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Only the road ahead was clear: a one-way track, the foot-high earthy bank and the pine-roots beside it, two distinct ruts, and a roughening of strewn brown bark and pine-needles, which, in the beating light of the car's lamps, made the sandy road scabrous with little incessant shadows. She had never known anything save this strained driving on. Jeff and Milt were old tales, and untrue.
"He'll break cover in a minute," said Stalky to himself. "Then we'll run into him before he gets away." Such boys, scabrous boys, moral lepers the current of his words was carrying King off his feet evil-speakers, liars, slow-bellies yea, incipient drunkards...
It was the bare bones of this old earth, as sombre and foreboding as any ruin of granite under the wrack of the bleak north. As for Bougie, these African villages are built but for bright sunlight. They change to miserable and filthy ruins in the rain, their white walls blotched and scabrous, and their paths mud tracks between the styes.
To complain that life is "often more than sad enough, with its inequalities confronting us, its gilded prizes and its squalors side by side, its burdens and its trivialties pressing in upon the soul," as does Marguerite Merington in a late and otherwise excellent magazine article, is to strike a popular chord, but the note is false and scabrous, the philosophy less than commendable.
Smitten, apparently, with a certain remorse that he had suffered her virginal eyes to reflect so scabrous a spot, he put a sheltering arm around her and said, sadly: "That, little daughter, was a THEATRE." At which limp climax, perhaps, you smile a little.
I had a lamp, and at my forehead the lighted candle, and I went on quickly, seeing it useless now to choose my steps where there was no choice, through a passage incrusted, roof and sides, with a scabrous petrified lichen, the roof low for some ninety yards, covered with down-looking cones, like an inverted forest of children's toy-trees.
The walls and towers of Rahn gleamed bright gold, in parts, and in parts they seemed dull and scabrous with some creeping fungus stuff, and on one side of the city the wall was overwhelmed by a triumphant tide of green. There the jungle had crawled over the ramparts and surged into the city.
And Chet Bullard, his blond hair shining like the gold that was inlaid and encrusted upon the walls of the room Chet Bullard, Master Pilot, once, of a distant Earth did not wait for the assault to reach him, but sprang in upon the beastly things with swinging fists that came up from beneath to crash into grinning faces; to smash dully into white, scabrous flesh; or catch beneath the angle of out-thrust jaws jolt the ghastly faces into awkward angles.
Coming through the tangled jungle growth, it seemed as if spears of flame shot through the air, irradiating stray patches of scabrous tree-trunk with unbearable light. For an instant the illumination held. Then there was a distant, cracking detonation. The unmistakable explosion of gun-cotton split the air, and its echoes rolled and reverberated through the jungle. The light went out.
He set forth this idea with much circumstance and considerable ingenuity in an article which he sent to me for publication in "The Fortnightly Review". The theme was scabrous; but his treatment of it was scrupulously reserved and adroit and I saw no offence in the paper, and to tell the truth, no great ability in his handling of the subject.
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