2
It is in the account of young Rowan that one finds, now, the clearest picture of the coming of the terror to Brinton. There are other accounts, for though the survivors of that terror were but few most of them have recorded their experiences; yet for the most part their narratives are too horror-stricken and incoherent to be of any real value. Rowan, on the other hand, not only saw the thing as well or better than any other single man, but set down his impressions of it in vivid style.
His narrative begins with the events already detailed, the disappearance of Dr. Morton and his own coming to Brinton. It had been some time after nightfall that he had arrived, and after making arrangements to accompany the posse into the swamp on the next morning he had ventured out into the streets of the town, which were still filled with the shuffling throngs discussing the sensation of the day. Along the streets the windows of stores were still brilliant, their proprietors taking advantage of the unaccustomed throngs, while a few raucous-voiced newsboys were selling late editions of a Chicago daily which had featured the sensation. For an hour or more Rowan strolled on through the streets and then, yawning, began to move back toward his hotel, through the thinning crowds. He had just reached the building’s door when he suddenly halted.
From away toward the street’s eastern end had come a sudden, high-pitched cry, a thrilling scream which was repeated in the distance by a score of voices, and then succeeded by a dull roar. Rowan stepped out into the street, gazing down its length, lit by the suspended brilliance of the street-lights. A few of the groups on the sidewalks near by had stepped out beside him, and with these he stared down the long street’s length toward the source of the shouting cries.
He glimpsed, in a moment, a horde of figures running up the street toward him, a disorganized little mob which was giving utterance to a medley of hoarse shouts and screams. The mob parted, for a moment, and there roared through it a crowded automobile, racing up the street with immense speed, and past the wondering Rowan and those around him. And now he heard, simultaneously, a wild ringing of bells toward the south and a far-away crash which murmured faintly to his ears from the east. With every moment the clamor around him was increasing, the whole city awakening, and lights flashing out in windows on every side.
By then the people around him had caught the contagion of panic and were hastening away toward the west also, but Rowan held his ground until the first running figures of the mob farther down the street were racing past him. Then he reached out and seized one of these, a shabby, middle-aged man whose face was contorted with panic.
“What’s the matter?” he cried, striving to make himself heard over the thunderous, increasing clamor about him. “What’s happening?”
The man he held bawled something indistinguishable in his ear, and at the same time wrenched frantically loose from his grasp, hurrying on. Some hundreds of feet down the street the main body of the mob was now racing toward Rowan, and then, beyond that mob, Rowan saw by the brilliant street-lamps the cause of their panic flight.
Far down the street there was thundering toward him a gigantic creature which his eyes refused for the moment to credit, a titanic, dark thing whose tremendous, rumbling tread shook the very ground on which he himself stood. A hundred feet in length and a third of that in height it loomed, a colossal dark bulk upheld by four massive legs, tapering into a huge tail behind and carrying before it a long, sinuous neck which ended in a small, reptilian head. High up on the great thing’s mighty, curving back clung some smaller creature which he could but vaguely glimpse, and down the street behind it were thundering a half-dozen more like itself, vast, incredible, charging down the street upon the madly screaming mob which fled before them. For one mad, whirling moment Rowan stared, and then he shouted aloud.
“Brontosaurs!” he cried, standing there for the moment quite unconscious of his own peril from the onward-thundering monsters. Brontosaurs! Monsters out of earth’s dawn, thundering through a Twentieth Century city! Mighty dinosaurs of the Mesozoic age, the most terrible creatures ever to appear on this planet, bridging the gap of millions of years to crash through the little town! Rowan stood rigid as they thundered on toward him, heard their mighty, throaty bellows as they overtook the fleeing mob, and then saw them trampling over that mob as bulls might trample ants, smashing them beneath gigantic feet, annihilating them with sweeps of the huge tails, thundering, crashing on.
And now they were within yards of him and he found himself staggering back from the street into a crevice between two buildings at its side. The next moment the great monsters had thundered past him, their gigantic tread shaking the earth beneath him, and in that moment he glimpsed clearly the creatures who rode upon their backs. Small and manlike shapes were these, but lizardlike, too, their limbs and bodies green-scaled, their extremities armed with sharp talons, their heads thick and conical and featureless, except for the big, dark, disklike eyes and the wide-fanged mouths. And as they thundered past on their gigantic mounts he saw one raise an arm with a white globe in its grasp, saw a beam of pale and feeble light which flickered out from that globe and struck buildings to right and left, buildings which burst into great masses of flame as the pale beam touched them.
And now the great creatures had swept past him and from farther up the street came their bellowing clamor, pierced by sharp, agonized screams from the tiny running figures there. Around Rowan flames were shooting up in great roaring bursts, and beyond he saw one of the great brontosaurs rearing up against the side of a building, saw that building’s walls collapse and crash beneath the huge beast’s weight. From right and left came other mighty crashes throughout the city, and an unceasing, thunderous clamor of sounds, the deep and terrible bellowing of the dinosaurs as they crashed across the town, the screams of their victims trampled beneath giant feet, the hiss of the flickering beams, the roar of bursting flames. Down the street, too, was the rumbling of more of the great brontosaurs, racing up the street and past the spot where Rowan crouched, galloping gigantically to the attack.
After them came a single dark, great shape, almost as huge, a great reptilian form whose huge paws gleamed with mighty claws, whose broad-gaping mouth showed immense fangs, leaping forward in quick, gigantic hops like some giant toad, its small eyes glittering in the flame-light of the burning buildings. In a moment it had whirled past Rowan in a series of mighty hops and he glimpsed it farther up the street, pouncing upon the few surviving little figures who ran screaming for shelter, inconceivably swift and catlike in its resistless rushes. And as Rowan saw it leaping on he felt reason deserting him.
“God!” he whispered. “A tyrannosaurus!”
Crouched there at the street’s edge he huddled, the buildings around him a storm of leaping flame, while down through that lane of fire there thundered into the town from the east the creatures of a long-dead age, the mighty beasts of earth’s youth extinct for millions of years. Rowan was never afterward able to recall all that he saw and heard in the minutes that he crouched there. He knew that other brontosaurs rumbled past, bellowing, ridden by the lizard-creatures whose pale rays swept and stabbed in great circles of fiery destruction; that other tyrannosaurs swept by with swift and mighty leaps, pawing human victims from the wreckage at the street’s sides, pouncing and whirling like gigantic cats; that other colossal reptilian shapes, their mighty, curving backs armored by great, upstanding plates, rushed past like great battering-rams of flesh and bone, crashing into buildings and through walls as though of paper, great stegosaurs that thundered on after the others who carried annihilation and death across the town; that still other huge rhinoceroslike shapes galloped past, triceratops who crashed resistlessly on with lowered heads, impaling all before them on their three terrible horns.
All of these Rowan saw, dimly, as though from a great distance, while in his ears beat all the vast roar of sound from the stricken town around him, screams and shouts and hissing cries and vast bellows, roar of flame and crash of falling walls. The great wave of destruction, the mass of the attacking monsters, had swept past and was rolling now over the town toward the west, but still Rowan crouched, motionless. Then behind him was a mounting roar of swiftly catching flame, and out toward him crept little tongues of red fire as the walls between which he crouched began to burn. Then, at last, Rowan rose to his feet and staggered out into the street.
The street-lights had vanished with the bursting of their poles and cables by the rush of the great dinosaurs, but all around him was illumined brilliantly by the light of the flaming buildings. North and south and west the city was burning, vast sheets of murky flame roaring up from it in scores of places, and by the light of those distant fires Rowan glimpsed the scores of titanic dark shapes that crashed still through streets and walls, glimpsed the play of the livid rays and heard the thin cries of those who still fled before the mighty, bellowing dinosaurs. A moment he stood at the street’s center, motionless, and then above him was a whirring and flapping of colossal wings, and he looked up to see a vast, dark shape swooping swiftly down upon him.
In a single moment he glimpsed the thing, the forty-foot spread of its huge, batlike wings, the great reptilian head thrust down toward him as it swooped, white fangs gleaming and red eyes shining in the firelight, and in that flashing moment recognized the thing for what it was, a pterodactyl, a flying monster out of the dead ages. Then he saw that upon it rode one of the sealed, dark-eyed lizard-creatures, whose arm was coming up with a white globe in its grasp as its dragon-mount dove down toward Rowan.
The next moment Rowan had thrown himself suddenly aside, and as he did so felt the great pterodactyl sweep over him by a few feet, glimpsed a beam of pale light that flickered down from the upheld globe and struck the street beside him, cracking and rending the pavement there with its intense heat and scorching his own shoulder as it grazed it. Then the giant thing had passed and was flapping on to the west, while behind and above it flew others of its kind, mighty flying reptiles ridden by the lizard-creatures, whose pallid rays struck down with fire and death as they swooped on with whirring wings.
And then suddenly Rowan was running, dazed and blind with terror, down the street toward the east, between the flaming lines of buildings and over the crushed fragments of humanity which lay there. Down the street’s length he ran, and out between its last buildings, and on and on into the night, crazedly, aimlessly. The roar of flames and thunderous din of the town behind him dwindled as he ran, but he did not look back, throwing himself blindly forward through the darkness, weeping and wringing his hands, stumbling, staggering on.