Word: reptilian
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Almost as amoral as zoo exhibits, they struggle feebly against temptation, maunder miserably into a plot to murder the man who stands in their way. They attempt their clumsy bathtub murder, bring off an equally clumsy auto murder, face sure conviction, and are rescued in one of the most reptilian bits of legal chicanery that ever made fiction look almost as strange as truth. They are hounded by blackmailers; they are tortured still more severely by their inability to trust each other; they come at last to a surprise ending which, in the novel, had much the force...
...exclusively male community seems to lack emotional drive and spontaneity." Prisoners are always hungry: there is never enough to eat, although light diet makes for fitness, up to a point. Red Cross parcels are lifesavers but monotonous. The total lack of privacy makes a man develop "a kind of reptilian insensitiveness-like crocodiles in their tank at the Zoo, which walk over each other without either appearing to notice the other...
...this closeness to the fierce Florida earth and its creatures that has enabled Author Rawlings to find, under the monotony of the Florida landscape, the secret of its haunting beauty, which is savage, reptilian and furtive. Like all her books, Cross Creek is saved from too much floral fragrance by her deep sense that, under the exuberance of subtropical growth, violence lies always coiled and ready to strike...
...prints; an old Zebu bull with mountainous shoulders; a leopard which is almost pure draftsmanship without substance. A formalized antelope reminded visitors of the wall drawings of Cro-Magnon cave men. A group of storks and herons seemed to be millions of years old, to show atavistic traces of reptilian ancestry...
...Item: a reptilian professional strikebreaker (Manart Kippen) tortures a union leader with hot irons...