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Updated: September 12, 2025
I asked, still staring at the thing which I perceived to be a most wonderfully fashioned likeness of the old dwarf himself as he appeared before me crouched upon the ground. There were the deepset eyes, the great head, the toad-like shape, the long hair, all. "It is a clever carving, is it not, Macumazahn? I am skilled in that art, you know, and therefore can judge of carving."
Nowhere among the portraits of Renaissance monsters do we meet with anything like those Roman emperors, whose frightful effigies, tumid, toad-like Vitelliuses or rage-convulsed Caracallas, fill all our museums in marble or bronze or loathsome purple porphyry; such types as these are as foreign to the reality of the Italian Renaissance as are the Brachianos and Lussuriosos, the Pieros and Corombonas, to the Italian fiction of the sixteenth century.
Indeed, his swollen, diabolical figure supported on the thin, toad-like legs, the great fires burning on either side, the lurid lights of evening reflected from the still water beyond and glowering among the tree tops of the mountain, the white-robed forms of the tall Pongo, bending, every one of them, towards the wretched culprit and hissing like so many fierce serpents, all suggested some uttermost deep in the infernal regions as one might conceive them in a nightmare.
He scrambled from the hut with slow, toad-like motions, while I with motions that were anything but slow, grabbed the grey catskin kaross and ensconced myself among the beerpots and mats in such a position that my head, over which I set a three-legged carved stool of Zikali's own cutting, was but a few inches to the left of the door-hole and therefore in the deepest of the shadows.
I recognized it chiefly in the parish priest I had been conversing with; for one thing, his mediaeval mind evidently did not regard a sense of humour and of the grotesque as out of place in or on a sacred building. If it had been lighter I should have looked at the roof for an effigy of a semi-human toad-like creature smiling down mockingly at the worshippers as they came and went.
He was checked by feeling Monsieur Leroy's toad-like hand in his. "Her Highness is very glad to see you," said an oily voice in French, but with a thick and rolling pronunciation that was South American unless it was Roumanian.
Acland-Troyte's dog had, in the same way, bitten a toad, and conceived henceforth that he rendered public service by putting every toad-like creature he saw carefully and gingerly "out of harm's way," underground.
I thrust my fist through the window and struck the Hottentot's toad-like face on which the starlight gleamed faintly. "Dog!" I said, "saddle my mare and the roan horse and get your gun. In two minutes I come. Be swift or I kill you." "I go," he answered, and shot out into the night like a frightened snake.
Terrible, toad-like tongue which goes and comes, leaps, crawls, slobbers, and stirs about in monstrous wise in that immense gray fog composed of rain and night, of hunger, of vice, of falsehood, of injustice, of nudity, of suffocation, and of winter, the high noonday of the miserable. Let us have compassion on the chastised. Alas! Who are we ourselves? Who am I who now address you?
Is it not so, O Kalubi of to-day, you without a finger?" and he laughed mockingly. The Kalubi, who was lying on his stomach, groaned and trembled, but made no other answer. "So all has come about as I foresaw," went on the toad-like creature.
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