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Still staring with vacant gaze into the fire, his face bearing a rapt expression curious to see, he broke into almost unconscious speech: "An enormous inland sea! Where float the mighty ichthyosaurus, the megalosaurus, in company with the gigantic plesiosaurus! Upon whose sloping shores disport the enormous mastodon, the stately megatherium, the tremendous eh?"
The struggle continues with unabated ferocity. The combatants alternately approach and recede from our raft. We remain motionless, ready to fire. Suddenly the ichthyosaurus and the plesiosaurus disappear below, leaving a whirlpool eddying in the water. Several minutes pass by while the fight goes on under water. All at once an enormous head is darted up, the head of the plesiosaurus.
It was not until one of these creatures wriggled on to a sand-bank within a few hundred yards of us, and exposed a barrel-shaped body and huge flippers behind the long serpent neck, that Challenger, and Summerlee, who had joined us, broke out into their duet of wonder and admiration. "Plesiosaurus! A fresh-water plesiosaurus!" cried Summerlee. "That I should have lived to see such a sight!
The yacht was whirled violently round almost capsizing in the process and dragged, with her bows nearly buried in the hissing and curling water, back toward the head of the lake, at a steadily increasing pace, as the now thoroughly terrified plesiosaurus surged forward at headlong speed in its frenzied endeavour to escape, with its companion keeping pace by its side.
The other was the mighty Plesiosaurus, a serpent with a cylindrical trunk, with a short stumpy tail, with fins like a bank of oars in a Roman galley. Its whole body covered by a carapace or shell, and its neck, as flexible as that of a swan, rose more than thirty feet above the waves, a tower of animated flesh! These animals attacked one another with inconceivable fury.
Small as these are they have accomplished infinitely more than all that ever was done by the ichthyosaurus, the plesiosaurus, the pterodactyl, and the whole tribe of monsters that once filled the earth. Immense districts and whole mountains have been built up by these minute creatures. They have been at work for ages, and are still at work.
No one can deny that the ichthyosaurus, plesiosaurus, and all the rest of their tribe did exist; and were they to be encountered in these days would spread the same terror around, and find man almost as helpless before them as did any fierce dragon of the fairy tales.
In the fulness of his vanity and wit, Wylo began to make gratuitous fun of Yan-coo, who fretted and fumed and terrified the piccaninnies with still more hideous debils-debils. I saw one of them. It resembled a span-long plesiosaurus, afflicted with elephantiasis, and a forked, lolling, tongue extruded from a head that swayed ominously right and left.
Was the last act of this terrible drama to take place without spectators? It was impossible for us to say. Suddenly, at no great distance from us, an enormous mass rises out of the waters the head of the great Plesiosaurus. The terrible monster is now wounded unto death. I can see nothing now of his enormous body.
He had fancies such as lovers have exhibited from since the time when the plesiosaurus swashed away in the strand of a warm sea a hollow nursery for the birth and first tending of the young of his odd kind, up to the later time when men have squandered fortunes on the sleeping rooms of women they have loved. He toiled for many days.
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