Argosy, Vol. 122, No. 1 — page 61: what you’re looking at

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

THE MAD PLANET. It was a ceaseless, undulating mass of hills and hollows, ridges and spurs, all of them colored, purple and brown and golden- yellow, deepest black and dingy white. And from the tips of most of the pointed . hills little wisps of vapor rose up. A thin, dark cloud had gathered over- head. Burl could look to the right and left and see the hills fading into the dis- tance, growing fainter as the haze above them seemed to grow thicker. He saw, too, the advancing cohorts of the army ants, creeping over the tangled mass of fungus growth. They seemed to be feeding as they went, upon the fungus that had gathered into these incredible monstrosities. The hills were living. They were not upheavals of the ground, they were fester- ing heaps of insanely growing, festering mushrooms and fungus. Upon most of them a purple mould had spread itself so that they seemed a range of purple hills, but here and there patches of other vivid colors showed, and there was a large hill whose whole side was a brilliant golden hue. Another had tiny bright-red spots of a strange and malignant mushroom whose properties Burl did not know, scattered all over the purple with which it was covered. Burl leaned heavily upon his club and watched dully. He could run no more. The army ants were spreading everywhere over the mass of fungus. They would reach him soon. Far to the right the vapor thickened. A column of smoke arose. What Burl did not know arid would never know was that far down in the interior of that compressed mass of fungus, slow oxidization had been going on. The temperature of the interior had been raised. In the darkenss and the dampness deep down in the hills, spontane- ous combustion had begun. Just as the vast piles of coal the railroad companies of thirty thousand years before had gathered together sometimes began to burn fiercely in their interiors, and just as the farmers’ piles of damp straw suddenly burst into fierce flames from no cause, so these huge piles of tinder-like mushrooms had been burning slowly within themselves. There had been no flames, because the surface remained intact and nearly air-tight. ol But when the army ants began to tear at the edible surfaces despite the heat they encountered, fresh air found its way to the smouldering masses of fungus. The slow combustion became rapid combustion. The dull heat became fierce flames. The slow trickle of thin smoke became a huge column of thick, choking, acrid stuff that set the army ants that breathed it into’ spasms of convulsive writhing. From a dozen points the flames burst out. A dozen or more columns of blind- ing smoke rose to the heavens. A pall of fume-laden smoke gathered above the range of purple hills, while Burl watched apatheti- cally. And the serried ranks of army ants marched on to the widenings furnaces that awaited them. | They had recoiled from the river, because their instinct had warned them. Thirty thousand years without danger from fire, however, had let their racial fear of fire die out. They marched into the blazing orifices they had opened in the hills, snap- ping with their mandibles at the leaping flames, springing at the glowing tinder. The blazing areas widened, as the purple surface was undermined and fell in. Burl watched the phenomenon without compre- hension and even without thankfulness. He stood, panting more and ‘more slowly, breathing more and more easily, until the glow from the approaching flames reddened his skin and the acrid smoke made tears ‘flow from his eyes. Then he retreated slowly, leaning on his club and looking back. The black wave of the army ants was sweeping into the fire, sweeping into the incredible heat of that carbonized material burning with an open flame. At last there were only the little bodies of stragglers from the great ant- army, scurrying here and there over the ground their comrades had denuded of all living things. The bodies of the main army had vanished—burnt to crisp ashes in the furnace of the hills. There had been agony in that flame, dreadful agony such as no man Would like to dwell upon.. The insane courage of the ants, attacking with their horny jaws the burning masses of fungus, rolling over and over with a flaming missle clutched in theif cCOomiclbooks.com