Our camp—a fire, our knapsacks, our multi-serviceable pot and fryingpan, and our outstretched figures, with the instruments, always including our camera outfit, a few implements and guns—was at the foot of a thicket of high ferns, under a group of palms, and we were at the base of an inconsiderable hill or rise, whose top these ferns and palms concealed. Hopkins had just returned from stalking some of the wild pigs, but he was empty handed; Goritz was very busy devising a stretcher or hurdle for our various belongings, to be carried between two of us, by turns, and the Professor was ruminating, with head in his hands, his wing-like ears protruding. I think I was asleep. Our supper had been made memorable by tea; a hidden package in one of our packs contained this precious leaf, and it was quite noteworthy how it revived and cheered us.
Well, I felt a sharp jolt, and a cavernous abyss yawned under my feet, and with a monstrous effort I snatched a providential branch and saved myself from falling. My eyes opened; I had seized Hopkins’ leg, and it was he whose energetic shaking had broken my slumbers with this nightmare.
“Get a move on, Alfred. The scrap of the centuries is going on up there.” He pointed to the grove and hilltop. “If we had a motion-picture camera, we’d have everything in that line knocked into junk. Get up. The White Hope is having it out with the sable champion.”
Utterly bewildered by these incomprehensible words I struggled to my feet, and we both scrambled pele-mele to the top, and there joined Goritz and the Professor, who hardly noticed our approach, so absorbed were they in watching the strangest spectacle that ever human eyes beheld.
Out on the level on a thin carpet of herbs and grass was reared the violent and horrible shape of a writhing, bending, gracefully oscillating, whitish-green monster, and before him the infuriated figure of a black pig. The pig’s bristling mane was erected, his small tail, like a bit of black rope, beat upon his muscular buttocks, his eyes gleamed viciously, his muzzle with its expanded nostrils was upturned, and his challenge sounded like a cornet, and again like a rolling drum.
But the creature before it mastered all attention. The elongated head of a saurian armed along its jaws with sword-like teeth, a long curved neck, a thorax but slightly enlarged over the width of the rest of the body, provided with a short pair of front legs, terminated by claws perceptibly webbed, and opening and shutting with a nervous rapidity, noticeable dull-colored scales striping its sides, a pair of much longer hind legs on whose skin-enwrapped, stilt-like support it had raised itself, and then a prodigious tail, heavy and fat at its protrusion, but lengthening out into a thin python-like body whose involuntary movements swayed it to and fro in serpentine motions through the flattened weeds.
THE CROCODILO-PYTHON AND THE WILD PIG
The color of the beast was most loathsome; a sickly yellow white it seemed at first; a closer study showed it to be a nauseating green, like a frog scum, and yet through it all, as if summoned to the surface at the will of the creature, coursed reddish blotches, whose inflamed contrasts gave the whole skin the aspect of inflammation, of purulent disease. This coloring prevailed over the neck, the faintly swelling belly, the sides, and over the hind rump and thighs and anal region. The monster awakened an awestruck repulsion. But at the moment its source, home, meaning, were swallowed up in the thrilling, tremendous combat between these strange litigants, a wild boar of today, a saurian—a tyrannosaurus or something like it—of the Cretaceous!
The huge lizard was skillful, wavering, crafty and sinuous. It swung from side to side, and when it attempted to descend on its antagonist its mouth opened, almost absurdly, as if waiting for the appetizing bite its hunger or its ferocity anticipated. A wicked mouth, shining with yellow teeth and slobbering with saliva! Any disposition to laugh at its floundering indecision was soon, or at once, overcome by hatred of its hideousness.