The Early Adventures of El Borak by Robert E. Howard

Author:Robert E. Howard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Desert adventures;El Borak;The Sonora Kid
Publisher: Paul Herman
Published: 2024-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

“Although I had known, almost exactly what would appear, still I could hardly credit my sight.

“There among the huge trees the monster stood, at least twenty feet high, standing upright like a monstrous kangaroo, evil, reptilian, a great dinosaur!”

“A dinosaur!” exclaimed Steve Allison.

“A dinosaur,” replied Gordon. “In that instant I seemed to be transported back a million years into the old Stone Age.

“There the monster stood, amid the uncanny silence and gloom of the mighty forest trees, as ancient as the age it represented. Primeval silence reigned. It was a setting wondrous strange for the modern age and I had an uncanny feeling that by some means I had been carried back into ancient days. I even glanced at my rifle, half-wondering whether I would find myself clutching, not a modern cordite rifle, but a crude stone hatchet. It was with difficulty that I rid myself of the feeling of unreality, and convinced myself that I had merely come into some strange land, rather than having stepped into a long-past age.

“The great dinosaur stood glaring evilly with its small, hideous eyes and then charged, covering the distance in great bounds, like a kangaroo.

“I threw my rifle to my shoulder and fired twice and the gigantic reptile plunged to the earth. I doubt if a lesser rifle than the cordite .577 would have stopped it. I cut a talon from the monster that had come out of the gloom of the ages. Here it is.”

And Gordon laid upon the table a great curving claw. Nearly a foot long it was, curved, sharp and like steel.

Steve Allison vizuallized the reptile that had worn the talon and shrugged his shoulders as he realized that his imagination could scarcely picture the monster.

Yar Ali Khan swore wonderingly in his beard.

“A devil, without a doubt,” he said. “It was an ifreet, sahib, surely.”

“It was monster enough for any demon,” Gordon answered. “I found many signs of dinosaurs in the forest and I knew the reason that no Balingas lived in the forest, and why the great apes went swiftly and silently.

“I caught glimpses of other dinosaurs, but I did not come face to face with any more except one, and it I eluded by slipping behind a great tree and gilding silently away.

“Finally I came out of the forest and came upon a swamp. It was a ghastly swamp of quagmires and stagnant lakes, abounding in reptiles. But it was not very wide and I crossed it, partly in a crude pirogue, partly by leaping from hummock to hummock. At any rate, I crossed the swamp and came into the strip of jungle I had seen from the great tree.

“It was a jungle of thorn trees. The trees were large and grew close together and the thorns were nearly as strong as steel. I hacked my way through that jungle with my scimitar and it was no easy task.

“All the time I was wondering whence came the terrible black men whom the Shansai had told me about.

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