The best short stories of 1921, and the yearbook of the American short story
General
The best short stories of 1921, and the yearbook of the American short story
American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories -- 20th century -- Bibliography; Short stories -- 20th century -- Indexes; Short stories, American
"It was near sundown when we came to that building shown in that
photograph. The vegetation was so thick thereabouts that the temple, for
I suppose it was that, appeared before us suddenly. One moment we were
crawling like insects between the trunks of great jungle trees that shot
upwards seventy feet or more without a branch, as if they were racing
for dear life skyward, and then everything fell away and there was the
old building. It startled the both of us. We got the sensation that you
get when you see a really good play. You forget your bodily presence and
you are only a bundle of nerves. You walk or sit or stand, but without
any effort or knowledge that you are doing it. We had been talking, and
the sight of that building, so unexpected, startled us into silence. It
would any one. Believe me, your imperturbable man with perfect, cool,
self-possession does not exist. Man's a jumpy thing, given to nerves.
You may deny it and talk about the unexcitability of the American
citizen and all that bunk, but let me tell you that your journalists and
moving picture producers and preachers and politicians have caught on to
the fact that man is jumpy, and they trade on their discovery, believe
me. They've got man on the hop every which way and keep him going.
"There had been a gateway there once, but for some reason or other it
had become blocked with a rank vegetation. The old gap was chocked full
with a thorny, flower-bearing bush so thick that a cat could not have
passed through. Somerfield switched on one of his theories as soon as he
got over his first surprise. Worshipers, he held, had brought flowers
there and the seeds that had dropped had sprouted. It looked reasonable.
"Above the lintel was carved one of those running lizards. That you
noticed early. You can't see that in the picture because we took that
from the edge of a broken wall. You see, all the walls stood except that
to the left of this doorway and that had partly fallen and what was left
was chin high. We saw at a glance that the people who had built that
temple were handy with tools. The stones of the wall were quite big--two
feet or more square, and fitted closely. There was no mortar to hold
them but the ends had been made with alternate grooves and projections
that fitted well. The stone was a kind of red sandstone. But I told you
that before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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