THE DINOSAUR'S EGG. BY EDMUND CANDLER. 66 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 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. Months passed and we heard no more beyond an occasional paragraph in 'The Daily Megaphone.' One morning we saw the headlines: "Intrepid African Explorer." "Lost to the World for Six Months." The 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. TERROR-DACTYL." 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 Bush tele- she would see the children "Fabulous before they went to school. haunts Equatorial A postscript added: The next message, though more sensational, was equally unauthenticated. graphy, perhaps. Monster "Your Swamp." "Gigantic Pre-his- Ursa Major is returning, seri VOL. CCXVIII.-NO. MCCCXX. U 2 ously ill, I am afraid. I met a mouse. 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 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 in Equatorial Swamps." into the water. He wore a "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 the pterodactyl, not killed it. The dramatic thing was that he had seen it at all. We wrote to Sellinger for news, and waited with great impatience for Marjorie. It was delightful seeing her, and hearing her jolly crowpheasant laugh again. Madame Bran put her up in the spare room. Vichy passed her. True, he barked, but approvingly; and the children met her at the station in what Angela called a flurricane of excitement." Of course, she brought them presents. They had begun to collect another museum. On the whole, Marjorie was reassuring about Uncle Bliss. He was very bad at Mombasa, but then, of course, one always is with malignant malaria. It plays with you like a cat with He looked like a witch-doctor who had swallowed his totem." "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.' 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 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. 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 "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.'" "Without wheels,"I emended. "Yes," said Marjorie. "How did you know? And a coating of slime like the saliva of a snail." I told her about the lau. "The Bahr-el-Ghazal variety leaves a furrow like a tumbril. Staff is probably nearer the mark. He doesn't exaggerate. But please go on. What happened next?" They waited by the spoor until dusk, and then they saw it swimming round and round on the far side of the pool and bending its head, first to one side and then to the other, as if lost." "What was it like ? " "You know the poise of the head of a water-snake, a sort of blind inquisitive peering. They always give me the creeps. You don't know how much they see. Well, it was like that, only simply gigantic." "I feel as if I had seen it myself," Marjorie continued. "If I had been Uncle Bliss, I think I should have gone straight home-not because I was afraid, though it is quite likely I might have had cold within range. They made the journey in the dark. It took them several hours, wading most of the time, and pushing and dragging the dug-out; but first they lighted a cordon of fires wherever they could find a dry patch on the village side of the swamp, lest the pterodactyl should take it into feet. I mean, I should have felt that the kongamato was not my affair; I couldn't have put myself in those relations with it. I have had this instinct with ordinary animals like lions when they did not know I was watching them. As for drawing a bead on the pterodactylI think I knew what Marjorie his head to decamp in that meant. direction. Suppose some one were to take you on a visit to Mars "Quite," I said. "The worst possible introduction would be to begin by putting out eyes with a pop-gun." "It is not exactly awe. That doesn't explain it." "Self-respect," I suggested, "human esprit-de-corps. One wants to show that it is not done." With creatures nearer one's own plane one is not troubled by appearances; they know. Marjorie, by the way, had given up shooting altogether. It was dawn before they were in position, and they lay in wait all day. One point Sancho Panza seems to have established in the natural history of the pterodactyl is its regular and crepuscular habit. Just before dusk it raised its head again in almost exactly the same place-an enormous head, like a crane-the mechanical variety. Staff said it had red eyes which didn't move. It was facing them, looking straight into their bush, but he thought it was blind. For a few seconds it made no movement, but held its head poised about ten feet above one's best the water; it might have been asleep, it was so still. Bliss gave the range at two hundred yards. Then it began its sorrowful inspection of the landscape before starting on its rounds. It moved in widening circles, swaying its neck from side to side, probably a habit surviving from the mesozoic age when it had sight. Each circle brought it a little nearer. At eighty yards Uncle Bliss, leaning his rifle on Staff's shoulder to steady his aimthe ague still gripped him, I don't suppose it occurred to Uncle Bliss that one ought to be on behaviour with the supernormal. His one preoccupation would be to shoot the kongamato before it could get away. The beast continued its melancholy and unsuspicious parade safely out of range until it was quite dark. It was in deeper water on the edge of the forest. This was evidently its beat. Uncle Bliss' plan was to make a wide detour so as to get on the land side of the brute without alarming it, and to lie up until it came |