Avon Fantasy Reader No. 11 — page 56: what you’re looking at

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

black man dropped his assegar, darted in and bowled over the doughty champion. of the pot. Sammu went backward into his own pit. As he went down, he shrieked out— “Break it gently, brothers—pently.” The head-man had uplifted a lance for a mighty blow, when the queer scene moved the Englishman to shout for the head-man to stop. The white man leaped down into the. pit himself. He went to the pot, hardly knowing what to expect. He found that it was completely covered with clay, and he remembered having roasted chickens and fish by rolling them in mud and dropping them in a fire. Sammu got himself upright and came to Mogglesby’s side. “Master,” he said, in a voice shaking after his struggle, ‘‘you take off the clay like this.” And he produced a piece of sharpened iron and began peeling away the covering with swift expert strokes. What Mogglesby now expected he hardly knew. He half braced his nerves to see a gruesome sight, and yet when a flake of clay dropped from Sammu's point, the white man was not greatly surprised to see a dull glowing surface. More clay fell and Mogglesby saw the little man was uncovering a surface of heated metal. For a few moments the governor's agent thought this might possibly be an inner metal pot when the metal began to take the form of a face. It was a face still faintly glowing from heat; it was a face unimaginably ferocious and hideous. It was the molded head of a gorilla. When it was exposed to the air the outer skin quickly cooled to a bronze sheen, but the deep sunk eyes remained red and shining with the inner heat. As he stood looking at it, it suddenly burst upon the Englishman that he was staring half dazed upon the most extraordinary and amazing piece of realistic sculpture he had ever seen. Sammu, who was watching Mogglesby’s face, must have read there the white man’s approbation of the casting, for the little man suddenly began snapping his fingers and dancing in the pit. Master,” he cried, “it is perfect, not a bubble, not a flaw!’ He put his hands out to the hot piece as if he would embrace it. ‘It’s amazing,” agreed the governor's agent. He turned to Loaga. “Why didn’t you want me to see this?” The head-man shrugged his shoulders, “It is a head—” “But, my heavens, what a head!’’ cried Mogglesby in eulogy; and then, more practically, he added. ‘It’s sculpture. It’s made of what—bronze? What earthly objection could any man have to sculpture?” Loaga lifted his hands as if this were beyond him, Sammu was charmed. ‘‘Master, come to the house of Mumbo. I will show you some wonderful heads.”’ Loaga began a hurried discouragement of this plan, but Sammu, with the 54 comicbooks.com