Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 11: what you’re looking at

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

Conrad thought they might have made most of the trip by water, because, as he said, the Persian Gulf ran up something like a hundred and thirty miles farther than it does now, and Old Eridu was a seaport town. But just at the moment something else was on my mind. ““‘Where did you learn to speak Somali?’ I asked Naluna. “*When I was litde,’ she answered, ‘I wandered out of the valley and inte the jungle where a band of raiding black men caught me. They sold me to a tribe who lived near the coast and I spent my childhood among them. Bue when I had grown into girlhood I remembered Eridu and one day I stole a camel and rode across many leagues of veldt and jungle and so came again to the city of my birth. In all Eridu I alone can speak a tongue not mine own, except for the black slaves—and they speak not all, for we cut out theie tongues when we capture them. The people of Eridu go not forth beyond the jungles and they trafic not with the black peoples who sometimes come . gainst us, except as they take a few slaves.’ _“L asked her why they killed our camp servant and she said that it was forbidden for blacks and whites to mate in Eridu and the offspring of such union was not allowed to live. They didn’t like the poor beggar’s color. “Naluna could tell us little of the history of the city since its founding, outside the events that had happened in her own memory—which dealt main- ly with scattered raids by a cannibalistic tribe living in the jungles to the south, petty intrigues of court and temple, crop failures and the like—the scope of a woman's life in the East is much the same, whether in the palace of Akbar, Cyrus or Asshurbanipal. But I learned that the ruler’s name was Sostoras and that he was both high priest and king—just as the rulers were in old Sumer, four thousand years ago. El-lil was their god, who abode in the temple in the lake, and the deep booming we had heard was, Naluna said, the voice of the pod. “At last she rose to go, casting a wistful look at Conrad, who sat like a mam in a trance—for once his confounded bugs were clean out of his mind. “ “Well, said I, ‘what d’you think of it, young fella-me-lad?’ ““It's incredible,’ said he, shaking his head. ‘It’s absurd—an intelligent tribe living here four thousand ycars and never advancing beyond their an- cestors.’ “You're stung with the bug of progress,’ I told him cynically, cramming my pipe bowl full of weed. ‘You're thinking of the mushroom growth of your own country. You can’t generalize on an Oriental from a Western view- point. What about China’s famous long sleep? As for these chaps, you forget they're no tribe but the tag-end of a civilization that lasted longer than any has lasted since. They passed the peak of their progress thousands of years ago. With no intercourse with the outside world and no new blood to stir them up, these people are slowly sinking in the scale. I’d wager their culture and art are far inferior to that of their ancestors.’ “*Then why haven't they dapsed into complete barbarism ?* “ ‘Maybe they have, to all practical purposes,’ I answered, beginning te draw on my old pipe. ‘They don’t strike me as being quite the proper thing for offsprings of an ancient and honorable civilization. But remember they 9 comicbooks. com