Evening star. [volume], August 24, 1947, Page 10, Image 87

About Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972

Image provided by: Library of Congress, Washington, DC

                
failed, that all he’d found in the jungle was Death. But it
seemed otherwise; the box he gave them to take back was
heavy. He’d made it himself, roughly hewn, and with the
secrecy of the scientist he’d packed and sealed it when he
knew that he, himself, was doomed.,
j “It will take four of you to tote it — two at a time,” Mark
S* graff had told them.
“There are four of us,” said Barry, the student.
“You'll have to spell each other,” Markgraff directed.
“I want every man to promise me that he’ll stick with it
until it’s safely delivered. You’ll find the address on top.
What you have there, if you deliver it to my friend Professor
MacDonald at the coast, is more precious than gold. You
won’t fail? I can assure you that you'll be rewarded.”
___^ They promised him, because he was a dying man and they
They came to hate it as a prisoner hates his chains
Sfjft
BY LESLIE GBBBBN BARNARD
Illustrated by E. Chiriacka
Sweating through the jungle,
they were bound by a promise to
bring out an unknown treasure
through hell and was as eternity. They hated still more, as
time went on, the thing they carried; but. they bore it as if it
were an ark of the covenant and their God was a jealous God.
“We got to get Markgraff’s stuff through,” they said.
"He was a good guy. We promised him.”
Of the reward at the journey’s end they said nothing; but
each man mumbled of it in his own mind, in his own way.
They had gone with Markgraff into this green hell hwaiw
he paid them well in advance. Now he was dead and they were
living. Death had struck him down —some swift tropical
disease had ended this geologic madness of his.
They would have understood the whole thing better if his
quest had been for gold. But Markgraff had said, smiling:
“There are substances which science has found to be more
precious than gold.” At the end they thought Markgraff had
A Short Story
rffiY came from the primordial jungle, four gaunt speci
mens of the human race, walking as men might walk in
their sleep, or before a taskmaster whose lash drives them on
to the limit of endurance. Their beards were matted, their
skin full of sores, and the leeches had sucked their blood day
and night.
They hated each other with the hatred of men bound by a
duty, confined by the green walls of a jungle whose paths led
1A
icspccicu iluii. iiw ^lauiioiiiy luiu
held them together when, a score of
times, with the jungle’s vast monot
ony eating into them, they might
have quarreled fatally.
Then Markgraff had smiled at
them, and died. He did it quietly,
as he did all things — this elderly
1 scientist, this man who’d bound
i them to him by ties of intangible
strength. They buried him in the
heart of the jungle, baring their
heads, and Barry, the student,
spoke brief, remembered words of
committal. Even as the clods fell,
the jungle loomed larger, more men
acing. Each man felt a shrinking of
his own stature, a terrible alone
ness, a doubt of his fellows, a suspi
cion that, with Markgraff gone, it
would be every man for himself.
They were a curious assortment:
Barry, the spectacled student;
McCready, the big Irish cook;
J__i_x . i
Wiv uvnu-(uiU'VUll die
bum Markgraff had enticed out of a water-front tavern to
follow him; and Jim Sykes, the sailor, who talked a lot about
home but never went there.
Sykes had the compass and map, which, when they stopped
to rest, he would get out and study. He put a stubby finger on
it and said, “There’s where we’ve got to get to.” It looked
easy — on the map...
The jungle deepened about them. They missed Markgraff,
who no longer could encourage them with an optimism that
was usually justified, who could find in an almost impenetra
ble tangle some logic for going forward. At first they talked
with each other, the sound of their voices important to them.
... Soon speech became only anathema against the weight
they carried, toting Markgraff’s box through the forest...
Then silence fell on them, and something worse than silence.
Longing for his water-front tavern as a parched soul in
Inferno might yearn for water, Johnson began to find that
sudden ways opened to him, on the right hand or the left,
tempting him. McCready’s face grew sullen and dark; he
kept repeating, “I’m goin’ my own way. I’m not traveling
with this outfit any more. I guess I’ve got the guts to make it.”
And he would cast a brooding, speculative eye on the map
to which Sykes, the sailor, clung.
As for Sykes, he developed a closed-in horror of this jungle
"«*«.** luaii-uap. lie wdmeu me sea. ne aemanaed
horizons. He mumbled about it in his sleep, and by day he
cursed the death that lay where grotesque insects and deadly
reptiles waited for the unwary. He spoke of his home, and how
for years he’d meant to get back to the missus and kids —
and now never would.
Barry, the student, said little, but there was a girl of whom
he was thinking. He’d lie sleepless, tormented by insects,
tormented by a face that at times, like the faces of those dear
to us, refused at this distance to come clearly. To think of her
was to think of a campus, green with spring and russet with
autumn; of a sports field, and classrooms, and a library; of
dances and moonlit walks, and a sweet, tearing moment of
good-by.
Sometimes one or another of them would pray — call out
in a way that the insensitive might think was cursing: He
had made this fierce jungle, these incredible trees, these
flowers, so large that they seemed to reduce man to a pigmy.
But the mind cannot quarrel with Nature successfully; so it
turns on its own kind. There had been bickerings and quarrels
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