Adventure Magazine Cover — page 106: what you’re looking at

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

104 snorts, whistles, grunts or thuds—who knew what sinister or startled shapes they implied? ‘“‘And who cared?” Kifaru seemed to say, with his gigantic head up, his big, fringed ears cocked forward, his restless, absurd tail cocked high. He did not anyway—not even for the barbed wire mimosa, the wait-a-bit thorn or the acacia, upon whose four and even six- inch meat-hook or straight, spiked skewers you or I would have left all the flesh we owned. Kifaru went through them all with that armor-plated unconcern that can go only with pretty well the thickest hide in Nature, and the weight of a steam roller to back it. Once, as happened to Tartarin of Tarascon, Kifaru heard lions roar; but it was they, not he, who stood aside—growling in a horrible sinister way among the inky shadows. Once too he came upon that last word in agile death, two leopards, with the dam of a zebra foal at bay, and chased them, exploding with snarls, up a phenix palm tree full of bees; and once—ough!—he trod upon a python fifteen feet long, who, after the unspeakable manner of the serpent, had dined, not wisely but too well, and could not—simply could not—get out of the way. It did, however, when Kifaru had done with it—get out of everybody’s way for- ever. And all the time Kifaru traveled with his patent India-rubber, steam-press jog- trot that not the roughest of rough ground or the most fearsome of impenetrable thickets seemed able to check, till the great umbrella-like euphorbia trees closed in and marched him solemnly along by the double-troughed, tunnel-like hippopotamus paths to the river. The river slid in the moonlight, like a flood of mercury between banks all alive with fireflies, tree frogs and wheeling, churring nightyjars. NOW it is written that, though he eel may feed, not even the greatest | =J land animals, the “left-overs” from the prehistoric, rhinoceros, elephant—but not hippopotamus for he is a water beast— may drink in safety. | Kifaru must have known this, but his size had made him arrogant. He drank, and, because his horns seemed always to get in the way of his eyes, he failed to see the quiet unimportant little Adventure ripple upon the oily current that may have been the ring of a fish on the rise, or—it may not. Certainly he with the wonderful nose did not fail to note the abominable stench of stale musk that pervaded the air a minute later. He drew back with that amazing agility that is always somethir¢g nearly akin to magic with rhinoceroses and elephants; but the quickness of the croco- dile’s rush was even a quicker miracle. Twelve feet of corrugated horny armor plating, two rows of hooked meat saws, a chaos of flying waters, and—the “‘croc’”’ had him—by the horn. : Apparently the crocs do not look before they leap. Equally apparently, having once taken hold, they are either almost physically unable, or too cold-blooded, to let go. Certain it is that the saurian’s grip upon Kifaru’s peculiar twenty-nine inch, three- toed ‘‘near fore’? seemed as if it was a fixture for good. Only one mistake the scaled nightmare made—in the depth of the water. It was shallow under her ponderous belly, and a crocodile not in deep water is robbed of half its terrors. Still, she had quite enough left, and the tug of war that ensued was—titanic. What might have happened, what might not have happened, after that no man can say, for with extraordinary suddenness and heralded solely by a deep, cavernous grunting comparable only to a fog-horn, some tremendous Thing awoke to life and commotion in the forest labyrinths on the top of the riverbank and charged down the hippo path to the water with not much more noise than a runaway traction engine. As a matter of fact, it was an old bull hippopotamus, lord of those particular reaches, who, hearing the uproar of the battle, suddenly conceived the notion that enemies were between himself and his be- loved deeps. And when a hippo gets that into his slow brain it is all up with any living thing in his path that may not be able to get out of it. Get to the water he will, straight and in the least possible in- terval of time. Nothing can stand up to him, and all that he knocks down comes out the other end flat as a pancake. It was sheer luck that he passed so close to Kifaru as to brush his side, instead of barging clean into and upsetting even the rhino, as he weighed four tons. Then he Co DOOK (©