send his call singing thunderingly across the jungle-belts and
grass-lands to the far beach of Ringmanu. Simple and primitive was
it as was the Red One's consummate artifice. A great king-post,
half a hundred feet in length, seasoned by centuries of
superstitious care, carven into dynasties of gods, each
superimposed, each helmeted, each seated in the open mouth of a
crocodile, was slung by ropes, twisted of climbing vegetable
parasites, from the apex of a tripod of three great forest trunks,
themselves carved into grinning and grotesque adumbrations of man's
modern concepts of art and god. From the striker king-post, were
suspended ropes of climbers to which men could apply their strength
and direction. Like a battering ram, this king-post could be
driven end-onward against the mighty red-iridescent sphere.

Here was where Ngurn officiated and functioned religiously for
himself and the twelve tribes under him. Bassett laughed aloud,
almost with madness, at the thought of this wonderful messenger,
winged with intelligence across space, to fall into a bushman
stronghold and be worshipped by ape-like, man-eating and head-
hunting savages. It was as if God's World had fallen into the muck
mire of the abyss underlying the bottom of hell; as if Jehovah's
Commandments had been presented on carved stone to the monkeys of
the monkey cage at the Zoo; as if the Sermon on the Mount had been
preached in a roaring bedlam of lunatics.


The slow weeks passed. The nights, by election, Bassett spent on
the ashen floor of the devil-devil house, beneath the ever-
swinging, slow-curing heads. His reason for this was that it was
taboo to the lesser sex of woman, and therefore, a refuge for him