Avon Fantasy Reader No. 14 — page 44: what you’re looking at

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

and in the hot, heavy nights crossing the Indian Ocean we stayed up on deck and argued ull the dawn. “He put forward theories that were not supported by scientific evidence; but that lack of evidence did not trouble him. Neen. He just jumped across the gulfs, and when you asked him how he got to the other side, he laughed. He thought that scientists lacked imagination, that they spent too much time building bridges instead of hopping mentally to the other side. It may be so. Dreamers see many things. “One of his theories I had big cause to remember. I will never forget it. He thought that longevity was a matter of breathing the same atmosphere that we had started to breathe. That life depended on the constancy of the atmos- phere. You see, we did not know what the atmosphere was composed of, till Cavendish made his tests at the end of the Seventeenth Century. And Caven- dish did not know of argon and of other substances. “ “The atmosphere we are breathing is not the same as the Pleistocene or the Neolithic man breathed,’ said Iyin. ‘It is not the atmosphere in which the mammoth and the dinosaur lived. We know nothing of its composition in those days. A change in it might have killed them off. Then again the longevity of Methuselah might be accounted for by the air he breathed. Some special brand.’ “Sometimes he made me laugh; sometimes he puzzled me. When we were near Tandjong Priok, he told me the reason of his visit. He was searching for old atmosphere! Old. Ja, oud! Atmosphere that had not changed for hundreds of years. Air which was the same air that blew over the Malay in the days when King Asoka sent a piece of Buddha’s body to Java as propaganda for Buddhism. They were good propagandists in those days. “ “How can you find such a place?’ I asked Ilyin. “*There might be an old temple bottled up and forgotten,’ he said. ‘You know how wine gets better with age? If I found such a place, the atmosphere might have improved.’ “T said good-by to that Russian at Tandjong Priok. I was not sorry. He talked too much. We Dutch say, Der gaan veel woorden in een zak. Many words go to one sack.” Kromhout rose from his chair as a soft whimper came from within the bungalow. The black ape was on the point of becoming a mother, and the big naturalist went inside to comfort her. I could hear his voice assuring her that he was close by, and that no harm could befall her. Returning to the veranda, he took up his story. “I went here and there in my business of collecting specimens. [ made a trip to Samarinda in Dutch Borneo, and I went from there to Makassar and on to the little San Miguel group in the Sulu Sea. Now and then [ thought of that Russian and his theories. It was not easy to forget him. Ideas that are a little crazy stay in our heads when we forget matters that are founded on common-sense. “I came back to Batavia, and I got a commission which took me to the vol- canic country near Padjagalan. It is bad. The sulphur fumes and the carbonic gas kill birds and animals that are fool enough to stay around. It js a little 42 comiclooks.com