arty skins were of a
curious fish-like iridescence, and the sunlight struck them with an
ever-varying rainbow bloom as they moved.

We had little time to watch them, however, for in an instant they had
overtaken the fugitives and were making a dire slaughter among them.
Their method was to fall forward with their full weight upon each in
turn, leaving him crushed and mangled, to bound on after the others.
The wretched Indians screamed with terror, but were helpless, run as
they would, before the relentless purpose and horrible activity of
these monstrous creatures. One after another they went down, and there
were not half-a-dozen surviving by the time my companion and I could
come to their help. But our aid was of little avail and only involved
us in the same peril. At the range of a couple of hundred yards we
emptied our magazines, firing bullet after bullet into the beasts, but
with no more effect than if we were pelting them with pellets of paper.
Their slow reptilian natures cared nothing for wounds, and the springs
of their lives, with no special brain center but scattered throughout
their spinal cords, could not be tapped by any modern weapons. The
most that we could do was to check their progress by distracting their
attention with the flash and roar of our guns, and so to give both the
natives and ourselves time to reach the steps which led to safety. But
where the conical explosive bullets of the twentieth century were of no
avail, the poisoned arrows of the natives, dipped in the juice of
strophanthus and steeped afterwards in decayed carrion, could succeed.
Such arrows were of little avail to the hunter who attacked the beast,
because their action in that torpid circulation was slow, and before
its powers failed it could certainly overtake and slay its assailant.
But now, as the two monsters hounded us to the very foot of the stairs,
a drift of darts came whistling from every chink in the cliff above
them. In a minute they were feathered with them, and yet with no sign
of pain they clawed and slobbered with impotent rage at the steps which
would lead them to their victims, mounting clumsily up for a few yards
and then sliding down again to the ground. But at last the poison
worked. One of them gave a deep rumbling groan and dropped his huge
squat head on to the earth. The other bounded round in an eccentric
circle with shrill, wailing cries, and then lying down writhed in agony
for some minutes befor