experience in fighting enemies, whether human or bestial, and the
attack of these creatures was new to me, and I was fain to learn
its method. So I gave the captain a letter to Tatho, saying how
the matter lay (and for which, it may be mentioned, the rude fellow
seemed little enough grateful), and stayed in my chair under the
awning.

The beasts surged up to us with champing jaws, and all the
shipmen stood armed on their defence. They came up alongside, two
females (the smaller) on the flank of the ship, the giant male by
himself on the other. Their great heads swooped about, as high as
the yards that held the sails, and the reek from them gave one
physical sickness.

The shipmen faced the monsters with a sturdy courage. Arrows
were useless against the smooth, bull-like hides. Even the
throwing fire could not so much as singe them; nothing but twenty
axe blows delivered on an attacking head together could beat it
back, and even these succeeded only through sheer weight of metal,
and did not make so much as the scratch of a wound.

During all time beasts have disputed with man the mastery of
the earth, and it is only in Atlantis and Egypt and Yucatan that
man has dared to hold his own, and fight them with a mind made
strong by many previous victories. In Europe and mid-Africa the
greater beasts hold full dominion, and man admits his puny number
and force, and lives in earth crannies and the higher tree-tops, as
a fugitive confessed. And upon the great oceans, the beasts are
lords, unchecked.