But the girl!  She was magnificent.  It was easy to see that she considered herself as entirely above and apart from her present surroundings and company.  She talked with me, and with Perry, and with the taciturn Ghak because we were respectful; but she couldn’t even see Hooja the Sly One, much less hear him, and that made him furious.  He tried to get one of the Sagoths to move the girl up ahead of him in the slave gang, but the fellow only poked him with his spear and told him that he had selected the girl for his own property—­that he would buy her from the Mahars as soon as they reached Phutra.  Phutra, it seemed, was the city of our destination.

After passing over the first chain of mountains we skirted a salt sea, upon whose bosom swam countless horrid things.  Seal-like creatures there were with long necks stretching ten and more feet above their enormous bodies and whose snake heads were split with gaping mouths bristling with countless fangs.  There were huge tortoises too, paddling about among these other reptiles, which Perry said were Plesiosaurs of the Lias.  I didn’t question his veracity—­they might have been most anything.

Dian told me they were tandorazes, or tandors of the sea, and that the other, and more fearsome reptiles, which occasionally rose from the deep to do battle with them, were azdyryths, or sea-dyryths—­Perry called them Ichthyosaurs.  They resembled a whale with the head of an alligator.

I had forgotten what little geology I had studied at school—­about all that remained was an impression of horror that the illustrations of restored prehistoric monsters had made upon me, and a well-defined belief that any man with a pig’s shank and a vivid imagination could “restore” most any sort of paleolithic monster he saw fit, and take rank as a first class paleontologist.  But when I saw these sleek, shiny carcasses shimmering in the sunlight as they emerged from the ocean, shaking their giant heads; when I saw the waters roll from their sinuous bodies in miniature waterfalls as they glided hither and thither, now upon the surface, now half submerged; as I saw them meet, open-mouthed, hissing and snorting, in their titanic and interminable warring I realized how futile is man’s poor, weak imagination by comparison with Nature’s incredible genius.

And Perry!  He was absolutely flabbergasted.  He said so himself.

“David,” he remarked, after we had marched for a long time beside that awful sea.  “David, I used to teach geology, and I thought that I believed what I taught; but now I see that I did not believe it—­that it is impossible for man to believe such things as these unless he sees them with his own eyes.  We take things for granted, perhaps, because we are told them over and over again, and have no way of disproving them—­like religions, for example; but we don’t believe them, we only think we do.  If you ever get back to the outer world you will find that the geologists and paleontologists will be the first to set you down a liar, for they know that no such creatures as they restore ever existed.  It is all right to imagine them as existing in an equally imaginary epoch—­but now? poof!”