High up the slope of the mountain-side, lurching slowly across the bare, bleak slabs of granite, was a Beast, and he was like unto nothing known outside the frenzy of delirium. Swartly green was his huge lizard-like body, and covered with filthy excrescences of a livid hue. His neck was the lithe neck of a boa-constrictor, but glossy as with a sweat of oil. A coarse, heavy, serrated tail dragged and lolloped along the rocks behind him, leaving in its wake a glutinous, snail-like smear. Four great feet or flippers paddled and slushed beside—rather than under—this mass of living horror, urging it lingeringly and remorselessly toward us. The great neck swayed and hovered before it, poising the little malignant head. The horny eyelids winked languidly over the deep-set wicked eyes. The lean, red tongue, slavering over the thin, hide-like lips, wagged out at us as if in mockery. The teeth, and the nails in the webbed, puddy feet, were yellow and tusklike, and a skinny dewlap rustled as it crawled across the stones.
Three hundred yards away the Thing stopped and shook and swung its horrid neck at us almost derisively. The luminous eyes shone iridescent beneath the slow winking lids. The poised head swayed uncertainly.
Suddenly the long neck stiffened. It set stiff as a rope that warps a ship from harbor. The eyes settled into a glassy stare. The swallowings that had pulsed at the junctions of the neck and dewlap ceased. The muscles became rigid. A hideous paralysis seemed to fall upon it as if by magic.
A sigh—almost a sob—shivered up into the stillness, and I looked at my companions. All of them were staring, staring, staring—three of them with eager, human, living faces, the fourth with the carven visage of the dead.
Parsons might have been graven from the rock. His hands were caught upon the lapels of his jacket; his lips and teeth were slightly parted; his eyes burnt their steadfast gaze upon the Beast unblinkingly. But for the measured rise and fall of his chest, he was as unstirring as one of the cañon boulders.
Then I saw that the ghastly Thing was staring with concentration at Parsons. As I watched, it gaped upon him. Parsons opened his jaws with measured, automatic motion, and gaped back. The sinuous neck swayed. Parsons stretched his throat with horrifying imitation. The thing advanced three ponderous steps. Parsons lurched forward a like space draggingly. The long serrated tail lashed to and fro once and again. Parsons waggled his body monstrously.
I glanced at the glacier cave which opened invitingly fifty yards away. Then I turned to measure the Horror intently with my eye. Beyond a doubt his gigantic limbs could never pass it. I rushed at Parsons, and seized his coat-collar. He struck at me furiously and unseeingly, his eyes gluing themselves to the fascination before him. I yelled to the others, and then simultaneously we made a rush to the cleft in the glacier face, bearing with us the struggling sailor. He hit out madly, his frozen death-like eyes still rapt upon the Beast. Shrieking, fighting, but still staring, we shoved him through the icy waterway, and heaved him with great splashings round the corner that screened the entrance.
As we lugged him back into the blue dimness of the cavern I pressed my palms upon his eyelids, and bawled reassuringly into his ear. As if a garment fell from him his body lost its rigidity; as I removed my hand his eyes looked back into mine with the natural light soft within them. The tense glare of a moment before was gone. He began to sob and cling to me.
“Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord,” he yammered, gripping my arm till I could have yelled with the pain; “the eyes of him—the blisterin’ eyes. They dragged me like a puppy on a string. I ’ad to go an’ be thankful for goin’. ’E’ll ’ave me yet, ’e’ll ’ave me yet. ’E’ll nip me up an’ break my back as if I was a bilge rat, an’ no more. Oh, for the Lord’s sake ’old on to me, or I’ll be cracked like a nut in ’is ’orrid jaws, an’ I didn’t sign for no dragons, m’lord, but only as deck ’and an’ not for no wanderin’s in devils’ lands.” And so on and so forth did he incoherently complain, covering his face from the sight of the approaching monster, grovelling at my feet on the damp sandy floor, as we others watched the gaunt Fearsomeness approach.
As it waddled clumsily up to the entrance we shrank further back into the gloom of the cavern. It stopped as it straddled across the out-gushing stream, damming the waters with its ungainly bulk, and forming a turbid pool. It lifted its pink, pointed snout curiously, and sniffed the air with parted lips. Then the little triangular head swung the full length of the neck into the cave, and the smell of noxious breath and musk clouded down upon us, making us cough with its disgusting effluvia.
The teeth snapped asunder as the lithe tongue licked across them, and as they closed again the breath hissed between them. The green light from its eyes shone luminous in the twilight of the overhanging ice. There was a swish and rush of released waters as it moved forward, and closed in upon the cave mouth. The dimness grew to utter night save for the faintest glow that filtered in from above, and the two pitiless eyes shone poised in the darkness like living coals.
I fumbled for the match-box, and tried to strike a vesta, but my trembling fingers spilled the half of them. The few seconds of horror, while I picked and fiddled at them in the darkness, and those two orbs of searching horror swayed above me, is an experience I am not likely to forget if I live to be a hundred.
As the dips took flame, and we saw the nearness of the Thing, we gasped with the freezing fear of it and backed still further into the recesses of the glacier. The ice began to melt where the heat of the horny excrescences pressed upon it, and for one unreasoning moment I seriously considered if he meant to break in upon us by this slow means. But the sight of the thick, curtain-like glacier, dark above us with its hundreds of feet of virgin ice, reassured me. Little by little, as the first shock of terror began to dull, I pulled myself together.
The others too, I noticed, were beginning to bear themselves more like men and less like whipped puppies. Lessaution actually donned a triumphant expression, and his lips moved. For a moment or so, though, his voice failed to respond to the call of his intelligence. Finally he burst into words.
“Well, my friends, well! What have you to say? Here you have the god Cay—the great Beast of the document, the great absurdity that could not possibly exist. Do we see him? Is he here, or is it possibly a dream, and we shall all awake together?” and the little wretch laughed, actually laughed exultingly, as he grinned round upon us.
As for me, when I heard his words my heart gave a great leap. I had utterly forgotten the horrible old story of the document. Looking on this atrocity, I could but wonder if there was any truth in it, and in the fearful tale of the devouring of Alfa, the sacrificial virgin. And as I speculated on Hardal’s wild frenzy if he saw her set in the path of this filthy monstrosity, I did not marvel that he had been hot to avenge his love or to die with her, even if unavailingly.
And then, as you may imagine, my thoughts wandered off swiftly to Gwen, and my gorge rose and my pulses leaped outrageously at the bare idea of seeing her or any other human being in the bestial Thing’s maw. The remembrance that she and twoscore other souls were swinging on that open pool, the easiest possible prey to this crawling Horror, made me curse deeply below my breath, while behind the imprecation followed earnestly a prayer.
Parsons still babbled and chattered in the background with his face to earth. Denvarre and Gerry stood silent, their faces as white as the ice-splits beside them, but Lessaution’s color was returning, and his show of bravado increased. He strode a pace or two nearer the swinging head, and began to look up at it inquisitively, waving his hand and strutting as if he stood before a class.
“You see, my friends, you see,” he expatiated with a platform manner, “this is of the supposedly extinct race of the Dinosauria. Of this animal and others like him we have examples in the Secondary period and the Jurassic formation. Of this class, but not of this order, is the great Sea Serpent, at which imbeciles pretend to laugh, but it has been seen—ah, yes, even as we see this monster before us. Since the days before history he has been here—this great and wonderful beast, and to us—to us who have toiled, comes the honor—the supreme honor to discover him. He was old when the race of Maya came; he is older now. And yet we stand familiarly before him. We look up at him, and there you see he wags his head. So we say belle chance de faire votre connaissance, monsieur, and we bow to introduce ourselves,” and the little man smirked and bobbed to the hideous head as, shuttle-like, it weaved restlessly from side to side of the cavern before his eyes.
It was the most absurdly ghastly combination of the horrible and the ridiculous that ever presented itself to a sane brain, to see that self-important little ass parade himself and point before that loathsome presence. His round little stomach was silhouetted black against the glistening ice, his arms were spread abroad, his toes out-turned, and swagger perspired from his every pore; while above him swung that living climax of horror, arrant in its filthy gruesomeness, indecently manifest in the face of nature. One might well be forgiven if one barely gave credence to one’s own eyesight.
As the Frenchman made obeisance forward, spreading his palms outward, and shrugging his shoulders with this outrageous buffoonery and travesty of courage, like a flash the gaping mouth dropped down upon him, and the red, sinuous tongue lapped out at him.
Uttering a shrill cry he stepped backward. His footsteps were hasty and uncertain, and his feet slipped upon the smoothness of the roof drip that swamped the rocky floor. His feet fled from under him, and he rolled over, falling within reach of the eager, straining lips.
The tip of the curling tongue fell upon his shoulder. The roughnesses of it clung to his jacket, fastening themselves to the coarse texture. He struck out at it wildly, and his palm brushed the red, rasping surface. His hand fell back bleeding and flayed, torn by the ragged point as it scored across it. He shrieked aloud, squirming and dragging desperately at the hold upon his arm, wriggling frantically. Above him the green eyes flamed scornfully, gloating upon him as a stoat might on a struggling rabbit. Out of the open jaws the saliva poured upon him, drenching him with noisomeness.
For one stupefying second we were paralyzed, fascinated by abounding horror. Then Denvarre’s rifle sprang to his shoulder, and as we leaped forward a shot re-echoed clatteringly down the dark aisles of the icy passages. A deep, livid gap showed angrily and red in the lapping, sinuous tongue. With the swiftness of light it swept from its hold upon the jacket, rending the stout cloth in the suddenness of the release. Before the crack of the rifle had died into the silences we seized the little man’s outstretched arms, and shot him back into safety. We heaved him to his feet, gasping, panting, his teeth chattering with the black terror of his escape.
The light and the untainted air began to rush back into the cave, as with a heavy lurch the beast withdrew its blocking body from the entrance. The dark blood was dripping in gouts from its wounded tongue, mixing with its saliva in pools upon the rocks, and sinking smearingly into the sand. Even in that moment of horror I couldn’t help noticing how the red stains shone upon the yellow nails in each webby foot, and how the pulses in its wrinkled dewlap increased their throbbings with the sudden pain of the wound.
As it waddled sulkily away from the cave mouth, Denvarre slipped in another cartridge, and aiming carefully for its head, fired again. The merest shred of horny skin flicked away from above its eyelid as the bullet thudded home, and not a vestige of blood showed upon the green hide. Evidently those scales were bullet-proof.
It turned with a puzzled air as it felt the rap of the ball, looking back at us in an almost meditative manner, as if wondering if we had anything to do with this thing. Then its eye caught and dwelt upon the Mayan mummy, which still lay half divested of its coverings upon the slab of stone beside the stream. It ambled forward a pace or two, nosing at the carrion uncertainly. Then it swung its head toward the ice-stream, and laved and slobbered its tongue in the water till the bleeding had well-nigh ceased. There was a snap of his bony jaws and a twist of the hard lips as the head shot back again. A single gulp sufficed, and both coats and body were gone. Nothing remained but the slowly-sinking swelling of the long thick throat, and a ragged shred or two of cloth upon the gray stones at its feet.
With heavy strides it moved off ponderously in the direction whence it came, clambering up the rubble of the volcanic slope. For a quarter of an hour we saw it dwindle into the distance of the mountain-side, till finally it rounded a spur of the cañon and disappeared from our view.
Then we left our staring, to which we had kept with an intentness which only those who have experienced a like nerve-sapping fear can understand. First we examined poor Lessaution’s palm and shoulder. They were in a sorry case indeed.
The surface of his flesh where the rasping tongue had swept it was scored as if by some huge nutmeg-grater. The skin was hanging from it in thin strips and filaments. Where the utmost tip had touched his cheek in the swift withdrawal was a deep, livid scar like the brand of a hot iron. His left palm was raw, not a vestige of skin remained upon it.
We set the unfortunate little chap upon a boulder outside the cave, and I tore a rag or two from my shirt, wrung them out in the stream, and washed and cleansed the wound to the best of my ability. With the remaining lint I bound up the quivering hand and shoulder, and improvised a sling from a handkerchief. Then we set ourselves to consider what should be done.
“We ought to follow the brute and not rest till we’ve finally polished him off,” said Denvarre emphatically. “Supposing he descended upon the ship when we were away?”
“I am supposing it,” said I, “and it makes me sick when I think of it, and that’s why I say return to the ship at once to warn them in case he pays them a visit. How are we to track him among all these rifts and gorges of the mountain-side? and meanwhile he may be rolling down upon that undefended ship in that open pool. No. Home first, hunting him down afterward—if you like. As for me, I fail to see how we are going to do it without losing our own lives over the job.”
They all seemed to have a good deal to say upon this point. Lessaution, in spite of the pain of his wounds, had not lost his voice, and offered plan after plan of the most strategic order, being frantic for further interviews with the monster, the discovery of which he regarded as the culminating honor of the expedition. But by degrees Gerry and I managed to instill a little sense into him.
We pointed out that we were not prepared to cope with this bullet-resisting abomination, our only chance of destroying him being apparently to decoy him within range of our little six-pounder signal gun, and see if that would have any influence with him. We did not know the recesses of the gorge as he did, and should be at a great disadvantage, for he was liable at any moment, if disturbed, to suddenly emerge from round a corner, and, as Mr. Parsons described it, “nip us like bilge rats.” That while we were wasting time discovering a lair which might well be empty, he might recover himself of his wound, and bear down upon the unprepared ship’s company. That for the present he had fed, his wound was smarting, and he was unlikely to follow and overtake us in the open as the Frenchman suggested. And thus after much talk our decision was taken for return.
So down the cañon we retreated hastily, with many backward looks, as you may well imagine, our hearts quaking at the thought of what might happen if we were tracked to the shallowing lake and there trapped in our helplessness. I must own that little Lessaution came out a trump. The agony of his half-dressed wounds must have been great, but he made light of them as veriest pin-pricks, actually laughing over his adventure as the best of jokes against himself. For the pride of our achievement, in finding not only a buried race but an extinct animal also, had lifted him above all considerations of common sense. He revelled in a sort of scientific ecstasy which obliterated all remembrance of the narrowest squeak ever man had from a fate of unimaginable horror. And so he ceased not his happy chatterings for so much as a single instant.
Parsons moaned and groaned respectfully all along the way, referring in dismal undertones to the land of his birth, and the extremely slender probability of his ever seeing the same again, regretting fervently his past treatment of his maternal progenitor, with many fanciful pictures of her emotions could she see the hapless case of the son of her constant sorrow. And he spent so much of his time looking jerkily over his shoulder, as sudden spasms of fear convinced him that we were being pursued, that his falls averaged not less than twenty per mile. Gerry was silent, brooding, as I could understand, over the perils that might be menacing the ship in our absence, and it was a phase of thought which commanded my full sympathy and respect. Denvarre, who is a keen sportsman, whenever Lessaution gave him a chance, discoursed learnedly on rifles, displaying much technical knowledge of initial velocities and expanding bullets, as bearing on the chance of penetrating the monster’s hide. But I fear he lacked an audience. And as the hours slipped by we reached the far end of the gorge, and stumbled out on to the roughnesses of the farther moraine. Here we had to give all the assistance we could to Lessaution, whose useless arm was a terrible handicap to him on such going, and it was with great thankfulness we saw a few hundred yards before us the point at which the boulders ceased, and the smooth going stretched to the shores of our little lake. We reached the corner that screened the ship and the pool from us, and turned it, rounding the jutting rock with eager eyes. As one man we stopped to gape upon the empty foreground. Both ship and lake were gone.