But nothing seemed to please Roderick better than to lay hold of a person infected with jealousy, which he represented as an enormous green reptile, with an ice-cold length of body, and the sharpest sting of any snake save one.
It was said, too, that an answering hiss came from the vitals of the shipmaster, as if a snake were actually lurking there and had been aroused by the call of its brother reptile. If there were in fact any such sound, it might have been caused by a malicious exercise of ventriloquism on the part of Roderick.
Being the whole Seventh Cavalry's
reptile, he doesn't belong to anybody in particular, and hasn't any military duties; so he comes and goes as he pleases, and is popular with all the house cats and other authentic sources of private information.
There were still a few reptiles; but there were fish by the thousands, by the millions.
To land, it would be necessary to run the U-33 close in to the shore, at least as close as we could, for even these waters were infested, though, not so thickly, by savage reptiles. I ordered sufficient water let into the diving-tanks to lower us about a foot, and then I ran the bow slowly toward the shore, confident that should we run aground, we still had sufficient lifting force to free us when the water should be pumped out of the tanks; but the bow nosed its way gently into the reeds and touched the shore with the keel still clear.
Eminent in many things, the professor was great at
reptiles. He left me his Subjects and his Tank.
He used to tell me about the various forms of animal and vegetable life which had covered the globe during former eras, and so I was pretty well acquainted with the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals of paleolithic times.
I could not cope with them all, and so I rose rapidly from among them to the cooler strata wherein they dared not follow; and then I recalled that Bowen's narrative distinctly indicated that the farther north one traveled in Caspak, the fewer were the terrible reptiles which rendered human life impossible at the southern end of the island.
"She sprang forward and stood still in front of the reptile as if she had been turned to stone.
Suddenly Norma gave a piteous whine; the reptile had bitten her tongue.
The simple fact that we had found no
reptiles in the corridor through which we had just come was sufficient assurance that they did not venture there.
Like a flash the thought came to me of the marvelous opportunity these sleeping
reptiles offered as a means of eluding the watchfulness of our captors and the Sagoth guards.
There were few
reptiles; the only dangerous kinds were the rattlesnake, and one striped with black, yellow, and white, about four feet long.
In the next stage they became fishes or
reptiles, An-Tak was not positive which, and in this form, always developing, they swam far to the south, where, amid the rank and teeming jungles, some of them evolved into amphibians.
But here we were doomed to defeat, at least tempo-rarily; for no sooner had the first of our troops descended into the subterranean avenues than many of them came stumbling and fighting their way back to the surface, half-choked by the fumes of some deadly gas that the
reptiles had liberated upon them.
