Adventure Magazine Cover — page 118: what you’re looking at

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

LI6 gold they might and get away from the place. The glamour of it held him but, with the fascination, he felt a curious dread. Treasure-trove like this was oftenest found in places where the earth denied sustenance to man or beast. It was a recurrence of a law of chemistry, he supposed, that placed elementary minerals in the still raw matrices of the world, yet now it seemed like a warning. All about them the endless caravans of ants perpetually crossed and _ recrossed, carrying provender, marching to battle, herding slaves, migrating, going about their own business, unmindful of the giant beings that could crush them underfoot by the tens of thousands and still not deter them from the hidden purposes of their steady evolu- tion. A flight of grasshoppers whirred out of a spinifex clump, dropped and rose again. Armored, like the ants, bony things like machines, terrible in their possibilities of ravage; destructive, at the last perhaps omnipotent. Suddenly the base of the lava crags wavered as if they looked through flawed glass. It disappeared and, in its place, there showed a ravishing vision of a pool with giant ferns about it, trees drooping overhead, blue waterlilies afloat amid great emerald leaves where brown, long-legged birds stilted, seeking snails. The mirage was so vivid that Perro rushed forward to the phantasmal brink of the water and paused half way to give a short bark and come foolishly back looking appealingly at his men friends as if to ask them what wizardry had roused this mock- ing magic. His eyes had deceived him but his surer nose did not. He saw water, but he smelled only sand and the faint spice of the spinifex, the sour stink of the ants. “This place is haunted, but nothing daunted, We'll gaily. ws The song died on Petrie’s lips and he collapsed, his lips blue, his fingertips pinched and his eyes sunken. They had found the treasure-p]ace—the caves proved that and the closer view of the formation, recognized by Reynolds, but sickness had reached out and _ touched Petrie with a spectral hand. The gayest, gamest of the three was paying the penalty of trespass. Cole and Reynolds picked him up and Adventure carried him through the mirage that faded as they advanced, reaching the caves, bearing him into the largest of them and putting him down on its damp floor. His flesh was cold, his eyes closed and his pulse barely susceptible. Cole opened the medi- cine kit and dosed him with cholera mixture that reeked of laudanum. ‘“‘We’ve got to get a fire,” he said to Reynolds, “‘if it’s only of dry grass. Got to get him warm and boil his water.” The dose restored Petrie slightly and the word ‘‘water’? made him repeat it with his parched, blue lips. He was close to col- lapse and Cole saw the importance of checking the disease before it ravaged the weakened system. Reynolds hurried out to come back with great bunches of the lower tiers of the spinifex clusters, his hands and wrists pricked badly but making nothing of it as he hastened to avert the disaster that threatened them. Soon there was a pile of yellow and brown blades on the floor of the cave that blazed_up readily and flung out an intense heat. The’crude petroglyphs that Reynolds had mentioned showed on the walls and ceiling, the light plaved far into the tunnel like interior of the cave. Petrie stirred to the warmth and vigor of the medicine. His eyes cleared, stayed open and his pulse went up. “I’m thirsty as the ——-,” he whispered to Cole. “Better, though, lots better, old chap. Not going to flop at this stage of the game.” Cole wrapped him in blankets, and while Reynolds went out for more of the far too inflammable grass that flared up and re- duced itself almost instantly to gray ash, he looked for a spot where water might be dug for. It showed moist on the walls and there were places where the ground was slippery with a pasty mud. It was damper in the tunnel and he entered it. Less than twenty feet in he came across the remains of a fire and other relics of savage occupancy. There were calcined bones, a scorched skull that separated as his foot struck it, but he barely noticed them as he saw several good sized pieces of char- coal and fragments of partly charred wood. He clutched at them eagerly and bore them back, putting them on the grass ashes and blowing at them until he had a compact fire on which he set a pannikin, with the last of their canteen water in it and a pinch of MICLOOOLK C@ inn