150 EDGE OF THE JUNGLE 



print, but preferred to depict impressionistic 

 Laocoon roots. 



These and others sat with me on the long bench 

 and watched the moonpath. The conversation 

 had begun with possible former life on the moon, 

 then shifted to Conan Doyle's The Lost World, 

 based on the great Roraima plateau, a hundred 

 and fifty miles west of where we were sitting. 

 Then we spoke of the amusing world-wide ru- 

 mor, which had started no one knows how, that 

 I had recently discovered a pterodactyl. One 

 delightful result of this had been a letter from 

 a little English girl, which would have made a 

 worthy chapter-subject for Dream Days. For 

 years she and her little sister had peopled a wood 

 near her home with pterodactyls, but had some- 

 how never quite seen one ; and would I tell her a 

 little about them whether they had scales, or 

 made nests ; so that those in the wood might be a 

 little easier to recognize. 



When strange things are discussed for a long 

 time, in the light of a tropical moon, at the edge 

 of a dark, whispering jungle, the mind becomes 

 singularly imaginative and receptive; and, as I 

 looked through powerful binoculars at the great 

 suspended globe, the dead craters and precipices 



