Just as they turned the nose of their machine toward a lower level, running at reduced speed, a huge bird with curving beak, which John said was a condor, dashed from the crags after the airplane.  It was followed a moment later by five or six others.  The great birds seemed to resent the appearance of so strange a giant in the mountain fastnesses where they had always held the supremacy of the air, all the time darting angrily at it, flapping their long, black and white wings, some of which had the immense span of fourteen feet, and croaking hoarsely.