The Land That Time Forgot
some fifty to seventy-five feet, with tall trees growing at their base and
almost concealing them from our view. To the west the country was flat and
sparsely wooded, and here it was that we saw our first game—a large red deer.
It was grazing away from us and had not seen us when one of my men called my
attention to it. Motioning for silence and having the rest of the party lie
down, I crept toward the quarry, accompanied only by Whitely. We got within a
hundred yards of the deer when he suddenly raised his antlered head and pricked
up his great ears. We both fired at once and had the satisfaction of seeing the
buck drop; then we ran forward to finish him with our knives. The deer lay in a
small open space close to a clump of acacias, and we had advanced to within
several yards of our kill when we both halted suddenly and simultaneously.
Whitely looked at me, and I looked at Whitely, and then we both looked back in
the direction of the deer.
“Blime!” he said. “Wot is hit, sir?”
“It looks to me, Whitely, like an error,” I said; “some assistant god who had
been creating elephants must have been temporarily transferred to the
lizard-department.”
“Hi wouldn’t s’y that, sir,” said Whitely; “it sounds blasphemous.”
“It is no more blasphemous than that thing which is swiping our meat,” I
replied, for whatever the thing was, it had leaped upon our deer and was
devouring it in great mouthfuls which it swallowed without mastication. The
creature appeared to be a great lizard at least ten feet high, with a huge,
powerful tail as long as its torso, mighty hind legs and short forelegs. When
it had advanced from the wood, it hopped much after the fashion of a kangaroo,
using its hind feet and tail to propel it, and when it stood erect, it sat upon
its tail. Its head was long and thick, with a blunt muzzle, and the opening of
the jaws ran back to a point behind the eyes, and the jaws were armed with long
sharp teeth. The scaly body was covered with black and yellow spots about a
foot in diameter and irregular in contour. These spots were outlined in red
with edgings about an inch wide. The underside of the chest, body and tail were
a greenish white.
“Wot s’y we pot the bloomin’ bird, sir?” suggested Whitely.
I told him to wait until I gave the word; then we would fire simultaneously, he
at the heart and I at the spine.
“Hat the ’eart, sir—yes, sir,” he replied, and raised his piece to his
shoulder.
Our shots rang out together. The thing raised its head and looked about until
its eyes rested upon us; then it gave vent to a most appalling hiss that rose
to the crescendo of a terrific shriek and came for us.
“Beat it, Whitely!” I cried as I turned to run.
We were about a quarter of a mile from the rest of our party, and in full sight
of them as they lay in the tall grass watching us. That they saw all that had
happened was evidenced by the fact that they now rose and ran toward us, and at
their head leaped Nobs. The creature in our rear was gaining on us rapidly when
Nobs flew past me like a meteor and rushed straight for the frightful reptile.
I tried to recall him, but he would pay no attention to me, and as I couldn’t
see him sacrificed, I, too, stopped and faced the monster. The creature
appeared to be more impressed with Nobs than by us and our firearms, for it
stopped as the Airedale dashed at it growling, and struck at him viciously with
its powerful jaws.
Nobs, though, was lightning by comparison with the slow thinking beast and
dodged his opponent’s thrust with ease. Then he raced to the rear of the
tremendous thing and seized it by the tail. There Nobs made the error of his
life. Within that mottled organ were the muscles of a Titan, the force of a
dozen mighty catapults, and the owner of the tail was fully aware of the
possibilities which it contained. With a single flip of the tip it sent poor
Nobs sailing through the air a hundred feet above the ground, straight back
into the clump of acacias from which the beast had leaped upon our kill—and
then the grotesque thing sank lifeless to the ground.
Olson and von Schoenvorts came up a minute later with their men; then we all
cautiously approached the still form upon the ground. The creature was quite
dead, and an examination resulted in disclosing the fact that Whitely’s bullet
had pierced its heart, and mine had severed the spinal cord.
“But why didn’t it die instantly?” I exclaimed.
“Because,” said von Schoenvorts in his disagreeable way, “the beast is so
large, and its nervous organization of so low a caliber, that it took all this
time for the intelligence of death to reach and be impressed upon the minute
brain. The thing was dead when your bullets struck it; but it did not know it
for several seconds—possibly a minute. If I am not mistaken, it is an
Allosaurus of the Upper Jurassic, remains of which have been found in Central
Wyoming, in the suburbs of New York.”
An Irishman by the name of Brady grinned. I afterward learned that he had
served three years on the traffic-squad of the Chicago police force.
I had been calling Nobs in the meantime and was about to set out in search of
him, fearing, to tell the truth, to do so lest I find him mangled and dead
among the trees of the acacia grove, when he suddenly emerged from among the
boles, his ears flattened, his tail between his legs and his body screwed into
a suppliant S. He was unharmed except for minor bruises; but he was the most
chastened dog I have ever seen.
We gathered up what was left of the red deer after skinning and cleaning it,
and set out upon our return journey toward the U-boat. On the way Olson, von
Schoenvorts and I discussed the needs of our immediate future, and we were
unanimous in placing foremost the necessity of a permanent camp on shore. The
interior of a U-boat is about as impossible and uncomfortable an abiding-place
as one can well imagine, and in this warm climate, and in warm water, it was
almost unendurable. So we decided to construct a palisaded camp.
Chapter 6
As we strolled slowly back toward the boat, planning and discussing this, we
were suddenly startled by a loud and unmistakable detonation.
“A shell from the _U_-33!” exclaimed von Schoenvorts.
“What can be after signifyin’?” queried Olson.
“They are in trouble,” I answered for all, “and it’s up to us to get back to
them. Drop that carcass,” I directed the men carrying the meat, “and follow
me!” I set off at a rapid run in the direction of the harbor.
We ran for the better part of a mile without hearing anything more from the
direction of the harbor, and then I reduced the speed to a walk, for the
exercise was telling on us who had been cooped up for so long in the confined
interior of the _U_-33. Puffing and panting, we plodded on until within
about a mile of the harbor we came upon a sight that brought us all up
standing. We had been passing through a little heavier timber than was usual to
this part of the country, when we suddenly emerged into an open space in the
center of which was such a band as might have caused the most courageous to
pause. It consisted of upward of five hundred individuals representing several
species closely allied to man. There were anthropoid apes and gorillas—these I
had no difficulty in recognizing; but there were other forms which I had never
before seen, and I was hard put to it to say whether they were ape or man. Some
of them resembled the corpse we had found upon the narrow beach against
Caprona’s sea-wall, while others were of a still lower type, more nearly
resembling the apes, and yet others were uncannily manlike, standing there
erect, being less hairy and possessing better shaped heads.
There was one among the lot, evidently the leader of them, who bore a close
resemblance to the so-called Neanderthal man of La Chapelle-aux-Saints. There
was the same short, stocky trunk upon which rested an enormous head habitually
bent forward into the same curvature as the back, the arms shorter than the
legs, and the lower leg considerably shorter than that of modern man, the knees
bent forward and never straightened. This creature and one or two others who
appeared to be of a lower order than he, yet higher than that of the apes,
carried heavy clubs; the others were armed only with giant muscles and fighting
fangs—nature’s weapons. All were males, and all were entirely naked; nor was
there upon even the highest among them a sign of ornamentation.
At sight of us they turned with bared fangs and low growls to confront us. I
did not wish to fire among them unless it became absolutely necessary, and so I
started to lead my party around them; but the instant that the Neanderthal man
guessed my intention, he evidently attributed it to cowardice upon our part,
and with a wild cry he leaped toward us, waving his cudgel above his head. The
others followed him, and in a minute we should have been overwhelmed. I gave
the order to fire, and at the first volley six of them went down, including the
Neanderthal man. The others hesitated a moment and then broke for the trees,
some running nimbly among the branches, while others lost themselves to us
between the boles. Both von Schoenvorts and I noticed that at least two of the
higher, manlike types took to the trees quite as nimbly as the apes, while
others that more nearly approached man in carriage and appearance sought safety
upon the ground with the gorillas.
An examination disclosed that five of our erstwhile opponents were dead and the
sixth, the Neanderthal man, was but slightly wounded, a bullet having glanced
from his thick skull, stunning him. We decided to take him with us to camp, and
by means of belts we managed to secure his hands behind his back and place a
leash around his neck before he regained consciousness. We then retraced our
steps for our meat being convinced by our own experience that those aboard the
_U_-33 had been able to frighten off this party with a single shell—but
when we came to where we had left the deer it had disappeared.
On the return journey Whitely and I preceded the rest of the party by about a
hundred yards in the hope of getting another shot at something edible, for we
were all greatly disgusted and disappointed by the loss of our venison. Whitely
and I advanced very cautiously, and not having the whole party with us, we
fared better than on the journey out, bagging two large antelope not a
half-mile from the harbor; so with our game and our prisoner we made a cheerful
return to the boat, where we found that all were safe. On the shore a little
north of where we lay there were the corpses of twenty of the wild creatures
who had attacked Bradley and his party in our absence, and the rest of whom we
had met and scattered a few minutes later.
We felt that we had taught these wild ape-men a lesson and that because of it
we would be safer in the future—at least safer from them; but we decided not to
abate our carefulness one whit, feeling that this new world was filled with
terrors still unknown to us; nor were we wrong.
The following morning we commenced work upon our camp, Bradley, Olson, von
Schoenvorts, Miss La Rue, and I having sat up half the night discussing the
matter and drawing plans. We set the men at work felling trees, selecting for
the purpose jarrah, a hard, weather-resisting timber which grew in profusion
near by. Half the men labored while the other half stood guard, alternating
each hour with an hour off at noon. Olson directed this work. Bradley, von
Schoenvorts and I, with Miss La Rue’s help, staked out the various buildings
and the outer wall. When the day was done, we had quite an array of logs nicely
notched and ready for our building operations on the morrow, and we were all