Chapter Twenty Six.
A queer Quadruped.
Half way up they halted, though not to take breath. Strong-limbed, long-winded lads like them, who could have swarmed in two minutes to the main truck of a man-o’-war, needed no such indulgence as that. Instead of one hundred feet of sloping sand, any one of them could have scaled Snowdon without stopping to look back.
Their halt had been made from a different motive. It was sudden and simultaneous, all three having stopped at the same time, and without any previous interchange of speech. The same cause had brought them to that abrupt cessation in their climbing; and as they stood side by side, aligned upon one another, the eyes of all three were turned on the same object.
It was an animal, a quadruped. It could not be anything else if belonging to a sublunary world; and to this it appeared to belong. A strange creature notwithstanding; and one which none of the three remembered to have met before. The remembrance of something like it flitted across their brains, seen upon the shelves of a museum, but not enough of resemblance to give a clue for its identification.
The quadruped in question was not bigger than a “San Bernard,” a “Newfoundland”, or a mastiff; but seen as it was, it loomed larger than any of the three. Like these creatures, it was canine in shape, lupine we should rather say, but of an exceedingly grotesque and ungainly figure. A huge square head seemed set without neck upon its shoulders; while its fore limbs, out of all proportion longer than the hind ones, gave to the spinal column a sharp downward slant towards the tail. The latter appendage, short and “bunchy”, ended abruptly, as if either cut off or “driven in”—adding to the uncouth appearance of the animal. A stiff hedge of hard bristles upon the back continued its chevaux de frise along the short thick neck, till it ended between two erect tufted ears. Such was the shape of the beast that had suddenly presented itself to the eyes of our adventurers.
They had a good opportunity of observing its outlines. It was on the ridge towards the crest of which they were advancing. The moon was shining beyond. Every turn of its head or body, every motion made by its limbs, was conspicuously revealed against the luminous background of the sky.
It was neither standing nor at rest in any way. Head, limbs, and body were all in motion, constantly changing, not only their relative attitudes to one another, but their absolute situation in regard to surrounding objects.