e Wyoming State University
has recently unearthed the skeleton of a Brontosaurus, 130 ft. in
length, which would have weighed 50 tons when alive. It was 35 ft. in
height at the hips, and 25 ft. at the shoulder, and 40 people could be
seated with comfort within its ribs. Its thigh bone was 8 ft. long. The
fossils of a whole series of these colossal lizards have been found.

Now and again these monsters would get caught in some vast fissuring
of the ground, but not often. Their speed of foot was great, and their
sagacity keen. They seemed to know when the worst boilings of the
mountains might be expected, and then they found safety in the deeper
lakes, or buried themselves in wallows of the mud. Moreover, they were
more kindly constituted than man to withstand one great danger of these
regions, in that the heat of the water did them no harm. Indeed, they
will lie peacefully in pools where sudden steam-bursts are making the
water leap into boiling fountains, and I have seen one run quickly
across a flow of molten rock which threatened to cut it off, and not be
so much as singed in the transit.

In the midst of such neighbours, then, was my new life thrown, and
existence became perilous and hard to me from the outset. I came near to
knowing what Fear was, and indeed only a fervent trust in the most High
Gods, and a firm belief that my life was always under Their fostering
care, prevented me from gaining that horrid knowledge. For long enough,
till I learned somewhat of the ways of this steaming, sweltering land,
I was in as miserable a case as even Phorenice could have wished to see
me. My clothes rotted from my back with the constant wetness, till I
went as naked as a savage from Europe; my limbs were racked with agues,
and I could find no herbs to make drugs for their relief; for days
together I could find no better food than tree-grubs and leaves; and
often when I did kill beasts, knowing little of their qualities, I ate
those that gave me pain and sickness.

But as man is born to make himself adaptable to his surroundings, so
as the months dragged on did I learn the limitation of this new life of
mine, and gather some knowledge of its resources. As example: I found
a great black tree, with a hollow core, and a hole into its middle near
the roots. Here I harboured, till one night some monstrous lizard, whose
sheer weight made the tree rock like a sapling, endeavoured to suck me
forth as a bird picks a worm from a hol