from him without subjecting him to almost certain death from any
of the numberless dangers that beset their way.

The entire party was moody and glum. There was none of the
bantering that had marked their intercourse before, even in the
face of blighting hardships and hideous danger. This was a new
menace that threatened them, something that they couldn't
explain; and so, naturally, it aroused within them superstitious
fear which Tippet's attitude only tended to augment. To add
further to their gloom, their way led through a dense forest,
where, on account of the underbrush, it was difficult to make
even a mile an hour. Constant watchfulness was required to avoid
the many snakes of various degrees of repulsiveness and enormity
that infested the wood; and the only ray of hope they had to
cling to was that the forest would, like the majority of
Caspakian forests, prove to be of no considerable extent.

Bradley was in the lead when he came suddenly upon a grotesque
creature of Titanic proportions. Crouching among the trees,
which here commenced to thin out slightly, Bradley saw what
appeared to be an enormous dragon devouring the carcass of
a mammoth. From frightful jaws to the tip of its long tail it
was fully forty feet in length. Its body was covered with plates
of thick skin which bore a striking resemblance to armor-plate.
The creature saw Bradley almost at the same instant that he saw
it and reared up on its enormous hind legs until its head towered
a full twenty-five feet above the ground. From the cavernous
jaws issued a hissing sound of a volume equal to the escaping steam
from the safety-valves of half a dozen locomotives, and then the
creature came for the man.