Adventure Magazine Cover — page 33: what you’re looking at

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

Buried Gods of the old moon was warmed by the flush of sunrise. His eyes strained eagerly to follow the light, slowly percolating like milk poured into rum, but not until the rim was stained crimson by the sunrise could he distinguish objects clearly. There was no sign of the other occupant, whom he had not heard for some time. The prison he saw to be the bottom of a volcanic shaft, about fifty feet across. The walls were as perpendicular as a lamp glass. The things he had stumbled upon during the night, which had rattled, were, he saw, the bones of a sheep or a‘goat. He rose and walked cautiously across to the great stack of ivory, which contained a thousand tusks at least, worth over a quarter of a million dollars. But he was too occupied with his position to be much excited at the moment. He stopped cautiously at the edge and looked around. Through the cave door, and the only one, by which he_had entered, the white stalactites and _ stalagmites gleamed in the growing light, suggesting the top and bottom jagged teeth of some terrible beast with its mouth open. Besides refuse and many pieces of broken native calabash blackened by fire, there was nothing on the smooth surface of the shaft bottom. He continued on around the corner of the stack and stopped. Lying asleep on the hard floor within a crude hut made out of some of the tusks, was the white stranger. Dorsay tiptoed toward him and _ peered down at him. The body was that of a big man. The shoulder-blades stuck through the remnant of a striped cotton hunting-shirt like the hips of an old cab-horse. The hair and beard were long, matted and snow white. One claw-like hand, protruding beyond the head, revealed long nails. In the corner of the primitive shelter was a rifle with the barrel yellow with rust. A jack-knife, broken near the haft, was in an- other corner, peeping from behind a pile of blackened calabash. Asleep, the face of the man looked peaceful and untroubled. Rather from the fear of witnessing the lunacy leap into the eyes than from any other consideration, Dorsay withdrew silently. For a moment he stood like a caged bird staring upward at the small circle of paling. blue sky above him. He placed one hand over his brow for a. mo- 27 ment as if the sight were too painful or brilliant. He glanced again around the empty floor and at the teeth-staring cave. The re- checking, as it were, of the situation seemed like a heavy burden. He sat down and held his head in his hands and concentrated to marshal all the facts he had as yet observed. Evidently the other prisoner had either been lowered into the trap or had been lured the same way as he had been. That was evident. The walls were quite twenty-five feet high and utterly unscalable. Through the door into the cave and out by the way he had come in lay the only hope of escape. Yet why hadn’t this poor soul, he asked himself, been able to find that way out? That he hadn’t arrived crazy was revealed by the fact that he had been intelligent enough to tear off a bit, or several bits for all he knew, of his striped shirt and somehow heave them out of the shaft—probably by tying them to pieces of broken calabash, surmised Dorsay. He wondered how long ago that had been. He had no means of even guessing, and the principal could not tell him now. Surely he must have been there for a very long time. One didn’t go crazy in a few weeks. Vet He jumped to his feet muttering: “Tt’s no use sitting here. I’ve jst got to find a way out.” He gave another glance to reassure him- self that the other was still sleeping, and then made for the cave door. “Cave can’t be very big,” he added to himself. “Ought to be mighty easy to find the glow of daylight through the other door.” He made straight ahead, keeping the door behind him; went on until the forest of stalactites and stalagmites shut it out. Then he peered in all directions, but no sign of a glow could he distinguish. He struck a few of his remaining matches and continued on, telling himself that the reason why the other man had failed was because he had not had light to carry hm far enough; he would succeed and come back to rescue the poor soul. The sense of desperation in the depth of his mind pre- vented him from thinking beyond that open door to the wide world. Every two matches he stopped, peered, waited to focus his eyes, blundered on, and lighted another. -He had meant to use only half the matches in case— ‘The half was COMIC OOOKS (E@)