Croaking and blind, with our three clawed feet
Writing a language dumb,
With never a spark in the empty dark,
To hint at a life to come.’”
CHAPTER VII
The Deer Fels
I must hasten my story; so much remains to be told, more wondrous, strange and unnatural, though that last word is not to be interpreted in any of its senses as abhorrent. Far from it.
We hurried away from the scene of the peculiar combat and the fratricidal feast. I do not think we feared these hideous saurians. We looked for them, and the Professor exulted in their evident marks of an evolutionary history (philogeny, he called it) quite isolated or diverse from those established by Barnum Brown, Williston, Lowe and others for the sauropsida of the—Mr. Link I was actually going to say EARTH, in a foreign sense, for somehow in this Krocker Land we felt detached from all we had ever known or ever been. Had we been transferred to Mars or the Moon or any other inconceivably contrasted sphere, we could not have felt more inimitably separated from what we had called the Earth.
No more of the Crocodilo-Pythons, so Goritz called them, were seen. We believed that their habitats were in the half submerged broad flatlands that rose in archipelagos out in vast expanses of this inland sea. Perhaps we traversed a distance of one hundred miles before the mingled expression of sage desert and semi-tropical lake began to change. The opposite boundary of the lake (Goritz as our geographer has named it the Saurian Sea) became visible. We were approaching a constriction or closing of its banks, and in a few days we perceived that it emptied into a wild, deeply sunken ravine or canon, an enormous, terrifying gorge of sandstones and limestones, where we could just dimly discern the foaming cataracts, the eye-like preparatory pools, and then the sweltering froth of raging rapids.
The water of the Saurian Sea enters this canon (the Canon of Promise Goritz called it, for a reason yet a long way ahead in my narrative) over an incline, and a series of waterfalls, which were invisible to us. It was hopeless to follow the canon, nor could we continue northward for we were powerless to cross the river. There remained the alternative of turning to the left, penetrating the sage plain and attaining the slopes of a hill country eastward, at whose feet doubtless the desert terminated. It promised to be an easy day’s journey and it was. The quail had supplied us with food. They now replaced the ducks. Indeed the Saurian Sea became almost devoid of aquatic bird life as we advanced, an eloquent testimony we thought to the fear of the omnivorous brutes who lived there.