Avon Fantasy Reader No. 11 — page 51: what you’re looking at

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

oward nightfall the men and their mules wete sensibly beyond the in- ence of the English settlement in Ghandis. In the branches of an ebony ee they had glimpsed a black man with vast, round, pendulous ears watch- g their progress through the jungle. Their way grew rougher. Eventually ey found themselves on a mountainside looking down on a distant fire, hich in the half light was neither smoke nor illumination, but a suggestion of both. The steady booming of a tom-tom came to their ears through the athering darkness. . The black man, Mokato, stood listening to it, evidently torn between painful impulses. “They are making ready for one of their feasts, Brother Mogglesby,” he explained desirously. ‘‘Perhaps I'd better not go any farther. You can get there by yourself from here.” "What sort of a feast?’ asked Mogglesby. “The drums say they are going to eat a wood-man.” “You can tell by the drums?” “Yes, the way they beat.” “Well, we won't go into the right and wrong of that any more,” said the big Englishman. "I want to go on down there while there’s light to see the trail.”’ The little doctor began pressing the black man to come on with them. What was the difference between eating gorilla steak and eating beef steak? Would Mokato not like to see his old friends among the M’Bembi? Mogglesby moved down from their point of vantage into the obscurity of the lower trail. He told his companions once more that he wanted to go on while he could see. The little white man and the tall black man were still absurdly arguing in the last of evening light, when a turn in the trail oc- cluded them from Moglesby’s view. The big Englishman pitked his way down into the booming valley with a feeling of faint irony for this new convert of the Reverend Spence. The white man tried to imagine what fascination there could be in cannibalism. That there was such a fascination is more than evident every time white men try to break up the practice among primitive people, but why should such a monstrous custom cling to a people? As the man strode along between two dimly seen walls of bushes and vines, his reflections were interrupted by a queer aspirated chatter somewhere in the darkness ahead of him. He paused to listen, then saw a vague form holding up a warning hand and hurrying toward him in the gloom. There was an urgency, an intensity of gesture about the dim figure that drew the Englishman up at once. He called out in the flat but confident voice of a very strong man who is not afraid but who has been startled, “What is it? What do you want?” At the sound the figure seemed to melt into the undergrowth and vanish. This extraordinary dénouement hurried the Englishman forward to where the thing had been. He stopped, listened with his mouth open and heard the faint rustling which a large animal makes when slipping away among dense growth. 49 comicbooks.com