The Unicorn in China.
The Sz, or Malayan Rhinoceros, as pictured by a Chinese artist in the ’Rh Ya. The Indian Rhinoceros is one-horned. The African square-lipped rhinoceros, or “white rhino,” though possessing two horns, one behind the other, has the forward horn so long and powerful as to be truly unicorn-like, though it is nasal and not frontal.
A warm and steaming mist hung with a dull purple haze over a landscape that seemed familiar, though the boy knew that his eyes had never seen it before. Huge monkey-puzzles thrust their spiny arms into the heavy air, ferns a hundred feet high swayed their livid green tracery against the lowering sky, and here and there a leafless pillar twenty feet in height showed where still remained a struggling horsetail of the weird forests of the age before. Over all hung the red ball of the sun, unable to pierce the low-hung curling wreaths of mist which held the landscape like a bowl.
The glow of the half-obscured sun shone dully on the quaking bog and deepened the shadows of huge black forms, monstrous and menacing, which seemed to be sprawling in the ebon water. To these, there was no shape, although their gross inertness breathed of life. In the distance there was a stir, and Perry, gripping his knees hard upon the Thing he rode, cried aloud in the somber stillness—
“What moved!”
No sound answered. Silence held that flowerless world like a vise, that world that had never heard the song of a bird, but a rumbling vibration in the distance seemed to the boy like some vast leviathan stirring in its sleep. Sure was he that he saw one of those sprawling shapes—which, near by, seemed like stone—heave itself upward and sway a monstrous neck. Straight in his path, one of the murky masses lay, huge as though the earth had spawned a creature vaster than a whale. In panic, Perry forced the Thing that carried him to swerve to the left. As he raced by, the boy forced himself to look at the sprawling bulk. Shapeless and moveless as a block of stone it lay. But when, a second later, some impulse moved the lad to turn his head back to look again, the seeming stone had lurched itself across his path as though to bar any returning way.
With a shiver, the boy’s glance turned to the creature that he rode. Its horse-like head and short, coarse mane gave a clue that its light limbs and four spreading toes seemed to deny.
He was nearly thrown to the ground as the Thing shied, then reared, nearly on its haunches. And Perry, looking to see the cause of fear, distinctly saw a quiver run over another monstrous mass immediately before him, like the rippling muscles on the back of a black panther about to spring. He drove his heels into his steed.
“They’re waking,” he cried hoarsely. “I’ve only got until the sun goes down!”