“Hereabout I may note in passing that my black tom at last found something smaller than himself—a hopping Deinosaur not much bigger than a rat. This he destroyed in triumph and partially ate—feeling the better and braver for doing so.
“Of course, I proposed to shoot one of these ‘dragons of the prime’ presently. Only I wanted a big specimen, if possible. I was too late for Anchisaurus—a giant whose footprints and tail-marks have been observed in the New Red Sandstone strata—and too early for Claosaurus, whose simple custom it was to eat off the tops of palms and tree-ferns in Cretaceous times; but I knew that those flesh-eating colossi, the Ceratosaurs, might lurk round any corner; I knew they had horns on their foreheads and took twenty feet of ground at a stride; that their footmark habitually covered a square yard of earth. These reflections made me cautious, and even nervous. Then again I remembered your fearsome Stegosaur, who also shone in Jurassic days. He was wont to take the air upon all fours; Nature had provided him with plates and spikes, a massive frame about thirty feet long, and two sets of brains; one in his head, the other in the region of his tail.
“I had a presentiment that Stegosaur must surely be at hand, and presently, coming round a corner, I found my faithful companion, with his back up, almost in the jaws of such a monster. The Stegosaur was apparently using neither his front brains nor those he kept in the rear. He simply blinked at Peter, but did not move or offer to molest him, being a vegetarian. I hesitated about slaying this great beast, and it was well that I reserved my fire, for, not five minutes after he had gone upon his way, I came face to face with another of Nature’s primeval experiments, quite one of the most terrific, fantastic and short-tempered Deinosaurs she has ever turned out of her workshop. This was Triceratops—a monster with a head six feet long and no brains at all worth mentioning, but a temper like ten demons. It could not control itself, even in the presence of an Archdeacon. Indeed, it lowered its vast horns and charged me passionately; while I stood my ground and kept wonderfully cool and collected—two things I certainly should not have done outside a vision. I gave Triceratops both barrels. I hit him chiefly because I could not miss him. He filled the entire foreground of that thrilling Mesozoic scene. He dropped five yards from me, uttered ferocious expressions, and passed away without a struggle. It was a great moment, and my success inspired both of us (Peter and me) with renewed confidence. We lunched beside that fallen Triceratops, and I found that the bag slung upon my shoulder contained a flask of very passable Irish whisky, a packet of sandwiches, and some cigars. I remember wondering where those sandwiches came from and who had cut them for me, and what they had been cut off. Maybe they were Deinosaur sandwiches, or Ichthyosaur. I had a tidy pie in my wallet too. It tasted like pigeon, but must have been Pterodactyl. Peter liked this better than the sandwiches.
“VERY PASSABLE IRISH WHISKEY”
“Then followed perhaps my most remarkable experience. I was resting awhile after lunch, finishing the whisky and smoking a cigar, while the black cat coursed about of his free will, when suddenly the weirdest sound that ever fell on mortal ear saluted mine. I never heard anything distantly approaching it before; I know not how to describe it. The sound was something between the hiss of a serpent and the coo of a dove. The primeval beast responsible for it evidently combined the vocal qualities of bird and reptile. Naturally I marvelled, for birds were still strangers to the world. And yet an element of music in the sound led me to suspect that a creature at least of semi-ornithological nature was making it.
“‘Peter,’ I said, for he was very excited at the noise, ‘we must be in the presence of an Archæopteryx! No other Jurassic concern could make that unutterable burlesque of melody.’ And I was right. A moment later I came across an Archæopteryx sitting on a fallen tree stump and singing, or, at least, under the impression that he was doing so. I stood and listened to the first dawnings of bird music; I, who knew what the lark, and the thrush, and the nightingale could produce at their best, gave ear to that cock Archæopteryx warbling according to his limited lights. It was pathetic to see how he enjoyed it himself, and how his hen enjoyed it. He was the very first thing of his kind that Nature had managed; naturally he could conceive of nothing finer than his primitive self and preposterous voice. He gurgled and hissed, and squeaked, and even tried to trill. Then Peter, who recognised in him a true bird, despite the fact that he had claws on his wings and teeth in his mouth, captured that unfortunate Archæopteryx after a tough struggle, and dragged him to me in some joy.
“Anon we walked the sea-shore, threading in and out amidst prodigious tortoises and sleeping saurians, some of the latter nearly thirty feet in length. And then a misfortune befell me, and I lost my faithful Peter. The silly beast became too venturesome. Familiarity with Jurassic marvels bred contempt in his feline mind, and he went too near the water. Whereupon a hungry Plesiosaurus popped ten feet of neck out of the waves, and Peter’s interest in Mesozoic matters ended. I was extremely sorry. Peter had been, as it were, a link connecting me with the future. He had belonged to my wife, and I could picture her bitter regret at this uncouth termination to his picturesque existence. And then I remembered that I was concerned with a period millions of years before Adam and Eve. This reflection sobered me and made me feel for the first time something lonely and separated from my fellow-men. I knew that I had entered my sixtieth year only a week before, and I felt that it was, humanly speaking, doubtful in the last degree whether I could exist until the dawn of the Christian era. It irritated me also to reflect that I should die twelve millions of years before my wife was born; and what was the good of being an Archdeacon of the Church of England ages and ages prior to the time when ‘Britain first, at Heaven’s command,’ had risen from out the azure main? Two things were transparently clear: there would be no professional work for me, and no salary either, for a considerable number of æons. I distinctly remember worrying about the salary, and also about the unquestionable certainty that I should never see the cathedral again. Why, at the most generous computation, our world had only reached the twentieth verse of the first chapter of the Book of Genesis! Candidly I was discouraged; and, at this moment of depression, I met Brontosaurus Excelsus—almost the largest of the Deinosaurs. He walked on all fours, measured sixty feet, and probably weighed twenty tons. Not that I cared. He passed me by with silent contempt, and I have a recollection of sneering at him, too, as he strode to the water. I said:
“‘You are not as big as Atlantosaurus for all your unwieldy bulk. He stands up on his hind legs, too, and walks about like I do, who am the King of Animals, and an Archdeacon!’
“But he paid no attention. I doubt if he even heard me. These vegetable-eaters were all sleepy, lazy, unambitious brutes. ‘What,’ I said to myself bitterly in my dream, ‘is the good of being sixty feet long if you have no brains and no conversation? I would sooner be a tree or a rock than one of these addle-pated monsters. But Nature is still a baby girl, and these are her clumsy playthings and stupid dolls.’