Avon Fantasy Reader No. 11 — page 58: what you’re looking at

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

“It may help,” agreed Mogelesby, looking at his satellite. “Where were you going?” “The truth ts we're going into this lodge room,” explained the doctor. “You see I know something of the signals and rites of the M’Bembi and tonight I'm.to be made a full-fledged member.” “The devil you are,” ejaculated the big Englishman in astonishment. “Yes, you see you're the government here now, and I’m your man. I thought it would be very handy for you to keep in touch with the secret society through one of your own men. I talked it over with Mokato. He said he would propose me. We thought it was his duty in a way.” The black man with the empty ear lobes nodded slowly to the idea. “By George, it is an idea,” agreed Mogglesby, sucprised at this outcome in his satellite. “You can go ahead with it.” The little man signaled the drummers. The rw7:-tidy-dum-dum broke out afresh and the procession with the doctor at its head marched into the huge malodorous house of the idol. Loaga, the head-man, went hurriedly with Mogglesby to the hut that had been set aside for the Englishman. He lighted a coconut oil lamp for his guest, indicated a woven mat with a panther skin laid over it for a bed and then hurried back to the lodge room himself. The coconut oil lamp made some light and some smoke of a rather pleas- ant odor, Outside, the drums in the noisome idol house filled the night with their pulse. Mogglesby lighted a cigaret at the coconut flame, then sat down on the skin bed to think over the queer position in which he found himself. The mixture of Negro heads and gorilla heads around the dais in front _of the idol pave Mogglesby a strange impression. It renewed the fact in his mind that the black men believed the animals could talk. His own experience with Luomo suggested some truth in this theory. Now as he sat watching the guttering of his lamp, the possibility that the great simians were a kind of people with a rudimentary language and were moved by erotic impulses toward the Baloonga women not only touched him with amazement but filled him with a kind of vague horror. Presently he wondered at his own emotion. This horror was so nebulous, so reasonless that he fancied it must have come to him out of some enormously remote ast. P His cigarette went out unnoticed as he sat musing on it and presently the strange fancy came to him that once, perhaps, his own far distant ancestors stood in the same position as these present-day Baloongas. The Baloonga- gorilla warfare must be a replica of the far-off strife when the Cro-Magnons found and exterminated the Neanderthal men in southern Europe. And in the Cro-Magnon blood, in Mogglesby’s own blood, still lingered the horror of animalish countenances and neckless shoulders that had saved his forebears from mating with and losing their human identity in a cruder species of sub-human animals. The Englishman’s odd reverie was broken into by the pad of a naked foot outside his hut. Then a black man slipped softly into his door with two round 56 comicbooks.com