“Then I saw strange animals moving in all directions, mingling their dazzling scales, twisting their fiery coils, walking, crawling, flying and responding to one another with profound and sonorous voices like the notes of an organ. There were sphinxes shaking their bandelets and chimeras with green phosphorescent eyes spitting fire through their nostrils and striking their foreheads with long dragon’s tails. There were griffins, half lion and half vulture, clenching their red paws and stretching out their blue necks, and basilisks with violet bodies undulating in the sand. There were a thousand strange, scarcely suspected, beasts: tragelaphs, half stag and half ox, alligators with the feet of roe deer, goats with the hindquarters of donkeys, owls with serpents’ tails, gigantic chameleons, and terrifying monsters sometimes as tall as mountains and sometimes as slender as reeds. There were immense metal flowers on the legs of women, and dragonflies whose deployed wings resembled the sails of ships and whose bodies shone like steel yardarms.”
Jane de la Vaudere, 1893