Set (deity) or a fennec fox. The animal has a curved snout, long rectangular ears, a thin forked tail and canine body, with sprouted fur tufts in an inverted arrow shape; sometimes, Set is depicted as a human with the distinctive head. Some early Egyptologists proposed that it was a stylised representation of the giraffe, owing to the large flat-topped "horns" which correspond to a giraffe's ossicones. The Egyptians themselves, however, made a distinction between the giraffe and the Set animal. During the Late Period, Set is depicted as a donkey or as having a donkey's head. The earliest representations of what
The Blue Giraffe thought of as lesser beings–[such as] a tribe of mutated baboons in 'The Blue Giraffe' ("Astounding", Aug 1939) ... as being as decent, rational and civilized as most men manage to be, and maybe even more so." Jamie Todd Rubin, reviewing the issue of "Astounding" in which the story originally appeared, writes "[o]f all the stories in the issue, de Camp’s is the best written. There is no feeling of pulp writing or story-telling. It is a smooth tale that comes alive in your imagination so that you feel like you are right there with the characters on their journey.