Adventure Magazine Cover — page 119: what you’re looking at

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

Go-Fever tea. He knew enough about dysentery from his wartime experience to guess that the deadly amoeba germ was in the water and that boiling would sterilize it sufficiently for Petrie’s use. sa REYNOLDS went into the tunnel eee and dug at the wet earth, making a 28 hole that soon.began to fill. The grass flare died down and it was too dim for him to notice the bones at first. Cole said nothing. Aside from dampness, there was no smell of decay; the bones were old, innoc- uous remains of some cannibal feast held long since. As long as the water was boiled After his weak tea and another dose of the laudanum mixture Petrie slept; his pulse and breathing showed that he was fighting successfully against the attack. Cole and Reynolds made themselves a warm meal and some fresh damper, opening a can of peaches, setting some aside for Petrie, feeding Perro, boiling more water while the charcoal lasted and refilling their canteens. At last they lit their tobacco and sat talking in low tones. ‘“‘We’ll get out of here as soon as we can,” said Reynolds. “It’s a weird sort of dump. You’d think the blacks would be afraid to come here but those figures they’ve marked up show they used it and they must have packed in that wood specially. I’m not stuck on the hang-out. The gold ledge is sticking right out of the sand on the west side. Want to go and see it or wait till Petrie can go with us?” “Good idea, Tom. It'll buck him up, maybe and he'll like us to find it all to- gether. I guess you’re right about their packing in the wood. Wonder if there’s any stowed away. Solve things for us if there is.’ They had two electric torches that they had reserved so far, not having had especial use for them, with a feeling that they might come in useful in emergencies. With one of these they explored the tunnel. The broken top of the skull Jeered at them. It had high cheek-bones and practically no forehead. It looked as if it had belonged to ape rather than man. Cole said so, inspecting the skull with the torch ray. “They ain’t much better,”’ said Reynolds. ‘‘One thing, they never use skins for cloth- ing. If they get cold they light a fire 117 Some of the women make little bark capes, but that’s all. But they’re smart, like monkeys. Cut down the telegraph poles and use the wire for fishhooks. Just a bit better than animals. Man told me once in the Sydney Museum the highest de- velopment they showed was that they knew how to polish stone for axes. Say, look there, up in that hole!’ The tunnel and the cave itself were prob- ably first caused by a blowout of gas or the outflow of melted lava as a liquid core from the hardening mass. In the sides of the tunnel were fissures that had been used as Closets. In the one Reynolds pointed to where the beam of the torch had strayed— and in two others—lengths of wood were stored, dry wood roughly severed into four- foot sticks. The labor of bringing them across the desert, unless somewhere a tongue of woodland projected into it closer to the cave—and they had seen nothing of the sort from the mountains—must have been prodigious. It marked the cave as a grisly rendezvous for secret orgies but the sight of the fuel was far more precious to them in the emergency than the gold they | had come for. It meant sterilized water and hot food; it meant life itself to Petrie. There was enough of it, used sparingly, to last them for days. They packed it jubilantly into the outer cave and started a real fire. When Petrie woke it was still glowing and he stared at it unbelievingly. ‘“‘Almost makes one believe in the per- sonal God,” he said weakly but cheerily, “or have you chaps sold yourselves to the devil who made this place for a load of his own private fuel?” He was better in the morning, insisting upon getting up. “Fine gold-hunters we are,’ he said. “Imagine you two aren’t as keen for wealth as you pretend to be.” And the light in his eyes was bright with friendliness and recognition of their real cause for delay. The fierce sun, coming straight at them while it flung grotesque shadows from the spinifex clumps and silhouetted the strange shadow of the lava peaks, made him stagger a little but he refused the help of an arm and went with them round the rugged buttresses of lava, Reynolds leading, striding on ahead, anxious to prove his claim. DOOK C© inn