Free The Zanthodon MEGAPACK ™: The Complete 5-Book Series by Lin Carter

horizon, losing itself in the steamy fogs which hung low over the heaving rollers.
    “It is like the first sea, on the very morning of Creation itself,” breathed the Professor, clasping his bony hands together in poetic exaltation. And I have to admit it certainly was. His expression became dreamy, as he repeated the old, old words:
    “…and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep…and the evening and the morning were the first day.”
    “Amen to that,” I said soberly. That vast, rolling expanse was like the first sea at the beginning of time, the mighty mother from whose tremendous, watery womb the first life stirred toward the dry land. It was a somber, an impressive, sight.
    And just then the sluggish waves broke into a glitter of flying spray, as something as long as a five-story building is high reared its small, snaky head atop its long, snaky neck out of the water.
    Up and up that slender neck rose, until it didn’t seem possible that any neck could grow that long. Under the sliding lucency of the sea’s surface I glimpsed a fat, seal-like body, propelled through the waves by vast, flat flippers.
    “Not to continue the Biblical parallels, but d’you suppose, that’s the serpent in Eden?” I said, flippantly.
    The Professor huffed and snorted.
    Then he peered more closely, eyes almost popping out of his skull with curiosity.
    “A genuine plesiosaurus, my boy, or I’m a monkey’s uncle!” he exclaimed. “An aquatic reptile of the Jurassic, thought by some to be yet surviving in the greater oceanic depths…perhaps the true sea serpent of sailing lore…possibly even the Loch Ness Monster itself…gad, if only I could get a closer look at the creature—if I could but measure it!—I could at last resolve the old dispute concerning the inordinate lengths to which the sea monster is believed to have attained.”
    The old boy was hopping from one foot to another in an agony of impatient and frustrated frenzy. I had to pity him: but his torment soon dissolved into another of those moods of dreamy rapture he was constantly falling into as he regarded yet another variety of prehistoric monster.
    “…To think of it, my boy!…the original sea serpent of the Dawn Age, vanished from the earth before the first man stood erect…until now we have only been able to study the plesiosaurus from its fossilized remains—but to be the first living man to actually look upon the living monster itself— gak !”
    Gak, indeed: for just then ten of the ugliest men I have ever seen came around the bluff and stopped short at the sight of us.
    They were hairy and half-naked and had matted manes and beards, and hefted huge clubs and things.
    And they were very definitely… men .
    “Oh, my goodness,” whispered the Professor faintly in a faint voice.
    “You can say that again,” I muttered, grabbing my gun and wishing I had packed along a good carbine and plenty of ammo, instead of one little .45.
    They were nearly naked, and were about the hairiest men I had ever seen or heard of, with barrel chests and long apelike arms and thick, matted hair and dirty beards on their ugly faces. They walked with a gait somewhere between a shamble and a shuffle, huge, dirty splayed feet wide-spread, and they had poorly tanned animal hides tied about them with thongs made of gut. Grunting and snorting to each other, they looked us over suspiciously, with an expression of surly truculence.
    “ Neanderthals , or I’m a monkey’s uncle,” breathed the Professor, a look of angelic rapture on his face.
    “Eternal Euclid, that I should live to see it…!”
    “Neanderthals? You mean cavemen?” I muttered out of the corner of my mouth, not daring to take my eyes off the pug-uglies. He nodded vaguely.
    “I should have guessed at the possibility of primitive man having found his way down here, when I saw the mammoth,” he said. “Both early man and mammoth must have fled here from the advancing