Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [63]
The massive jagged-spined stegosaur wouldn’t do. The hulking reptile was docile enough, except when roused, but the two tons worth of meandering, slashing, spike-tipped tail made the beast a companion of unpredictable peril. The cave man warily kept his eye on the fin-backed flesh-eating dimetrodons, but the entire pride was too immersed in glutting themselves with the muddy water to notice him.
He’d nearly resolved to select the company of two enormous exotically crested duck-billed hadrosaurs, but then a great baritone bellow trumpeted the arrival of a lone hundred-year-old deinotherium. Even better, the cave man recognized the elephantine goliath from long-healed foreleg scars caused from the claws of great saber-toothed cats, the splintered skulls of which were embedded forever in the pads of a ponderous front paw, resulting in a familiarly distinctive limp.
Gathering up a bouquet of succulent orchids, the cave man showed himself plainly to the colossal matriarch. Her melon-size left eye regarded the snack tentatively for just a moment, then the long muscular proboscis snatched the juicy blossoms high above to her pink hook-tusked mouth. The cave man had chosen his allies carefully, knowing from endless hours of observation that the deinotherium were predominantly gentle, intelligent and entirely fearless, even in the face of the Plateau’s most fearsome flesh-eaters.
Confidently, the caveman followed alongside his lumbering guardian behemoth — safe in the shadow of her protective company — and drank his fill beside her from the edge of the beetle-infested, worm-writhing green-brown river. A swelling wave suddenly engorged the odious surface and for a scant second the cave man found his entire head submerged beneath the water. Coughing up the sulfur-flavored refreshment, he bitterly observed his leather medicine bag floating rapidly away from him. No chance of rescuing the precious little pouch, already it glided among sharp-beaked snapping turtles twice his own weight. The cave man’s sole luxury, absolutely irreplaceable, was bade a tender farewell through his tear filled eyes.
Abruptly, the source of the rising river became alarmingly clear as a wading herd of leviathan long-necked sauropods emerged from the bend of the river, the thunder lizards enormously dwarfing every other colossus among them. These majestic treetop browsers, the cave man knew, were the real lords of the Plateau, especially when they gathered in such abundant numbers. The danger of a panicked stampede of the lesser giants around him was a very real possibility.
With a rapid, final, and regretful glance, the cave man scurried away to his lonely lair.
“There, lady and gentlemen, is our Plateau!” Lord John Roxton pointed with a weathered bronze forefinger.
Our ominous destination jutted up through the eerie morning mist like a dark green jungle-haunted obelisk. Already the dizzying height within the balloon’s carriage had threatened to rob me of my meager breakfast as the humid tropical atmosphere rocked and swayed like an angry sea. It was, however, an excellent and even awe-inspiring view of our perilous objective. Lord Roxton remarked, jabbing an elbow playfully into my ribs, that he felt like a boy living out a Jules Verne adventure. Sherlock Holmes had said nothing at all since we’d cast off and he clung white-knuckled to the carriage handrails.
The last two months had been a flurry of planning, packing, and speeding away at a dizzying pace by motor, rail, sail, and steam. Twice Sherlock Holmes cautioned me that we were being followed, but would say no more about it afterward, even with me pressing him firmly.
Holmes had spent a goodly portion of our journey in silent study of Professor Challenger’s recovered notebook. The missing scientist’s distinctive barbed-wire scrawl contained enough chemical details on the mysterious super-steel formula to convince my friend