his tail
hurling the sands in every direction, he lifted his head and bleated
piteously.

The struggle had already drawn the dreadful eyes of those grim, folded
figures perched along the cliff-tops miles away; and now, as if in
answer to his cry they came fluttering darkly over him. Seeing his
helplessness, they flapped down upon him with hoots of exultation.
Their vast beaks tore at his helpless back, and stabbed at the swiftly
writhing convolutions of his neck. One, more heedless than his
fellows, came within reach of the thrashing tail, and was dashed, half
stunned, to earth, where the sands got him in their hold before he
could recover himself. With dreadful screeches, he was sucked down,
but his fellows paid no attention to his fate. And meanwhile, in a
ring about the islet, not daring to come near for terror of the
quicksand, crocodiles and alligators and ichthyosaurs, with upturned,
gaping snouts, watched the struggle greedily.

As the lower part of his neck was drawn down into the quicksand, the
colossus lost the power to move his head quickly enough to evade the
attacks of his horrid assailants. A moment more, and he was blinded.
Then he felt his head enfolded in the strangling membranes of wings
and borne downwards. Once or twice the convulsions of his neck threw
his enemies off, and the bleeding, sightless head reemerged to view.

But not only his force, but his will to struggle, was fast ebbing
away. Presently, with a thunderous, gasping sob, the last breath left
his mighty lungs, and his head dropped on the sand. It was trodden
under in an instant; and then, afraid of being engulfed themselves,
the hooting revellers abandoned it, to crowd struggling upon the
arched hump of the back. Here they tore and gorged and quarreled till,
some fifteen minutes later, their last foothold sank beneath them.
Then, with dripping beaks and talons, they all flapped back to their
cliffs; and slowly the fluent sand smoothed itself to shining
complacency over the tomb of the diplodocus, hiding and sealing away
the stupendous skeleton for half a million years.

CHAPTER II

THE KING OF THE TRIPLE HORN

It was a little later in the Morning of Time--later by perhaps some
two or three hundred thousand years. Monstrous mammals now held sway
over the fresh, green round of the young earth, so exuberant in her
youthful vigor that she could not refrain from flooding the Poles
themselves with a tropical luxuriance of flowe