476 Abd-el-Krim's Stronghold in the Riff. the swish of the waves. [Oct. It together, furnish mutual heat, has turned suddenly dark. Luminous phosphorescence clings to the dipping blades, and goes seething away in the ship's wake. The horizon is melted in blue of the sky; cliffs shadowy; stars repeated in the water. She is steering into calm night. Very late the helmsman heads her suddenly among the rocks, and she is beached in white sand right under the cliffs, the crew leaping overboard with wooden rollers to pull her out of reach of the tide. Then everybody ploughs about in shingle, searching for a sheltered place, until at last all are settled; and little like human beings do these curious objects appear in the faint starlight, each man's legs drawn up for warmth within his jaleeb, head concealed in shapeless hood. We two Englishmen are so indistinguishable from the rest that one of our askar bodyguard, coming up late from the beach, is unable to recognise his charges, and inadvertently rouses two sailors in his efforts to identify us. The crouching position for sleep had not been easy, when one was first compelled to adopt it in the crowded guest-house of a Kayed; but already it is second nature, and were it not for the stiffness which follows its maintenance for any length of time, it would have become one's normal attitude. Knees tucked under chin, the limbs drawn Once upon a time this was how all men slept, with the knees pulled up. In this attitude most ancient skeletons are found in the barrows of our own country, and in very old tombs throughout the world. A slight change in the wind compels me to alter my situation at dead of night; and as I wander shivering up and down, searching between motionless bundles for a place to leeward of the rocks, entire civilisations seem fallen away and vanished into air. Dawn is already in the sky when they wake us to a meal of freshly-fried sardines and bread and coffee. The sun finds the entire party gathered about a fire built with driftwood from the beach, and no sooner is breakfast over than the ship is again steering westward, propelled at intervals by oars, but more often able to find enough breeze to fill the sails and carry her lightly forward. A second night on the shingle, and very early in the morning she enters the bay of Wad Lau, to be pulled up on to a beach strewn with bales of fodder and smashed ammunition cases and dead mules. (To be continued.) '); THE DINOSAUR'S EGG. BY EDMUND CANDLER. XIV. NEWS OF THE UNCLE BLISS was not a good correspondent. He wrote to Irene once on the voyage, and again soon after landing. It It was only a moderately interesting letter. No news of the pterodactyl yet, but he had found two fleas on the ear of an ant bear which were totally new to science. Evidently the bug-hunters had got hold of him. 66 Months passed and we heard no more beyond an occasional paragraph in 'The Daily MegaIphone. One morning we saw the headlines: "Intrepid African Explorer.' Lost to the World for Six Months." The 1 vague inaccuracies which followed, pointing at the imminent discovery of a "Monstrous Winged Reptile," told us nothing that we did not know, except that the 'Megaphone' staff had scented a story." No clue was given as to the source of the information. Obviously Uncle Bliss had not taken the Press into his confidence; and he would be cut off from communication with the coast. ઃઃ toric Survival." Pterodactyl It was not very creditable to the enterprise of 'The Daily Megaphone' that we received our first definite news of the pterodactyl hunt through Marjorie. She was staying at Pau on her way home from Uganda, and wrote suggesting that she should come over and spend a night with us. She hoped that she would see the children Fabulous before they went to school. haunts Equatorial A postscript added: "Your Gigantic Pre-his- Ursa Major is returning, seriVOL. CCXVIII.-NO. MCCCXX. The next message, though more sensational, was equally unauthenticated. graphy, perhaps. Monster Swamp." Bush tele U 2 The doctor of his ship seemed to think that the sea voyage and a week or two's rest afterwards ought to set him up. She met Staff quite by chance. He was pointed out to her as Bliss' servant by the friend she was seeing off on the coasting steamer. That was the first she heard of his being on board. Her own boat sailed a day or two later. Staff was leaning over the rails, the picture of woe, gazing into the water. He wore a Sancho Panza, if he had been corruptible, might have made a small fortune out of 'The Megaphone.' The squire, however, had the same contempt for publicity as the knight. The reporters failed to get a story out of him. A few days after we heard from Marjorie 'The Megaphone' announced Bliss' return. "Seven Months in Equatorial Swamps." "Wounded Winged Monster corduroy suit and a round Escapes." "Famous Hunter leather hat, like a beret, though Fever-stricken." "Landed in it was 103° in the shade. MarAmbulance." Again the text jorie recognised him at once was little more than a para- from Claude's description. The phrase of the headlines. Uncle squint would have been enough. Bliss, apparently, had scotched "He looked like a witch-doctor the pterodactyl, not killed it. who had swallowed his totem." The dramatic thing was that he had seen it at all. We wrote to Sellinger for news, and waited with great impatience for Marjorie. "Do you remember Chimbashi ? " she asked me. "The eleventh commandment in the Clayton family," I reminded her, "is not to go near the anthropological section in the British Museum." I inquired for her arm. "Oh, my arm is all right, thank you. Chimbashi has done it good." "Well, I introduced myself," Marjorie continued, "but couldn't get him to talk at first. He retired into his shell, all but one eye, so to speak, which looked at me suspiciously. I believe he thought I was a newspaper woman. Sancho Panza's squint is embarrassing. When I told him that I knew Renton Parva and was a great friend of Irene and Val, he opened out at once, and ventures. Uncle Bliss' porters wanted me to go down and did not "precede " him, as he see Bliss. He thought it might boasted was their custom. And soothe him. 'He keeps calling worse, the country was imout for Miss Irene,' he said. possible for wheeled transport. 'But mostly he talk random.' The lorry and the VickersMaxim outfit, which must have eaten up a considerable fraction of the "five figures," had to be left behind at the coast. So there was never any hope of bringing back the pterodactyl alive. "I saw the ship's doctor, but he told me Bliss was not in a state to see any one. He had just come round from a spell of coma, and was subject to delusions and loss of memory, but he thought that would pass with anti-malarial treatment. He was pumping in quinine. Intra-muscular injections. Staff said that he had had malaria off and on for six months. He tried to get him back to the coast, but couldn't turn him from that there dratted terror-dactyl.' 66 I could imagine that Bliss was difficult to turn. Did Staff describe the 'terrordactyl?" I asked Marjorie. From Staff's account Marjorie concluded that the terrordactyl was an enormous amphibian python, a sort of freshwater sea serpent. This was disappointing, as I was prepared for a description of an apocalyptic beast, "each eye as large as a windmill and more fiery than a glass furnace." But Staff's story was credibly matter-of-fact. "No; he didn't see no wings. And he didn't see no legs, nor tail neither." Only its head was above water. The stolid Sancho Panza was not impressed by the terror-dactyl. He denied all its fantastic attributes. The whole hunt seems to have been a chapter of misad They were several months locating the beast. Staff spoke disparagingly of its habitat. It was a rare unhealthy sort of place." He could not put his finger on it on the map. There were natives, of course. They wore their hair in knobs and horns, and filed their teeth; he dismissed them as "nasty." He could not tell Marjorie the name of the tribe, but she gathered that they were a pretty low lot, as they ate chimpanzee. Even the Mbongwe eschew chimpanzee. It was most unfortunate for Uncle Bliss that this particular tribe feared the devil in the form of the kongamato, which is the local name for the pterodactyl. They feared it more than they feared Uncle Bliss. The legend ran that if the kongamato saw you first, at however great a distance, you died; whereas if you saw the kongamato first, it died; but as nobody except Uncle Bliss was willing to put this legend to the test, it was necessary to conceal the object of their expedition, and to be diplomatic in their questions about the reptile as if it were a creature they boldly threw themselves they wished to avoid. Thus the niggers "Staff applied the word indifferently to all Africans from the Hadendowa of the Sudan to the Kafirs, and the blacks of Guinea-enrolled themselves unsuspiciously as beaters. The chief's name was Shindy; Staff remembered that, because it was apt. He beat the big war-drum, the hollowed base of a tree. The others beat smaller drums, or blew horns. When they all turned out for a beat, the banging and braying was enough to scare the devil. Bliss' usual plan of operations was a drive. He would take up an advanced position on some island, while the natives formed up in a line of boats and beat along the channels. It was all bog and swamp and decaying vegetation, which gave off a putrid smell, a paradise of snakes and vermin. Sancho Panza's "rare unhealthy sort of place was probably the most pestilential hole in Africa. Bliss was soon attacked by ague and cramp, and had to be carried when he was not paddled, but he had his daily beat all the same. After about a hundred days of this they came across the track of the kongamato. The first native who saw it set up a terrific hullabaloo, whereupon the whole tribe swung round their dug-outs and made for the village. Bliss' boatmen were for joining in the sauvequi-peut, but he and Staff seized their paddles, whereupon into the water, swam to the nearest craft, and scrambled on board. So the knight and the squire were left alone. Here, perhaps, is where Don Quixote comes in. "They made straight for the island where the hullabaloo started. Staff said the kongamato had left a trail 'as if you had dragged a barrer along."" |