Gbe traveller* A Night of Horror.

Waikato Times, Volume XXV, Issue 2039, 1 August 1885, Page 6 (Supplement)

Gbe traveller* A Night of Horror.

Am English writer thus describes the terrors of a night which he pissed on the island of Trinidad : The weird rook soenery, with its dead forests, the strange birds that were " foul as the fabled harpies in their manners, dropped morsels of rotten fish from their mouths when we approaohed, and attacked ns with fury." More unoanny still were the landcrabs, " fearful, as the firelight fell upon their yellow, cynical faces, fixed as that of the sphinix, but fixed in a horrid grin. Smelling the fish we were cooking, they came down the mountains in thousands upon us. We threw them lumps of fish, whioh they devoured with orab-like-slowness, yet perseveranoe. It is a ghastly eight, a land crab at his dinner. A huge beast was standing a yard from me ; I gave him a portion of fish and watohed him. He looked me straight in the faoe with his outstaring eyes and proceeded with his two front claws to tear up his food, bringing bits of it to his mouth with one olaw, as with a fork. But all this while he never looked at what he was doing : his face was fixed in one position, staring at me. And when I looked around, lo 1 there was half a dozen others, all steadily feeding, but with immovable heads turned to me with that fixed basilisk stare. It was indeed horrible, and the effect was nightmarish in the extreme. While we slept that night they attacked us and would certainly have devoured us, had we not awoke, and did eat holes in our clothes. One of vi had to keep watch, so as to drive them from the other two, otherwise we should have had no sleep. Imagine a sailor cast along on this coast, weary, yet unable to sleep a moment on account of these ferooioui creatures. After a few days of an eiistanoe full of horror, he would die raving mad, and then be consumed in an hour by his foes. In all " Dante's Inferno' there is no more horrible a suggestion of punishment than this. As I was keeping watch over the others I threw a large stone at one of two great orabs that were approaching the sleepers. It broke through his armour and killed him. His death produced an effect upon his companion that I little expeoted, and whioh, I confess, made me feel quite uncomfortable and nervous in my exhausted condition. The reptile stopped when his companion fell, a copious foam then poured from his mouth, and his two eyes started right out of his head, hanging on to the ends of two long strings of horns. When I saw this ghastly exhibition I did not have faith to believe it for a time that I was in a land of magio, surroundad by more than earthly enemies. The foul birds luckily slept, so we had not to defend ourselves against their attaok as well, or I know not how we should have got through the night. As it was, the overcrowding orabs produoed a delirium tremeni sort of an effoot on the imagination of a lonely watoher. But we managed to get through the night without affording them the unwonted luxury of a human sapper."