SOURCE: "The Great Beast of Kafue" (Under the Hermes, 1917) by Richard Dehan

DESCRIPTION: "...And the horned head of the beast, that was as big as a wagon-trunk shaking about on the top of a python-neck that topped the tallest of the teak-trees or mahogos that grow in the grass-swamps, seemed as if it were looking for the little human creature that was trying to run away...how the water rises up in columns of smoke-spray as the great beast lashes it with his crocodile-tail! His head is crocodile also, with horns of rhino, his body has the bulk of six hippo bulls together. He is covered with armour of scales, yellow-white as the scales of leprosy, he has paddles like a tortoise. God of my fathers, what a beast to see! I forget the gun I hold against my hip—I can only stand and look, while the cold, thick puffs of stinking musk are brought to my nostrils and my ear-drums are well-nigh split with the bellowing of the beast. Ay! and the wave of his wallowings that wets one to the neck is foul with clammy ooze and oily scum.Why did the thing not see me? I did not try to hide from those scaly-lidded great eyes, yellow with half-moon-shaped pupils, I stood like an idol of stone..." ("The Great Beast of Kafue" by Richard Dehan)

NOTES: A Dutch Boer recounts how he ventured deep into the African jungle to find a double lake where two dinosaurs lived. The female dies, leaving the male terribly lonely, calling to her. The hunter can not bring himself to shoot the dinosaur because he had killed his own wife while doing military duty, suppressing a riot of protesting women.

HISTORY: Like the novels of H. R. Haggard, this tale is filled with plenty of South African detail. Dehan tells the story in a strangely disjoined way, having the father tell his son about what happened. The big revelation at the end of the story is well telegraphed. Dehan isn't the first to use the idea of the lonely dinosaur. Kipling used it in 1892 with his Blind Sea Serpent. Ray Bradbury would use it years later in "The Fog Horn" (Argosy, August 1951).