Adventure Magazine Cover, March 20, 1925 — page 109: what you’re looking at

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

The Grotesques of N’gibbidi boiling water, just as a female took the pot and with a ladle sprinkled hot water on the poulticing abomination all over him. He got it that he was a patient in a sweat- house, bedded down in goat stablings. His reaction to the discovery was a lazy interest in the’ treatment. He had no energy to think ahead, to speculate on what might come after the cure—he slept. THE witch-doctor was bending over Mon him again. But he was not to be =Os tortured this time with lime and red pepper. After a long look into his eyes the wizard gave a sign to the women in the background. A terrific din of tom- toms, hand clapping, shrieking, and blowing through hollow sticks with pebbles in them ensued. The wizard pulled a plug from an inch hole in the wall over Roach’s head. Roach managed to remember that all this meant that the evil spirit of his sickness had been exorcised and was being scared out through the little hole, which presently the wizard plugged against its return. A woman went down on her knees at the foot of a wall and began clawing wet clay from a stopped up entrance. The vapors began to clear. Roach was lifted from the bed to the floor, his body washed, then dressed in his khaki rags. Then he was pushed and pulled through the hole at the foot of the wall into a white dawn and carried across an open space that was the hub of radiating, narrow streets. The wiz- ard walked behind, making marks in the ground which the evil spirit dared not pass. Oh, they were doing the best for him, according to their way of it. But why such friendliness? He was set down in an open fronted house facing the open center, so that he had all the comings and goings of N’gibbidi in view. A procedure so con- trary to African suspicion, which sees a spy in every stranger and ensures his lodgment in the Hut of the Stranger at the end of the village, where he can spy upon nothing, got Roach guessing as to what manner of man was Kolo—what his policy might be. He had been restored to health, his pack was there in the room—his property - inviolate—and there, too, was a gourd of goat’s milk, a calabash of makita cakes and wild hohey. All this was so contrary to that resounding smack on the gilau and the growl, “I am the Burr that sticks to the OI passerby” that Roach was all at sixes and sevens. Anyway he was too weak to care or to think deeply. Now, it might almost be that the witch- doctor had cast a spell or worked an en- chantment on Roach. Not that this was his his explanation when telling aboard the Liverpool boat of those N’gibbidi days. He confined himself to picturing scenes, and seemed to make the pictures screens to his emotions, or as if he said— “There; it was like that. Make what you can of it.” His enchantment was probably no more than the spiritual flights of convalescence. He spoke of the beauty of clouds as if it were a discovery. Nothing in the world is so beautiful as clouds after months of monotonous steel-blue, empty skies, noth- ing more refreshing that the feel of rain in the air after the oven heat of the long dry spell, nor anything more full of poetry than palms, that have been as painted scenery for many months when they sail their fronds in vagrant winds. Roach was as those who have come back to the world from sickness that has taken them close to the Borderland and find the world intenser and more full of meaning. But it would have annoyed him to be told that when the physical senses are at low ebb the psychic is stronger. It would have been like imputing the exalting gladness, the sense of oneness with the universe of those convalescing hours to weakness, to something exotic, when he wanted robustly to believe that his N’gib- bidi experience had been the sanest passage in his life. He was in N’gibbidi in quest of the one- man boss job, the biggest thing he had ever struck—oodles of tin right on the surface; and yet he sat there dreaming on the great cloud masses with sunflamed edges, and dreamily watching the cloud shadows sail- ing slowly over the roofs and sands, while before him flowed the simple life of N’gib- bidi, domestic and placid. And where were the monster-men? Were the crocodile skulls put on only when a stranger was seen nearing the town? A free, buoyant people! Bronzed Eves with clay pitchers balanced on erect heads, babies carried on hips. Men in -togas, walking leisurely, as if a day were a year. A bow to every back. Had Kolo been really a troubadour, how he might have rolled CORnNIECLO© (©