Avon Fantasy Reader No. 11 — page 77: what you’re looking at

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

As the Englishman stood looking at the enormous trees that surrounded the savanna, a kind of relief went through him when he saw for a certainty that the Baloongas would not be asked to vacate their village and trek beyond the mountains. The black men stood in the sunshine and presently one of them sug- gested that since they had come for nothing they might as well go back. To this the wizened Saminu objected. “Let us stay where we are, brothers, and wait for the wood-men.” The feeling of respite from some enormous struggle began to fill Mog- lesby’s nerves. The white man’s intellect had never believed the gorillas frould come, but somehow his nerves and muscles had believed it. ‘No, I don’t believe they will come,’ he said, glancing up into the heavy gloomy leaves of a paddlewood tree near which he stood. Then he glanced up, he stopped breathing and simply stood and looked. Between the two curtains of leaves he saw the flattened demoniacal face of a wood-man looking down at the Baloongas. For ten seconds the Englishman simply stood and gazed at the fanged ideousness of the animal above him. And he realized more poignantly an ever that such horror as he felt could not have sprung up against a imple animal. He knew again it was a profound reverberation in his nerves f some ancient inheritance, a racial hatred that had sprung up when the ro-Magnons had struggled with the Neanderthals for the possession of urope. And now here was the most primitive battle of the human species eing refought in the jungle of Africa. He broke through the spell of archaic horror and pointed upward, “There is one up on that branch,” he said aloud. “I suppose there are others,” The black men became suddenly alert, poising their assegais. Loaga peered at the creature, then waved his men away. ‘Let them come down,” he said. “I suppose there must be more.” The simian seemed to understand the clearing maneuver of the black men below, for it caught a branch with its long arm, swung lower, crossed an open space among the limbs with a fearfully easy agility and dropped to the ground. At this signal the whole nearby group of giant trees became alive with the anthropoids. and fifteen, perhaps twenty, of the animals dropped to the around, then moved away awkwardly to the oP osite side of the savanna, running on their short legs and on the knuckles of their long arms. It gave them a look of wonderfully agile cripples scuttling away on crutches. The gorillas drew up in a huddle on the opposite side of the field. Mog- glesby stood looking at his enemies across geologic epochs. He sensed by their very huddled formation that his antagonist would employ inhuman holds and tactics. He stripped off his shict and undershirt in order that the neck band might not inadvertently strangle him and advanced toward the simians. A broad black animal with an enormous spread of arms and satanic countenance came out to meet the human being. As the two creatures ap- 7) COMiClOOKS.COMmM