Adventure Magazine, March 1916 — page 202: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

200 Upreared upon his short, huge and hairy legs, he stood facing me full in the center of that path and full in the moonlight. I could see him plainly—his little round eyes glittering snakily from under bushy brows, his head rolling on a thick neck from side to side, and his whole immense body a dull smear of shaggy hair, black as a negro’s skin oa i fully, in each separate black strand, a foot long; but on his head the, hair was no more than three inches long; ON HIS body that shaggy hair wall while on his face, save for the bushy brows, there was no hair at all. His face, a si- mous smudge, was bare of hair, his progna- thous chin beardless; his was almost a negro’s face. And his head, undeveloped with brains, was small, as I said, dwarfed for so large a body. For his body was three times in depth and breadth the size of a man’s body. Over seven feet tall he was, and five feet wide, and three feet, no less, from back to front. His long, heavy-thewed hairy arms hung down from his high bulging shoulders below the knees, right to his ankles. With his ham-like paws he could touch and sweep the lava floor of the path. And his chest, between those six-foot-long arms was stu- pendous with hair and with depth and roundness. He was enormous. He must have weighed, all in all, close to a thousand pounds—fully half a ton. I never saw an ape like that monster man. I never heard of one just like that one. The Orang Benua, or head-hunters of the interior of Borneo, -have legends of jungle men seven feet tall; but nobody ever has seen apes seven feet tall; and yet—yet here was I facing an ape that was over seven feet tall. He was seven feet four inches tall at the least. Never had I heard of, let alone seen, his like. He was a frightful mon- strosity of hugeness. I halted dead. I faced that monstrous brute without a tail, with no hair on his palms, with ears and eyes and nose so like a man’s. My heart thudding against my chest like terrible hammer-strokes, my hand sweating and shaking, quickly, almost unconsciously, I raised my revolver and full at that vast black bulk of brute I fired. I plugged him in the chest. But what with the preposterous vastness, the tremendous vitality of his bulk, that was no vulnerable Adventure spot. I had not wounded him mortally. I had only filled him with sudden pain. He swayed toward me. His great soft- palmed hands went to his reddening chest. And from between his crunching teeth—in form and number just like a man’s—he emitted a single scream, a horrible scream, an almost human scream. It was a scream like the scream of a man in pain; and there is nothing so horrible as the scream of a man in pain. I leaped back, pressing my finger on the trigger of that revolver. Screaming and rocking from side to side, one long-armed hand tearing leaves from the bank and attempting to stuff them in the wound, as if to stop the flow of blood, the other reaching out, its long fingers work- ing and gripping likesome enormous pincers, he lurched, an ungainly vast black bulk, toward me. I fired a second time. Then ere I could leap back, ere I could shoot again I was in those long, muscled, hairy arms. With those six-foot-long arms, those soft-palmed long-fingered hands, he clutched my arms as if he would tear bodily my biceps from my arms. He swept me slap up against his vast hairy bulk of body. He hugged me against his vatlike blood- besmeared chest. _ With a snap like the snap of a breaking twig, my right arm broke, in that viselike hug at the forearm. A sharp spasm of pain shot through that broken arm; and the re- volver to which I had held with such des- perate tenacity even when he first had gripped my arms, fell to the lava floor. I tried to cry out. But I could not cry out. I could not even breathe. And yet I heard in that awful moment, an echoing exultant ‘“Hee-ah! Hee-ah!’’ from the Poo- nan sweeping into the path; and I knew then that they had got my wife, my Golden Feather of Flame! I caught, amid the echoes of that war-cry but nearer hand, the low mirthless laugh of a woman—the Taugh I had come to know so well—the laugh of L7p-Plak-Tengga. And then that indescribable monster gripped me about the middle and his strong sinewy hands sunk into my flesh just above the hips. The balls and long nails of his thumbs reached back almost to my spine; the balls and long nails of his fingers reached around to the pit of my stomach; and those incredibly long fingers gripped the fleshy Eomichoo <S (E(@)