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Page 5
As he approached quite close to me I obtained an excellent view of
him, and though I was later to become better acquainted with his
kind, I may say that that single cursory examination of this awful
travesty on Nature would have proved quite sufficient to my desires
had I been a free agent. The fastest flier of the Heliumetic Navy
could not quickly enough have carried me far from this hideous
creature.
Its hairless body was a strange and ghoulish blue, except for a
broad band of white which encircled its protruding, single eye: an
eye that was all dead white--pupil, iris, and ball.
Its nose was a ragged, inflamed, circular hole in the centre of
its blank face; a hole that resembled more closely nothing that I
could think of other than a fresh bullet wound which has not yet
commenced to bleed.
Below this repulsive orifice the face was quite blank to the chin,
for the thing had no mouth that I could discover.
The head, with the exception of the face, was covered by a tangled
mass of jet-black hair some eight or ten inches in length. Each
hair was about the bigness of a large angleworm, and as the thing
moved the muscles of its scalp this awful head-covering seemed
to writhe and wriggle and crawl about the fearsome face as though
indeed each separate hair was endowed with independent life.
The body and the legs were as symmetrically human as Nature could
have fashioned them, and the feet, too, were human in shape, but
of monstrous proportions. From heel to toe they were fully three
feet long, and very flat and very broad.
As it came quite close to me I discovered that its strange movements,
running its odd hands over the surface of the turf, were the result
of its peculiar method of feeding, which consists in cropping off
the tender vegetation with its razorlike talons and sucking it up
from its two mouths, which lie one in the palm of each hand, through
its arm-like throats.
In addition to the features which I have already described, the
beast was equipped with a massive tail about six feet in length,
quite round where it joined the body, but tapering to a flat, thin
blade toward the end, which trailed at right angles to the ground.
By far the most remarkable feature of this most remarkable creature,
however, were the two tiny replicas of it, each about six inches
in length, which dangled, one on either side, from its armpits.
They were suspended by a small stem which seemed to grow from the
exact tops of their heads to where it connected them with the body
of the adult.
Whether they were the young, or merely portions of a composite
creature, I did not know.
As I had been scrutinizing this weird monstrosity the balance of
the herd had fed quite close to me and I now saw that while many
had the smaller specimens dangling from them, not all were thus
equipped, and I further noted that the little ones varied in size
from what appeared to be but tiny unopened buds an inch in diameter
through various stages of development to the full-fledged and
perfectly formed creature of ten to twelve inches in length.
Feeding with the herd were many of the little fellows not much larger
than those which remained attached to their parents, and from the
young of that size the herd graded up to the immense adults.
Fearsome-looking as they were, I did not know whether to fear them
or not, for they did not seem to be particularly well equipped for
fighting, and I was on the point of stepping from my hiding-place
and revealing myself to them to note the effect upon them of the
sight of a man when my rash resolve was, fortunately for me, nipped
in the bud by a strange shrieking wail, which seemed to come from
the direction of the bluffs at my right.
Naked and unarmed, as I was, my end would have been both speedy
and horrible at the hands of these cruel creatures had I had time
to put my resolve into execution, but at the moment of the shriek
each member of the herd turned in the direction from which the sound
seemed to come, and at the same instant every particular snake-like
hair upon their heads rose stiffly perpendicular as if each had been
a sentient organism looking or listening for the source or meaning
of the wail. And indeed the latter proved to be the truth, for
this strange growth upon the craniums of the plant men of Barsoom
represents the thousand ears of these hideous creatures, the last
remnant of the strange race which sprang from the original Tree of
Life.
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