Far away up the desolate slope I heard a harsh scream, and saw a thing
like a huge white butterfly go slanting and fluttering up into the sky
and, circling, disappear over some low hillocks beyond. The sound of
its voice was so dismal that I shivered and seated myself more firmly
upon the machine. Looking round me again, I saw that, quite near, what
I had taken to be a reddish mass of rock was moving slowly towards me.
Then I saw the thing was really a monstrous crab-like creature. Can you
imagine a crab as large as yonder table, with its many legs moving
slowly and uncertainly, its big claws swaying, its long antenn , like
carters whips, waving and feeling, and its stalked eyes gleaming at
you on either side of its metallic front? Its back was corrugated and
ornamented with ungainly bosses, and a greenish incrustation blotched
it here and there. I could see the many palps of its complicated mouth
flickering and feeling as it moved.
As I stared at this sinister apparition crawling towards me, I felt a
tickling on my cheek as though a fly had lighted there. I tried to
brush it away with my hand, but in a moment it returned, and almost
immediately came another by my ear. I struck at this, and caught
something threadlike. It was drawn swiftly out of my hand. With a
frightful qualm, I turned, and I saw that I had grasped the antenna of
another monster crab that stood just behind me. Its evil eyes were
wriggling on their stalks, its mouth was all alive with appetite, and
its vast ungainly claws, smeared with an algal slime, were descending
upon me. In a moment my hand was on the lever, and I had placed a month
between myself and these monsters. But I was still on the same beach,
and I saw them distinctly now as soon as I stopped. Dozens of them
seemed to be crawling here and there, in the sombre light, among the
foliated sheets of intense green.
I cannot convey the sense of abominable desolation that hung over the
world. The red eastern sky, the northward blackness, the salt Dead Sea,
the stony beach crawling with these foul, slow-stirring monsters, the
uniform poisonous-looking green of the lichenous plants, the thin air
that hurts one s lungs: all contributed to an appalling effect. I moved
on a hundred years, and there was the same red sun a little larger, a
little duller the same dying sea, the same chill air, and the same
crowd of earthy crustacea creeping in and out among the green weed and
the red rocks. And in the westward sky, I saw a curved pale line like a
vast new moon.
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