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I suppose you know that when you are after tiger, it is a point of honour not to shoot at anything else, as life may depend on it. I could easily have spined this monster, but I felt that I must not so, with regret, I had to let it go.
To the gaze of Duke, still blurred by slumber, this monstrosity was all of one piece the bone seemed a living part of it. What he saw was like those interesting insect-faces that the magnifying glass reveals to great M. Fabre. It was impossible for Duke to maintain the philosophic calm of M. Fabre, however; there was no magnifying glass between him and this spined and spiky face.
The majority of them had two fins just behind the gill slits, typical fish tails and blunt, sloping heads. But now and then I saw a spined monster that was queerly unlike its fellows. Instead of two front fins, these unique ones had two vacant round holes. The head looked as though it had forgotten to grow; its place was taken by an eyeless, projecting, shield shaped cap. And there was no tail.
In one case a female Mias, on a durian tree, kept up for at least ten minutes a continuous shower of branches and of the heavy, spined fruits, as large as 32-pounders, which most effectually kept us clear of the tree she was on. She could be seen breaking them off and throwing them down with every appearance of rage, uttering at intervals a loud pumping grunt, and evidently meaning mischief."
My friend Lieutenant Roe presented me, also, with two specimens of the Spined Lizard Moloch horridus, which I intended to present to Her Majesty; but, unfortunately, I did not succeed in bringing either of them alive to England; one, however, lived beyond the Western Islands. We left Swan River on the evening of the 6th of May, 1843, running out with a moderate North-East breeze.
They refused to allow it to pass. Afterwards it was presented to Queen Mary. At this time grew up a most beautiful and decorative style, known as "ivy pattern," consisting of little graceful flowering sprays, with tiny ivy leaves in gold and colours. The Gothic feeling prevails in this motive, and the foliate forms are full of spined cusps.
The glare of the red earth, under the scourge of the flaming sun, tormented the eyes of the men into strange illusions. The naked red plain stretched flat like the colossal background of a screen, over which writhed a huge dragon, spined with many horns, headless, trailing its tortuous way over the red world.
Here were the "picturesque costumes!" This was the "gallant spectacle!" Tatterdemalion vagrants cheap braggadocio "Arabian mares" spined and necked like the ichthyosaurus in the museum, and humped and cornered like a dromedary!
He was there some time, for your hedgehog rarely hurries; and when he came out again, his little pig's eyes gleaming red under their spined cowl, it was with the same snuffling, softly grunting deliberation with which he had gone in; but the pale moon, that showed the gleam in his eyes, showed also blood on his snout, and on the bristles of his forefeet, blood.
The desert zone includes a vast region east of the Caspian Sea and extends to the Tian Shan Mountains, which separate it from the desert of Gobi. Here, as in the Mohave Desert, are found the leafless, thickly spined forms of the cactus family.
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