Avon Fantasy Reader No. 11 — page 62: what you’re looking at

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

“ “Aye, aye, strong was Mokato” “And the head-man chanted— “ “Mokato was a noble man.’ “And the rest of us sang back— “Aye, aye, noble was Mokato.’ “And the head-man sings— ““Mokato gives his strength to his brothers.’ ‘And we sings it back, and it went on Jike that, Governor, all of us shaky mside that it wasn’t us lying there in the fire. Feeling grateful that Mokato was it and not us. Then we raked off the fire—" “Hush! My God, that’s enough!’ cried Mogglesby. The doctor ceased talking while the big man stared at him in horror. “Doctor, what in God’s name ever possessed you?” “Mr. Mogglesby, it isn’t what you think it is,” cried the doctor in a sort of anguish to make him understand. “There’s something about it, that— that lifts a man up—it makes him realize his—his comrades are brothers— My God, I can’t explain it—” : Mogglesby got to his feet, walked widely around the doctor and went out the door of the hut. In the early dawn the Baloonga village still slept. The big Englishman moved down the village street with the doctor's narra- tive still shuddering in his mind. There was a kind of childish feel to the account which gave it a tang of unreality. The whole thing seemed a game. But the Englishman suddenly realized that the games of children were the far off reproductions of exactly these cannibalistic orgies. What was the meaning of childish burying in leaves, of building bonfires and leaping through the flames, of shrieking flights to escape the child who was “it”? What was the meaning of all this except the timeless handing down of such rites in the games of children from an immemorial past: The very fact that the doctor's narrative had seemed childish was proof of its verity. Mogglesby moved up the village street with a painful feeling of immediate responsibility for this remote survival. A Frenchman, an American, might have considered the problem with considerable abstract interest, but with the Englishman it was a personal affair which he must rectify; and that is why tiny England governs so much of the globe. In the gray light, Mogglesby saw a renewed smoke arising from Sammu's furnace. As he drew closer he saw the pit was empty, but a new bal! of clay sat in the corner. He looked at the thing. It gave him a turn. Then he walked on with an impulse twitching through his powerful body to reach out and brush away the whole abomination of the Baloonga village. At some distance down the street began the first noise of the day, the pounding of barley in a see-saw pestle. Mogglesby could see a black girt lifting and drawing down a stone whic was attached by a rope to a beam like a well lift overhead. The white m regarded her with loathing as the future mother of cannibals, He we 60 comicboo