Avon Fantasy Reader No. 11 — page 71: what you’re looking at

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

stand went over Mogglesby, and in the silence it occurred to him that there might be modes of perception without the use of words—even the dreaming banyan—he interrupted his own musing to ask. “Why should I come up if they are all gone?” For answer Luomo made her clacking sound again, and then said— “He will come down as slowly as he can, master, so as not to startle you.” A slight noise overhead caused the Englishman to look up and, at some distance up in the branches, the governor's agent saw a huge man-like thing gazing down at him. It was vast and gray, and its fangs and wide nostrils and cavernous eyes and the peaked ears suggested a ferocity and frendishness beyond anything imaginable. The mere fact that the gorilla was descend- ing. as Luomo had said, very slowly, gave the white man, not a feeling of safety, but a sense of being crept down on, of being stalked by some devil. ' The thing seemed a thousand times worse than the impersonal coils of the boa; there was something human, something intimate and demoniacal about it. And even amid the cold horror it evoked, through Mogglesby’s mind flickered the reason for this profound revulsion; his far-off ancestors had fought creatures such as this for millenniums before they established their human supremacy. The whole idea of devils is based on some closely related sub-human species of the animal race. “This is—” here Luomo made a simian sound which can be approximately rendered by the syllables “Keckechex.” ““This is Keckechex,” she said, “the wood-man who leaped over the stockade of my village five years ago and who brought me here.” The white man looked at the woman, then back at the monster and im- agined the horror of such an ordeal. “Does he remember doing that?” asked Mogplesby, under the prevail- ing human impression that animals have very short memories or none at all. The black woman turned back to the thing and uttered a queer barking. The simian chattered in return. Then apparently some sort of misunder- standing arose between them, for Luomo replied with a sharper tongue, which provoked more chatter from the gorilla. Presently Mogglesby broke into the dialogue. “Wel, does he remember it?” he inquired again. The black woman turned to the white man with the protruding lips of an angry Baloonga. | “He says of course he remembers the follies of his youth. He's calling me a folly of his youth!” A wrinkle of humor crept into the fantastic interview for the Englishman, but this allayed all doubt in Mogglesby’s mind that the black woman’s questions and answers were authentic. He looked up at old Keckechex and suddenly the gorilla ceased to be sheer monster. It was such a human thing to do—steal a woman, live with her until the years extinguished the flames of his desire and then suddenly decide that all women are follies—quite like any old valetudinarian in a Fifth Avenue club. Mogglesby did not press his personal curiosity further. It was quite evident 69 comicbooks.com