A. Merritt's Fantasy Magazine, February 1950 — page 39: what you’re looking at

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

THE SMOKING LAND 39 I felt my forehead knot hard in a frown. I was greatly worried. I wanted te do something about it. I wanted to stop that stupid waste. There was enough water here to pipe through a whole town, and keep it snugly warm. Enough water run- ning hot to have a large-scale commercial adaptation. I could not guess how many tons of coal per day would be necessary to heat so much water to such a temperature. Then all of this problem dissolved, and left me laughing at my foolishness, for I realized that I was in the Smoking Land, some eight hundred miles as the bird flies from the nearest outpost of civilization— some eight months’ journey lay behind me. Yes, I could realize, now, exactly what Scanderov had meant when he said that I would have unfailing luck with me, night and day. For luck and Murder had literal- ly pulled me through by the nape of the neck ! Sometime I would have to face the ghastly impossibility of return, though I could hardly hope that luck like that would come twice to one man. At the mo- ment, though, I could put that thought behind me. There was enough and more than enough in the present to fill my mind! I was hungry, my furs and face were caked with ice; I was weak, and wobbly in the knees. The shock I had been through had been so great that I was still thawing out nervously, so to speak, inch by inch, and there still seemed to be yards of ice surrounding my heart. So I got up there in the mouth of that cave from which the hot stream poured, and from the sled put out my supplies, put the seal fat into the primus stove, and lighted it with a match from my fold of oiled silk, and started cooking, and adding another layer of soot to the deep aggregate which had been settling on me throughout these months, For I had long ago ceased being a white man. There was enough pure carbon on my hide to make a gross of lead pencils. I could have written an encyclopedia, using myself for the inkpot, so to speak. However, there I sat, shivering a little, only as uncomfortable, say, as a cat in a hail storm, and comforting a belly already filled with meat, with 'the heat, the fra- grance and the black powder of well boiled tea. Murder, too, had eaten, and we both, rested, CHAPTER 11 The Men Appear ELL, I had spent enough time resting at the cave, so I hitched Murder to the sled and turned in-: land toward the great smoking mountain in the distance. As I traveled, it grew greater and greater. From the distance, it! seemed to have fellows well nigh as high, | but as I drew closer to it, I saw that it| must be at least ten thousand feet high—| perhaps three miles of mountain lifting up there. As I went along, I got a clearer idea of' the geography of the end of the world. It appeared that the island, though rough-: surfaced, and with plenty of irregularities, was in general a high rim of cliffs pre- sented to the sea all around, and big hills behind the cliffs, and then all of the center of the island was lower, turning into gentle plateaus, broken only by low-roll- ing hills, Now, as I went inland, until the roar of the sea against the cliffs died and then was lost behind me, I came upon what have to be called the meadows of the Smoking Land. Some of them were sheeted across with hard ice, some were deeply covered with snow; but there were thousands of acres spotted only with ice or snow, and covered with dun-colored growths of herbage and grass. And it was in a big field of this sort that I first saw the musk-oxen, though long before I had discovered their sign. There were about five hundred of them in the herd, I think, and I expected them at once to form their circle and stand with low-, ered heads waiting for me to charge.| Those are their tactics—to make a wall of horns that will keep off the strongest polar bear in the world. And instinct has planted in their minds the ineradicable certainty that there is no other enemy in‘ the world than things that kill with tooth. and paw. They are. grand animals, and they are useful for a meat as good as beef ever was, , or better, and they’ have a length of fine, «~ GOMIIGooOo S C@