What sort of customs are they?” asked Mopgplesby. “I regret to say the Baloongas drift toward anthropophagism,” admitted the governor. Mogglesby straightened in his chair. “Cannibals!” “As I say, sporadic cases in times of popular excitement.” “What causes them to break out like that?” “You mean the fundamental cause?’’ inquired the governor. “It’s a theory of mine, Mr. Mogglesby, that it’s the damned gorillas kidnapping their women.” It seemed to the writer that the governor was probably rationalizing, seeking an excuse for a hideous custom merely because the Baloongas were now his own people and a part of the empire. He asked how his Excellency had ever come by such a notion. “The black men do not look upon gorillas as we do,” explained the chief. official. “They do not regard them quite as animals; more as a kind of tetrible people, if you understand what I mean.” “And just how does that lead to cannibalism?” inquired Mogglesby, curiously, “When the natives manage to kill a gorilla they roast and eat it, of course. I think they have an idea that its strength and courage will pass into their bodies.” ‘“That’s the usual explanation,” agreed the writer. “Yes, but don’t you see, since the line between human beings and the anthropoids is not clearly drawn in their minds, how easy it would be for the practice of eating the simians to slip across the boundary into eating men. “It’s a terrible blot on the empire for such a thing to exist,” said Mog- glesby, leaning forward in his chair. 42 Comicbooks.com