ay up they halted, though not to take breath. Strong-limbed,
long-winded lads like them, who could have swarmed in two minutes to the
main truck of a man-o'-war, needed no such indulgence as that. Instead
of one hundred feet of sloping sand, any one of them could have scaled
Snowdon without stopping to look back.

Their halt had been made from a different motive. It was sudden and
simultaneous, all three having stopped at the same time, and without any
previous interchange of speech. The same cause had brought them to that
abrupt cessation in their climbing; and as they stood side by side,
aligned upon one another, the eyes of all three were turned on the same
object.

It was an animal, a quadruped. It could not be anything else if
belonging to a sublunary world; and to this it appeared to belong. A
strange creature notwithstanding; and one which none of the three
remembered to have met before. The remembrance of something like it
flitted across their brains, seen upon the shelves of a museum, but not
enough of resemblance to give a clue for its identification.

The quadruped in question was not bigger than a "San Bernard," a
"Newfoundland", or a mastiff; but seen as it was, it loomed larger than
any of the three. Like these creatures, it was canine in shape, lupine
we should rather say, but of an exceedingly grotesque and ungainly
figure. A huge square head seemed set without neck upon its shoulders;
while its fore limbs, out of all proportion longer than the hind ones,
gave to the spinal column a sharp downward slant towards the tail. The
latter appendage, short and "bunchy", ended abruptly, as if either cut
off or "driven in"--adding to the uncouth appearance of the animal. A
stiff hedge of hard bristles upon the back continued its _chevaux de
frise_ along the short thick neck, till it ended between two erect
tufted ears. Such was the shape of the beast that had suddenly
presented itself to the eyes of our adventurers.

They had a good opportunity of observing its outlines. It was on the
ridge towards the crest of which they were advancing. The moon was
shining beyond. Every turn of its head or body, every motion made by
its limbs, was conspicuously revealed against the luminous background of
the sky.

It was neither standing nor at rest in any way. Head, limbs, and body
were all in motion, constantly changing, not only their relative
attitudes to one another, but their absolute situation in rega