"Sulphur doesn't steam," Jerry thought idly, still sniffing at the fumes. "So the white plumes mean there is water, or some volatile liquid, mingled with the deposits in these pits."
After a moment, he realized that he was no longer taking random sniffs of the fumes, but was actually indulging himself in a regular orgy of breathing. The smell of the sulphur was as strong and piercing as he'd ever known it, but absent was the almost simultaneous effect of raw throat, streaming eyes, and hacking cough.
"The desert air must be nearly all sulphur gases," he realized. That would explain the hue of the sky, and the not-unpleasant silvery haziness of the atmosphere.
"And I, if I don't keel over in a few more moments, must be a sulphur-breathing creature."
Sunlight, from nearly directly overhead, was warm and comfortable upon his head, back and hindquarters. An unusually flexible feeling in the caudal region of his spine told him that he had a tail, even before he swung his huge head about for a glance at it. The body, as bronzed as the rock on which it stood, was something like a lion's, although the taloned feet, from heel to the first leg-joint, were horny and rough in appearance. They were not unlike those of a barnyard fowl, if considerably thicker and decidedly more lethal.
That, save for a hard-to-see fringe of darker fur that ran up his neck toward where he felt his ears to be, was all of his body that he could view.
"I wonder," he mused, "what my head looks like?"
A brief turning of the problem in his mind gave him the solution to it. It wasn't the best possible way of getting an idea of his latest cranial conformations, but—unless there was a looking-glass lying about—it was the only way at hand.
Jerry tilted his head until his eyes fell upon his shadow on the brown rock beneath him. By tilting it from one side to the other, and joining the various silhouettes in his mind by a simple application of basic gestalt, he knew what his head looked like.
Very like a lion's, except that it seemed to have no external ear. A single slender silhouette that fell from the forehead region, stiletto-pointed, must be a sort of horn, unless it deciduated periodically, like a deer's antlers.