be described as organized protoplasm?

Enormous, half-transparent, gelatinous organism, attaining a height of
about a hundred feet, and crudely organized into forms not unlike
those of men?

Half the members of the Rawlins Expedition, which had first entered
this valley, had fallen victims to the monsters. Most of the rest had
gone raving mad. And the stories of the two who returned, sane, to
Buenos Aires, were discredited and scoffed at as those of madmen.

But of a second expedition none had survived, and it was the solitary
survivor of the third who had confirmed the amazing story. The giant
monsters, actuated by some flickering human intelligence, had found
their way out of the central valley, where they had subsisted by
enfolding their vegetable and small animal prey with pseudopods, that
it to say, temporary projections of arms from the gelatinous bulk of
their substance.

They had floated across the shallow seas between the tip of the
Antarctic Continent and Cape Horn, as toy balloons float on water.
Then they had spread northward, extending in a wall that reached from
the Atlantic to the Andes. And, as they moved, they had devoured all
vegetables and animal life in their path. Behind them lay one great
bare, absolutely lifeless area.

* * * * *

How many of them were there? That was the hideout fact that had to be
faced. Their numbers could not be counted because, after attaining a
height of about a hundred feet, they reproduced by budding!

And within a few weeks these buds, in turn, attained their full
development.

The Argentine Government had sent a force of twenty thousand men
against them, armed with cannon, machine-guns, tanks, airplanes,
poison gas, and the new death-ray. And in the night, when it was
bivouacking, after what it had thought was glorious victory, it had
been overwhelmed _and eaten_!

Proof against the poison gas, the hideous monsters were, and
invulnerable to shot and shell. Divided and sub-divided, slashed into
ribbons, blown to fragments by bombs, each of the pieces simply became
the nucleus of a new organism, able, within a few hours, to assume the
outlines of a dwarf man, and to seize and devour its prey.

But the Argentine expedition had done worse than it at first dreamed
of. _It had given the monsters a taste for human flesh!_

After that, the wave of devastation had obliterated life in every city
clear up to the Amazonian forests. And