Adventure Magazine Cover — page 35: what you’re looking at

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

Guns of the Gods that Yasmini had sat on the spurs. There was long, spun-gold hair to be combed out—penciling to do to eyebrows—lac to be applied to pretty feet to make them exquisitely pretty—and layer on layer of gossamer silk to be smoothed and hung exactly right. Then over it all had to go one of those bright-hued silken veils that look so casually worn but whose proper adjustment is an art. But when they reached the bottom of the long hill and began twisting in and out among the narrow streets, it was finished. By the time they reached the temple of Jinendra, set back in an old stone courtyard with images of the placid god carved all about in the shade of the wide, projecting cornice, all was quiet and orderly inside the carriage, and there stepped out of it, followed by the same dark-hooded maid, a swift vision of female Joveliness that flitted like a flash into the temple gloom. It was not so squalid as the usual Hindu temple, although so ancient that the carving of the pillars in some places was almost worn away, and the broad stone flags on the floor were hollowed deep. by ages of devotion. The gloom was pierced here and there by dim light from brass lamps, that showed carvings blackened by centuries of smoke; but there was an un- looked-for suggestion of care, and a little cleanliness that the fresh blossoms scattered here and there accentuated. There were very few worshipers at that hour—only a woman who desired a child and was praying to Jinendra as a last recourse after trying all the other gods in vain, and a half-dozen men—all eyes—who gossiped in low tones in a corner. Yasmini gave them small chance to recognize her. Quicker than their gaze could follow, a low door at the rear, close beside the enormous, jeweled image of the god, closed behind her and the maid, and all that was left of the vision was the ringing echo of an iron lock dying away in dark corners and suggesting - nothing except secrecy. The good, square room she had entered so abruptly unannounced was swept and washed. Sunlight poured into it at one end through a window that opened on an inner courtyard, and there were flowers everywhere—arranged in an enormous brass bowl on a little table—scattered at ran- dom on the floor—hung in plaited garlands 29 from the hooks intended to support lamps. Of furniture there was little—only a long, cushioned bench down the length of the wall beneath the window, and a thing like a throne on which Jinendra’s High Priest sat in solitary grandeur. He did not rise at first to greet her, for Jinendra’s priest was fat; there was no gainsaying it. After aboyt a minute a sort of earthquake taking place in him began to reach the surface; he rocked on his cen- ter in increasing waves that finally brought him with a spasm of convulsion to the floor. There he stood in full sunlight with his bare toes turned inward, holding his stom- ach with both hands, while Yasmini set- tled herself in graceful, youthful curves — ‘on the cushioned bench—with her face in shadow, and the smirking maid at her feet. Then before climbing ponderously back to his perch on the throne the priest touched his forehead once with both hands and came close to a semblance of bowing, the arrogance of sanctity combining with his paunch to cut that ceremony short. “Send the girl away,” he suggested as ‘soon as he was settled into place again. But Yasmini laughed at him with that golden note of hers that suggests illimitable understanding and unfathomable mirth. “T know the ways of priests,” she an- swered. “The girl stays.” The priest’s fat. chops darkened a shade. “There are things she should not know.” “She knows already more in her small head than there is in all thy big belly, priest of an idol.” “Beware, woman, lest the gods hear sacrilege.” “Tf they are real gods they love me,” she answered. “If they have any sense they will be pleased whenever I laugh at your idolatry. Hasamurti stays.” “But at the first imaginary insult she will run with information to wherever it will do most harm. If she can be made properly afraid, perhaps— Yasmini’s golden laugh cut him off short. “Tf she is made afraid now, she will hate me later. As long as she loves me she will keep my secrets, and she will love me be- cause of the secrets—being a woman and not a belly-with-a-big-tongue who would sell me to the highest bidder if he dared. I know a Brahman. “Thou and I are co-conspirators because . COMME IOOKS (EO)