Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 49: what you’re looking at

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

over, or some racehorse falls down, or that Balkan king is shot. You think it is luck? It is not. The man with the camera sensed the accident before it happened. That is what makes the good press photographer. Sometime I will tell you a story about that business of sensing a smash. “Each day I would see that Russian stalking the girl. Ja, stalking her like a black panther stalking a mouse deer. Whenever I saw the flash of her scarlet sarong in the jungle, I would sce Ilyin close to her, And I would watch her eyes and watch those of the Russian The fear was growing greater in hers; in his was the belief that he would conquer. He would pull his mustaches and brag about the girls that had loved him in Moscow when he was at the university. He made me sick with his talk. “*You had better watch that old man,’ I said to him. ““Pooh!’ he cried. ‘He is nothing. The girl—ah, the girl is something pre- cious. Do you know, Kromhout, that she believes she is a reincarnation from other days? She speaks as if she was around here when things were happen. ing.’ “*Then she will know too much for you,’ I snapped. “‘*No woman knows too much for me,’ said that fool. ‘At the university they called me “Little Andrey, the Fisher of Souls.” She will be mine very soon. “Men are fools. We Dutch say: ‘Roasted pigeons do not fly through the air.’ It is a good proverb. “One morning I saw that old Sundanese creeping through the jungle on his hands and knees. I could not see Ilyin or the girl, but I guessed that old man was hunting for them. “That afternoon Ilyin was very gay. He sang little Russian songs that were all about girls who loved very much and who were willing to kill themselves for fellows. He sang them in his own language, but he translated them for me. J thought them foolish. Dutch girls would not do the things that those songs told of. Not much. Dutch girls keep their feet on the ground very hard. “*Tonight, Kromhout,’ said Ilyin, ‘something might happen. It has been a big day for me. Sava loves me. Da! She loves me a lot. And she has promised me that she will make old sulky Mokhan put on a show tonight to celebrate our love-pact. In that vault we might see the Past.’” The naturalist paused in his narrative. He sat silent in his big chair. I thought he might be marshaling the events of that evening of long ago, put- ting them in order, shaping them so that they could be intelligible. Or perhaps he thought that the pause might let the caressing fingers of the Malayan night bring to my mind the capacity for belief. Belief in the strange tale that he wished to unfold. “Jt happened as that Russian thought it would happen,” he said, and his voice was lowered as if afraid that the Tjandi Bororboedoer, squatting out in the thick darkness, might be annoyed at hearing him tell of the secrets of the long-buried past. “The girl persuaded the old man to put on a big show. Ja, a big show. And he did! “When we climbed down into that vault, I thought the lichen was more phosphorescent than the first time. It might have been just fancy. I don’t 47 comiclsooks.com