本书摘录:
Author‘s note
_ On several previous occasions it has happened to this writer of
romance to be justified of his romances by facts of startling
similarity, subsequently brought to light and to his knowledge. In
this tale occurs an instance of the sort, a "double-barrelled"
instance indeed, that to him seems sufficiently curious to be worthy
of telling. The People of the Mist of his adventure story worship a
sacred crocodile to which they make sacrifice, but in the original
draft of the book this crocodile was a snake--/monstrum horrendum,
informe, ingens/. A friend of the writer, an African explorer of great
experience who read that draft, suggested that the snake was
altogether too unprecedented and impossible. Accordingly, also at his
suggestion, a crocodile was substituted. Scarcely was this change
effected, however, when Mr. R. T. Coryndon, the slayer of almost the
last white rhinoceros, published in the /African Review/ of February
17, 1894, an account of a huge
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