Word: beastes
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Wild Beast. What happened was this: the ignorant, the primitive and the poverty-stricken believed and defended the miracle. Roused to .a pitch of hope such as seldom touches the earth's hopeless, they became as powerful a fact for the world to reckon with as the vision itself. Franz Werfel builds up a compassionate and ludicrous picture of how state, science and the Church handled this strange wild beast against which no weapons had been invented. Scientists trembled in scorn and terror at the challenge to their royalty over the century. The Church, sternly resolved to distinguish between...
...less instructive is what happened afterward. Little by little the wild beast captured and institutionalized itself. In the grotto a sentimental statue stood in for Bernadette's lady; a great church improved the living stone of the mountainside; the healing virtues which her spring retained were put to the service of the great institutions which had opposed them...
Star of the beast epic is Shere Khan (real name: Roger), a magnificent half-Bengal, half-Sumatran tiger who is out to get Mowgli (Sabu, the young Hindu who starred in Elephant Boy). The ominous supporting cast includes some 2,000 animals, birds and reptiles-notably a slinky black panther (Bagheera) with a sinister propensity for sharpening his lethal claws on tree limbs, an enormous python (Kaa, who had to be controlled with a blow torch), and a very unpleasant cobra...
Today Bachelor Kartveli, like other top-drawer ideamen in aviation, is busy about next year's design. But sometimes he goes out on the field to watch his 2,000-h.p. (Pratt & Whitney) Thunderbolt in the air. He's proud of the beast. "A nice plane," he admits, in an accent tinged with French, rather than Russian. "But she's too big." Airmen who fly the beast could argue with him, but they don't. They know it's an esthete's criticism...
They learned, also, to ally themselves with the free fighting men of the hills, to "harry the enemy like fleas in a dog's tail so that the beast can make no headway for stopping to gnaw his rear." Ling Tan's sons wandered, but always secretly to return, sophisticated in the ways of killing. The eldest son set deep traps and coolly killed his victims with his knife. The second smuggled in firearms from the hill-men, and killed only when he had to. The youngest killed for pure joy and found joy in nothing else. Ling...