Adventure Magazine Cover — page 58: what you’re looking at

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

48 his hands a bone that he had been gnawing at during the dance. Having lain down and covered himself he proceeded to gnaw the bone with great relish. From out of the dark a voice demanded if he was gnawing a bone. “Ewe bawo,’’ he answered. “Yt bope ngum tya yako zala yi nyama,” commanded the voice of the stalwart one, for it was he. 'bwer” “6 Bawe.’’ And so being only a boy and no more ‘greedy than others, the idea that the bone would be covered with ‘“‘red live” meat if he tied it around his middle appealed to him and he followed out the command by doing so, breaking a string of beads from around his neck in order to get the sinew with which to tie it, which was a great sacrifice for a little boy when you consider how fond they are of their beads. EARLY in the morning, just before dawn, Upina awoke, thinking that the evil spirits were really eating up his stomach. He put his hand on the bone. It was alive with things that crawled. ~ In panic fright, Upina tugged at it, once, twice, and broke the cord that held it to his body and flung it from him. He jumped up and rushed out of the hut like one possessed, brushing off those crawling things from him in a terrified frenzy. The stalwart one, as a well-seasoned warrior should be, was a light sleeper and awoke when the bone struck the mud wall, where his offspring had flung it away—any- way he had been expecting something of the sort to happen—and smiled contentedly as he heard Upina stamping the ground out- side in efforts to rid himself of the seeming curse. The stalwart one knew that the boy was cured from any further tendency to gluttony where flesh was concerned. Knowing this, he smiled as he turned over to sleep until the sun was up. When Upina had tied the Bone to his middle he had promptly lain down, cov- ered his head with the robes as all natives do and fallen fast asleep with that graceful abandon that always seems strange to any one not used to native ways. Sleeping on his side as he did, the bone rather slid down on the mat, ‘and after a while ants worked their way through the mat and Adventure TimPorea RivAR peLacos ea UM BiNDOe MRaAALT or Tem @RBAT RAD Cocce> SVEELAS RAD Stace thre ~"93 (Vee SE a, Sour AFRIGA= 1899 maoe)> LOPENCYEA? TRAD attacked the bone; then tried the gristly part; and then sampled the sleeping Upina with the results related. As to how these little termites “knory” that there is any meat or bones near them, I make no effort to explain. That is up to some entomologist to try to solve. Place a bone anywhere inside the hut or outside, and in a little while the red ants will be seen to be crawling over it. - During the rainy season they work out; salt is poured on them, under which they disappear in the hole that they have made. Dig down one, two or three feet, no sign of them will be found. How do they live? Where do they live? None can answer, and as to what purpose they serve, ask the native. He will shrug his shoulders and say andazi, perhaps to teach aba ntwana not to eat too much meat. Upina sat in the boys’ hut, one of a dozen or so, by the fire, listening to a spell- binding, imaginary tale told by one of his companions, a tale that only the native boy knows how to tell. And so the story ended —pela kantsomi—and the listeners breathed normally again, their imagination quick- ened. They bombarded the _ spell-binder with questions as to what had happened to the different characters in his tale. Upina heeded them not, for his mind was turned inward for on the morrow he was to take his first plunge into the world. He was to go with several other boys into the wil- derness and the veld. For four days to look after the tribe’s immense‘ herd of cattle. He was only about four years old, or five _at the most, yet he had been able to survive Conn DOOKS (© iin