Its shaggy feet carried great, curved claws as thick as a man's fingers, from which were hanging fragments of torn fern and strips of bark. Huge it was-giganticstanding on its hind legs more than twice as high as a man. appeared a figure of terror, monstrous beyond the nature even of that dark savage place. Paul Zweig is author most recently of “The Adventurer,” criticism, and “The Dark Side of the Earth,” poetry, and is chairman of the comparative literature department of Queens College, C.U.N.Y. Suddenly, into this concert of balanced energies intrudes a ripping and tearing branches are crushed, trees mauled and thrust aside: “In the gap, half‐concealed by a confused tangle of creepers, leaves and broken flowers. Along the foot of a tilted red rock a porcupine came nosing and grubbing.”īy Richard Adams. The heat had thickened it, so that the, winged insects sat torpid on the very leaves beneath which crouched the mantis and spider, too drowsy to strike. Between the trees the air seemed scarcely to move. Above, the green dusk of creepers and branches formed another realm, inhabited by monkeys and sloths, by hunting spiders and birds innumerable. A forest at summer's end: “Along the ground-soft, bare soil, twigs and fallen branches, decaying leaves black as ashes-there ran a continuous flow of sound scuttlings of rodents, snakes, lizards and now and then the padding of some larger animal on the move.
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