Chapter II: Part 2

A movement at last caught my eye, and staring over his shoulder I saw two great dogwolves breast a wall and come loping toward us. With a warning cry I threw up my bow. In the time it took me to change hands on it, he had peered back; then he gave a cry, remarkably manlike in tone, and waved urgently at my face. Scowling, I dodged back to get a shot at the foremost brute. At once the hairy thing knelt, as if pleading, and the pair of dogwolves, coming up, fawned on him with lolling scarlet tongues.

My jaw dropped and I gasped, dumbfounded.

The fierce beasts were his friends!

I slung my bow over my shoulder, but took the precaution of grasping my bone hatchet. The dogwolves stared at me, their hot eyes as puzzled as no doubt my own were; but they made no move toward me.

The hairy being stood up and came forward to touch me lightly on the chest. Then he shook my right hand up and down again. The dogwolves crept on their bellies to our shadows, and one of them, a giant of a fellow, touched my foot with his wet nose, whining a little.

If there has ever been a more astonished person than I was at that second, he must have fainted away with his wonder. I know I grew quite giddy. Now, I said to myself, if Halfspoor were to amble up to me and ask for the loan of my knife, I think he would get it without a question or a raised eyebrow!

The big carnivores lay panting beside us, and the dark rough-coated manlike creature rubbed his chin and stared at me from those deepset eyes; which I could make out now, as they were glittering in a stray beam of sunlight that fell across his strange face.

He said something to me. It was not an animal's noise, but a reasonable imitation of human speech, except that none of the words were familiar.

At once I remembered the young hunter who had come to our glen several years before, from a country far to the north. His language, while much the same as ours, had words in it which we had never heard; and the elders of the tribe said that probably other folk, living in other isolated places, must have developed words of their own too.

* * * * *

This being, of course, seemed to me at first no more a man than were the dogwolves at his feet. He had the same general form, yes, and perhaps even the exact conformation of features under that mat of hair; but what human by any stretch of the imagination could ever grow such a pelt?

Nonetheless, his voice was pleasing enough to the ear, and his speech seemed separated into distinct words, though as I have said, none of them were familiar to me.

I said, "Friend what-is-it, you undoubtedly know what you're talking about, but I do not. I would give a new set of hunting arrows to be able to understand you."

He uttered more words, pointing off to the west where the tall raw cliffs were even now shutting off the lower half of the sun.

"Yes," I said, "evening comes on, and you're afraid I'll wander over into the country of The Nameless. Is that it? Never you fear, my friend, I'll not go a step farther in that direction."

But he took my hand, hesitantly and as though afraid that I might be offended; and he tried to lead me westward.

I hung back, and the dogwolves growled a little, but desisted when he spoke to them. Then he signed to me, as plainly as one could imagine, that there was food where he was taking me; and so because of my grumbling belly I suffered him to lead me off among the ruins of this fabulous place.

As we walked I thought of Lora, and her distress in the morning when she would find me still away; but not for anything would I tread the paths of the Fearful Forest at night. I must find a sleeping place nearby.

We passed the flat-faced precipice with the five lines of square openings, where Halfspoor's brown lady had been sitting. I pointed up and said, "Knifetooth bear!" He cocked his head at me. I hunched my shoulders, put two fingers athwart my lips for fangs, roared like a bear and said, "Knifetooth!" again.

The hairy one stopped, opened his mouth--he had teeth as even and white as my own--and out of his throat came the exact duplicate of old Halfspoor's battle cry. The dogwolves leaped and barked excitedly. I nodded agreement and said, "Bear!"

He said something guttural that sounded like _oorsa_. I made him repeat it several times. It occurred to me that _ursus_ is another of our names for old knifetooth; and my wonder grew apace.

Pointing to myself, I then exclaimed, "Ahmusk!"

He said my name with no difficulty, and then seemed rather confused; for he tapped his own black chest and said, "Ahmusk?"

I tried again. I touched the bigger of the two canines and said, "Dogwolf."

He mastered that more or less, and in return gave me his name for the brute, which was _poort_ or _spoort_, I could not tell which. His sibilants were tongued so lightly that they were difficult to hear.

* * * * *

I indicated myself and said, "Man." I prodded him and repeated it. Then I realized consciously for the first time that I was now regarding him as a species of human. He had taken me for kin before, as his former use of my name as a generic term plainly proved.

"Ahmusk," said I once more, beating my bosom.

"Ahmusk," said he, pointing; and then, laying a shining-haired paw on his own breast, "Dy-lee!"

"Dy-lee," I said, charming him no end, for he capered grotesquely and nodded his head till the lank thatch flew.

Well, now we were acquainted. My pleasure at finding this strange brute-man was out of all proportion to its apparent importance. I suppose it was reaction to my hours-long suspicion that I had played the complete fool in coming into this country, in following the terrible Halfspoor, in ignoring the age-old forbiddance against crossing into the land of The Nameless.... Now all seemed to have come out well. Halfspoor, who had been proving more than a match for me, had been harried off, evidently on orders from this Dy-lee creature, by a pack of dogwolves. The Nameless were nowhere in evidence. Food and possibly a tree for the night were in the offing. And I had made a wonderful discovery, a brain-shaking find; for if I was right, I had chanced upon a new branch of the family of men.

Through the ruins we went, the dogwolves at our heels; and we were as delighted with one another as two boys who have been given their father's old bone hatchet to play with.

* * * * *

The silver dusk came up from the earth, spawned from the shadows of the many ruinous walls and ramparts; and far ahead I saw a scarlet eye wink out at us from the darkening cliff. I clutched Dy-lee's shaggy arm involuntarily, and hissed at him, as though he understood the words, "The Nameless!"

He understood, at any rate, that I was frightened; for he patted me awkwardly on the back two or three times, and said something in his language meant, by the tone, to be reassuring.

A hunter could not hang back where a brute-man like this went on. He obviously knew what the scarlet eye was, and seemed utterly without fear. And so after a time we had come near enough to it for me to see that it was no ghastly orb of a Nameless ogre, but the mouth of a cave, fairly high up the raw cliff, shining with the reflection of a fire deep within it.

Evidently Dy-lee meant to go into the cave, for soon we had struck a well-worn path and were traveling upward. I imagined that there were friends of his there, with whom he would eat before seeking his tree for the night. Overcoming my dislike of caves with a wrenching effort, I followed him up the path and stood on the threshold of the grotto, having a last look about me. From this vantage point I could see the glimmering of fires from several other great holes which had been hidden from the plain.

Then I went into the cave of Dy-lee the hairy man.

* * * * *

The fire, leaping merrily within a ring of stones, heated the long tunnel-like cavern for many paces on all sides; and about it, some cooking meat, some engaged in low-voiced conversation, and some making or repairing noose-traps, snares for rabbits and birds such as our children often play with, were a score or so of the long-maned people. My last doubt as to their humanity vanished at sight of the flames, for no animal can control fire. Except for their pelts, these folks might have been my own.

Some of them sprang to their feet as we entered, waving their arms and shouting. Dy-lee quieted them with a crisp word, and putting his hand on my shoulder he made a speech at which they all came crowding around, each one wanting to shake my hand up and down. It was all wonderfully friendly and heart-warming. Instinctively I loved these people, and pitied them a little, too, for that they must live so close to the terrible country of The Nameless.

At thought of those malignant beings, I remembered Laq the guardian, whose arrow (I felt sure) had goaded the bear Halfspoor into attacking me; but at once I put the bitter thought from me, and shaking the hand of one dark fellow while grinning amiably into the almost featureless face of another, I moved to the fire and was given a haunch of hare, all smoking and hot from the spits above the flames. After I had wolfed this, while the whole company stared at me and chattered among themselves. Dy-lee handed me some meat off the brisket of a doe. I wondered how they managed to catch deer, for the only traps in evidence were the small rabbit-snares, while none of them carried lances or bows or even metal knives, but had some crude flint daggers with which they made shift to cut up their meat. Then my eye fell on several of the tame _poorts_, or dogwolves, lounging insolently about among the hairy folk; and I recalled their pack chivvying Halfspoor over the ruins. There was the answer! Incredible though it was, these men must have trained their four-footed companions to pull down deer--even stag and bison for all I knew--for the masters' larder.

* * * * *

I sat down on the floor by the ring of firestones, weary with tracking and fighting and surprises. At once all of them came close to me and seated themselves too, clamoring good-humoredly for their dinner. They still peered curiously at me, but with such a friendly air that no offense could be taken. As we ate, Dy-lee pointed to various members of the group, or family, as it possibly was, and told me their names, which I did my best to master. The oldest of them, a seven-foot giant of a man with very long grizzled-silver hair falling in cascades all over his body, was called Dy-vee, or Dy-veece, I could not be sure which. He seemed to be the chief, or the grandfather, for when a bevy of young females began to giggle loudly together, he spoke to them with authority and they were hushed.

The woman whom I took to be Dy-lee's mate was a slim, high-breasted she, whose hair was sleeker and finer than his, and on whose face the shag was lighter and not of so matted a nature. It was on this shy creature that I first perceived the color of the cave folk's skin; when I was told her name (which was Zheena), she put back the long hair of her forehead with a very feminine gesture, and I saw that just around her eyes, less deepsunk than the males', there was no fur at all. The skin was white, like a winter's baby before it is tanned by the sun, and seemed smooth and firm. I resolved, when I should know Dy-lee better, to have a try at burrowing in the nap of his face to see if he too were white beneath it.

So we got through the meal somehow, between introductions and polite gestures and much high laughter at our mispronunciations and general inability to understand each other. When I had eaten all I could hold, I leaned back against a wall of this cheerful cavern, with my hands pillowing my head, and because my stomach was full and my heart light, I began to sing.

The effect was that of a lightning bolt striking among them. They stood petrified for long seconds, and then came swarming from everywhere to hear me; and I, whose voice is admittedly like that of a wounded bison bellowing to its herd, stopped my song with a grunt and stared openmouthed at the shaggy people. Dy-lee made quick eager motions to me, opening his mouth time after time, and presently it was borne in upon me that they wanted me to sing again. They wanted Bear-throat to sing!

* * * * *

So I sang. I caroled a love ditty, which made all the females roll their eyes and sigh; and I chanted a song of the hunt, which set all the bare hairy toes to beating on the rock floor. I sang all the songs I could recollect of my mother's repertory, the rollicking ones and the sad ones, the lullaby tunes and the haunting melodies that told our legends of the far olden times. For the space of at least two hours I sang to them, and when at last I stopped, for lack of breath and rawness of throat, and because I could not remember another song to save me, you would have thought the cave was falling in, such a noise they made. I saw then that many, many more had pressed into the place, until it was packed with scores of the hairy folk, and there was no vacant space anywhere in the grotto except for the little cleared place on which I sat. Even their great dogwolves were lying about watching me with quizzically cocked heads, and looking as though they enjoyed it.

They liked _my_ singing! The all-but-tuneless caterwauling of Bear-throat the hunter enchanted them to immobility! I could scarcely believe it, even though they had listened to me for so long.

I pointed at Dy-lee and by gestures, asked him to sing. He shook his head and shrugged, an especially human movement; as plain as if he had said it in words, I knew that neither he nor any of the others had ever known what it was to lift the voice in song. They were a people wholly without music. No wonder my bawling had enthralled them!

Gradually, the cavern cleared; although they obviously wanted to stay and listen to me, and gaze wide-eyed on my bronze hairless skin, old grizzled Dy-veece shepherded them out into the night with gruff barks of command. When only the family, or whatever this group might be, was left, he came to me and after patting me a few times and shaking my hand up and down, handed me a sleeping fur. It was cave cat, and very like my own blankets at home. I looked to be led out to a tree then, but saw that the folk were one by one lying down near the fire, wrapped in their furs and evidently intent on sleeping in the cave. I think this astonished me as much as anything I had seen in all that strange day, for who ever heard of sleeping anywhere but on a tree platform? Nevertheless, I could scarcely wound the feelings of my hosts by going out alone and thus refusing their hospitality; so with a weak smile at Dy-lee and his mate, who were watching me anxiously, I spread the great yellow pelt on the bare rock, laid myself down on it, flipped the edges over me, and closed my eyes with the certainty that I would not get a blink of sleep all that night.

* * * * *

The next thing I knew was that I was very warm and drowsy, and that something was pressing cozily against me from both right and left. I opened my eyes, yawned, and found that I was flanked by a pair of the tame dogwolves, who were snoring gently into my ears. The fire was crackling under half-a-dozen spits loaded with meat, a number of the dark-haired people were moving about quietly, and the sun was beating straight in the door of the cavern with a cheerful orange light.

Dy-lee, seeing that I was awake, brought me water in half the shell of some great nut which I did not recognize; and Zheena, his mate, presented me with a choice of fruits set on a wooden slab that had been rounded and cleverly decorated with bright dyes.

After rinsing my mouth and eating an apple, I rose and stepped over a dogwolf to go to the opening and look out on a beautiful autumn day, crisp and clear as the one before had been. Then, after a few deep satisfying breaths, I returned and made a hearty breakfast of meat in company with all the cave folk.

When we had finished, Dy-lee led me down the path to the place of ruins. By the vivid sunlight I could see that the walls at the base of the cliff were somewhat less shattered than the first ones I had come upon; and also that they were definitely no accidents of nature, but constructed. I asked by gesture if his race had built these walls, and he signed to me, No.

Shortly we came to an enclosure that still bore its roof. I went and peered into this strange square place, and Dy-lee kindly handed me a long torch of bound reeds soaked in black oily matter and lighted, the purpose of his carrying which on this bright morning I had not hitherto understood. Now I realized that he meant me to see everything there was to be seen, whether open or hidden from the light; and I smiled my thanks as I took the brand. Dy-lee and his two dogwolves followed me into the place.

The roof was of stone, or perhaps of _a_ stone, for I could detect no crack or joined place in all its surface. It was shored up by lesser stones, long and thick and ornamented with carvings that resembled the tendrils of the burrowflower. These must have been scratched into the rock with a metal tool, I think; though it certainly would have taken the whole lifetime of a man to accomplish all the carving I saw there. I had never seen or heard of anyone carving deliberate designs in anything before. The effect was lovely, albeit startling. Our glen-folk decorated many things with dyes made of vegetables and roots and minerals; but none had ever thought to adorn wood or stone with carvings. And here again I was astonished, for after the first moment or two, it seemed a natural and beautiful thing to do. It was like the shaking of the hands, something that was surprising only at the first acquaintance.

* * * * *

While I stared about me, Dy-lee passed into a far corner and began to clear away a great heap of trash, broken wood, old discarded sleeping furs, and other useless articles, which had been piled in a haphazard fashion there. I followed him across the floor and saw that he had cleared a space in the center of which was a square slab of stone set into the floor, with a huge ring embedded in one side of it. This ring he now grasped, and began to tug and haul at it, grunting with the strain. The block of stone moved upward, fell, moved and fell again, and it seemed it would take him an age to lift it free. So I put my hand on the ring beside his. He relinquished it to me, I think out of curiosity to see how powerful I was; and it was then I discovered that I was much the stronger, for the slab came up out of its hole smoothly and easily to my tug. Dy-lee straightened and said something in an awe-struck voice.

"That is the result of a hunter's life, friend Dy-lee," I said, grinning. "If you stalked with a bow and a hatchet, rather than a pack of dogwolves, you would be as strong as I."

Pointing down into the black well exposed by the raising of the stone, he indicated the torch in my hand. I thrust it down into the mouth of the well. There was a kind of sputtering sound from the brand, which I could not attribute to anything in particular, except perhaps that the fire was afraid to go down into that jetty darkness. Peering past it, I saw a line of the graduated stones that abounded in these ruined places, going down like a curious tilted rock ladder into the depths of the earth. Dy-lee made urgent motions to me, that I should go down. I shook my head. "Not for an extra year of life, friend," I said.

He took the torch from me and before I could stop him he had dropped into the pit. The two dogwolves brushed by me and followed him down.

Well, it ill became a hunter of the glen-folk to sit here gnawing his knuckles when even the brute beasts showed no fear of this terrible hole; so with many misgivings I took my first hesitant steps down the underground passage.

It was almost pleasant in the tunnel. I had expected chill and dampness, but the walls were dry and quite warm to the touch, rather like the rocks on the sides of Ruddy Mountain, which is the cone-shaped hill that gives off sparks and smoke, far to the north of our land. As we progressed downward, the flambeau lighting our way, I seemed to notice even more heat; there may be a great fire somewhere beneath the earth of the ruined country--who can tell?

* * * * *

Shortly we came to a level stretch of tunnel, and some few score paces thereafter, to a widening portion which shortly became about as broad as the inclosure with the stone roof. Here it was like an ordinary cave, except that the floor and walls and ceiling were flat, with sharp angles at the jointures. The thought was inescapable: the giants or whoever had made all the walls and inclosures above had hollowed out the earth and made this place likewise. I examined the wall in one place (it was all alike, as much as I saw of it that day). Small smooth stones of agreeably differing colors were set in rows to form the surface, and their substance was such as I had never found before, being sleek and wonderfully glossy, as lustrous as the hair of my Lora in the morning sunlight.

Dy-lee now seemed excited, and urged me to follow him swiftly through the shining grotto. The dogwolves' claws clicked along the level floor, and they constantly sniffed the air, which was musty and made our breathing rather labored. The big torch crackled and blazed brightly.

At last we turned a corner--as sharply angled as those at the base of the walls--and after one look I gave a cry of fear, of brain-breaking wonder.

How can I explain what I first thought I saw? It was ... it was as if in this gallery there were many many square holes in the walls, and each of these holes gave on a vista of vivid color and much apparent movement; as though by some inconceivable magic there were different worlds beyond each hole!

I covered my eyes with an arm and moaned with terror. My knees smote together, my teeth chattered. And when Dy-lee laid a reassuring hand on my shoulder, I leaped as though Halfspoor himself had snorted in my ear.

With murmurs meant to restore my confidence, he led me to one wall and waited patiently until I found the courage to uncover my eyes. Then he pointed to the first of the large square openings. Seeing that nothing malignant had sprung out of it yet, and that the dogwolves had casually lain down in the light dust of the floor, I gripped my nerves with the teeth of my mind and peered closely.

* * * * *

Again I am at a loss for words to tell of this marvel. It was not a hole or opening, it was but an enclosed place on the wall, overlaid with a sheet of something so shiny and transparent that it must have been water frozen there forever by unthinkable sorcery. Beneath this motionless water, the figure of a woman looked out at us with calm unwinking gaze. She was dressed in fantastic furs, blue and emerald and gold, wrought in patterns that surely no one had ever seen before; her face, crowned by the gaudy feathers of a bird, was like those of my own people, being without hair and gentle-looking. After a long time of staring, I reached out to touch this wonder, and the still water over it felt cool and slick to my fingertips. The woman made no move as my hand passed before her. I was thunderstruck.

Dy-lee led me to the next enclosed place, and there was a man, clad as fabulously as the woman, with a stern look of resolution on his features. He seemed a curious hybrid, for while most of his face was as smooth as mine, on his chin was a fringe of dark hair such as covered Dy-lee's folk. Him I did not try to touch, for fear he should burst out of the frozen water at me.

With the third of these strange things I began to notice something else: namely, that the people--there were two behind this water--seemed very flat and completely without true substance. It is difficult to explain. It was as though a man could be pressed flat as a leaf, and still hold his form, his color, even his life (though this was in abeyance, _suspended_ as it were, yet waiting to break into movement at any second).

* * * * *

So we went down the long gallery, and I saw more multitudes of wonders than ever I can tell. There were many sorts of folk in even more awesome furs and pelts than the first; men clad entirely in what appeared to be metal, and women in garments that surely never came from the cave cat or doe or anything that walks our world today. There were scenes I could not comprehend, enclosed flat places on the wall which I could not make myself believe were flat places at all, but rather must be the holes on vistas I had first thought them. These showed tiny trees and brooks, figures of people smaller than my thumb, even portions of the sky with infinitesimal clouds hanging motionless therein. And it was after I had looked on two or three of these that the truth began to come to me, like a fiery jewel of knowledge shining murkily up through the black waters of my ignorance. For these were not real people at all, nor real vistas, nor was there anything real or magical about them at all; they were flat places on the walls, whereon some clever man had laid multihued _dyes_, so that when all were applied this representation of reality sprang to its mysterious, incredible, unmoving life!

I longed to ask Dy-lee if this was the true nature of the things, but could not think how to do it by signs. I therefore simply pointed at one of them and raised my brows questioningly.

"_Peesha!_" said he. "_Peesha!_"

It was, I gathered, a peesha. Whatever that might be.

He put a finger on a certain part of this peesha, and said, "Tree!"

I reeled. Literally I reeled, staggering back and dropping my jaw like a fool. "Tree?" I gasped. "Yes, yes, a tree!"

He made polite motions, asking me my word for it.

"Tree!" I shouted. I pointed to the beasts at our feet. "Dogwolves," I said, with one hand on my breast; then, aiming a finger at him and still indicating the two animals, "poort," I said. He understood that, for he nodded. I pointed to the wall. "Peesha," I cried, nodding to him, and then, "flat place with many dyes," I said in my own tongue. Finally, I waved at him and then at myself, and said, "Tree, tree. Tree, _tree_!"

* * * * *

He grasped it then. He was as amazed as I had been. We had at least one word in common. It suggested astonishing possibilities to me. Eagerly I touched the sky in the representation before us, the clouds, the earth, a small hillock; naming them and getting his names in return. Not until we came to a brook did our languages coincide again. Then I said, "Stream," and he said, as clearly as any man could, "River." "Yes, yes!" I shouted. "River, river!"

Babbling with excitement, he grasped my wrist and dragged me past several of the dye-images to a large one that was without the protecting rigid water, and which showed many men and women walking about between stone inclosures such as littered the ground above us. These inclosures, however, were not broken, but seemed whole and strangely beautiful, being decorated lavishly with carving and dyes. Some of them went up for hundreds of feet, as I could see by comparing them with the size of the people. Before this peesha he halted and proceeded to point out many things, naming them eagerly; but here we could not find anything for which we had a mutual name. Indeed, it was not remarkable, for most of the objects I had never seen until the day before, and then only in a ruined state.

And so we passed down the cavern until we came to the end, and crossed its narrow width to go back along the other side, looking at Dy-lee's uncanny "peeshas;" and at last we had seen them all, and I was too shattered for speech. Nothing like it had ever been thought of, had ever been dreamt of, had ever been seen by anyone in all my world, before today. That one could do this with dyes! Some of them had had no water--he called it _glaa_--over them, and these I had touched cautiously, finding their surfaces raised slightly here and there; and had come to the conclusion that the dyes had been mixed cleverly with harder substances, so that when they were put on the wall, they stiffened there and would not blur nor run together.

And nearly as wonderful as these things was the fact that there were points of contact in our languages, words which were the same in both tongues. "Hand" was _and_ to him, or it may have been _hand_ also, as his aspirates were breathed as lightly as his sibilants were tongued. _Tree_, _river_, and _owl_ were the same. I grew quite wrought-up with the fascination of the game, and could scarcely wait to tell Lora all about it.

We went up the slanted stones to the surface, and after he had carefully hidden the entrance slab with the rubble again (I could not guess from what or whom), he led me across the ruins to another whole roofed inclosure. This one we entered by a hole far up in one wall, raising two logs for a kind of bridge from the ground. Into this place the dogwolves did not follow, but lay down outside to await us.

* * * * *

Dy-lee's torch was burning low. When we had dropped into the inclosure, he chose two more from a pile of them stacked neatly in a corner, and lit one from the first. It flared up redly, and again we raised a ringed slab and descended into another warm dry place of peeshas. By then, I may say, I had identified this with our own word "picture," which we use to describe several things, such as the images our minds form occasionally which seem to us very real, and also a distant view of a beautiful countryside, as perhaps from a hill; I felt certain that _peesha_ was _picture_, and dimly I was wondering if our own race had once known this strange art of arranging dyes on walls. Certainly the similarity of the two words would indicate something of the sort.

He led me to one of the pictures--I will use this other word from now on--and held up the torch so that I could see it well. There was none of the frozen water at all in this place. The things were done in large squares on the rock wall, just as in the first underground grotto, but there was no _glaa_, nor was any of the slippery curious stone set around them. These walls were rougher and less shining.

The first one was very old, faded, flaked here and there so that the barren rock showed through. It portrayed a scene in just such a place as the plain above had once been, and as I had seen in a number of the other pictures. Tall inclosures rose into the air, with more lines of openings across them than I could count. Strange birds flew above them, looking stiff and featherless and glittery. If there were people on the ground, they were too small to be seen.

Gently he urged me to the next. Here was a scene among the walls, with people moving about. They looked very like my glen-folk, excepting always for the odd garments they wore, which covered all of their persons but the faces and hands. Even upon their feet they seemed to have garments.

The third picture was terrible. In its ancient much-faded colors it showed many men fighting. Not fighting bears, or cave cats, but _other men_. Yes, here were dead men, with blood upon their breasts, and others were locked in fierce combat. I turned from this view with a sickness pulling at my belly, and Dy-lee felt much the same, for he threw a hairy arm over my shoulders and bent his head sorrowfully even as I.

* * * * *

The next few pictures were all the same, men slaying one another, often with strange stick-like things, the nature of which I could not imagine. From the attitudes it was plain that when one was pointed at a man, the man died. It was some form of magic, such as an ogre might dream of.

Then we came to a picture which defied my comprehension for many minutes. It was a place of high walls and inclosures, over which flocks of the curious stiff-winged birds flew; and many of the tallest inclosures were toppling, while fire raged in among them (I knew it was fire by the marvelous crimson and scarlet of the colors, dimmed though they were), and great clouds of smoke rolled out.

There were others. I disliked them, I loathed them, but I could not keep myself from looking intently at each one. It was impressed on me that this was no legend, but a true thing that had happened in the far olden times. These were my people dying, at the hands of others of my people. I could not understand, but I could feel the truth of this thing.

Men slaying men! The legend of Sunset Fields had not lied!

On the second wall there was an enormous picture, full seven paces long and as high as the roof, and this one I could not grasp though I studied it for a long time. It was a place such as this plain--once there must have been many such, in the far olden times--from the center of which there sprouted up a great mushroom, like those in the Fearful Forest, but all creamy-white and so big as to shatter the imagination. I cannot say how huge it was. All our glens and valleys would be hidden in the shadow of such a mushroom. Though I looked at it until my eyes watered, and Dy-lee had to light his third flambeau, still I could not understand how such a thing could grow in the midst of the tall inclosures.

The next picture I could grasp, however. They were of ruins, like those below which we stood, and all among the ramparts and broken walls were the bodies of men. Some calamity had laid its dreadful hand on the place. I wondered if the giant mushroom had been to blame, wreaking this havoc as it grew.

And now the pictures were different. No more men slaying men, or tall majestic structures spearing the very sky with their tops, but only ruins and blackened plains, raw cliffs and far-flung wastes, the wreckage of great metal things I did not recognize, and among them a few, a very few human figures, prowling like jackal-rats furtively in the chaos. These pictures were all very ancient, with their dye-stuffs flaked and marred by time.

* * * * *

There was a view of a prairie, waving with orange grass, on which moved men who might have been my own tribe. Naked, with bows and hatchets, they stalked an animal something like a cave cat, which had a great mane of hair all down its back. I touched this picture and nodded to Dy-lee. He pointed to me. He knew that these were my kindred. And this picture too was older than the oldest man of the glen-folk, for it was much dimmed and discolored.

Down the walls I went, and now the pictures seemed to be less ancient, and in them I saw a weird change coming over the race of men, for they grew more hairy, and leaving the fields and pleasant glens (why, I wonder?) they appeared to take up their homes in the blighted places and in the caves of the raw red cliffs. Time passed, the pictures were brighter and less flaked, and mankind was furred as a beast, growing little by little to look like my friend, Dy-lee.

This series of pictures I pored over for a long time, going back and forth along the wall, judging the age of each in relation to the others; and I could not apprehend why, but it was true--these men were the same race, but growing shaggier in every succeeding picture. How long was the time gap between the pictures? A generation, a hundred years, a thousand? I could not tell. I went back across the floor to look at the earliest pictures, those in which men fought together. They exuded the aura of an incredible antiquity. And what of those in the other cavern? Their dyes were more brilliant, newer looking; yet the people were dressed in the queer garments that I saw in the oldest portrayals here. Did it mean that there were folk existing even now like them--folk impossible to believe in!--or simply that the dyes in their pictures were better and lasted longer than these? There were many things here that I could not understand, and I felt small and stupid and as young as the youngest pink rabbit with still-blind eyes.

Dy-lee made a speech then, indicating that I should look at the final pictures; so I left my speculation and came to him and gazed.

* * * * *

Here, immediately after the series in which mankind grew hairy, was a large square with dyes that were still vivid and clear, though it still seemed quite an ancient picture. It portrayed a number of Dy-lee's folk crouching amid the ruins, perhaps of this very plain above our heads. Their attitudes showed perfectly that they were afraid, for they drew back, with arms about their females and young ones. Then, in a cleared space, there stood a man of my own race, smooth-skinned and wearing the raiment of a guardian, the long fringed black fox pelts hanging from his waist and the short mantle of white hares' skins about his shoulders. He faced away from the cave folk, with his arms lifted in just such a mystical gesture as I had often seen the guardians making; and beyond him, from the edge of an especially well-limned forest, there arose a being whose every line suggested evil--evil beyond the power of words. There was no definite outline to the thing. It appeared to change slightly even while I stared at it, as though the dyes had been mixed with smoke or mist. It seemed to have horns, and then when I looked again, the horns had vanished. There were great columns of legs, and arms that hung loosely before its chest with an indescribable air of menace. Perhaps there were two sets of arms. I could not tell. It is strange to speak of a picture this way, for after all it was but dyes of many shades laid upon rock; but all I could recall definitely about the evil being, when I had turned away, was that its color was that of a dead fish's belly, and that from its amorphous head there blazed out two terrible eyes of purest lambent flame.

The import of this whole picture was inescapable. Here were the shaggy folk, here was a guardian of my own people, and here was a representation of one of ...

_The Nameless!_

* * * * *

For long minutes I stared at my new friend Dy-lee, while the thoughts churned in my brain. At last I shook myself, as a bear does on coming out of a cold stream, and I began to try him with questions, partly in gestures and partly in words which I hoped he might understand. First I pointed to the shaggy folk. Yes, they were his people, he signed. Then I indicated the guardian. He pointed at me. I shook my head. Indicating my rough loincloth of cave cat fur, I showed him the rich black and white apparel of the little figure, and then touched my bow and quiver, my hatchet, my knife. No guardian carries a weapon of any sort, as the beasts will never molest one of their craft. Dy-lee seemed to know this, for he nodded vigorously, but then showed me where we were similar--the brown furless face and body. I said, Yes, that this man was of my people, but differing from me in profession. He understood this. I asked him, after several tries, whether he had often seen such men as this; and he signed to me, Yes, that there was a place of meeting on the plain. I then asked if he had thought I was a guardian when he first found me the afternoon before, and he answered, No, pointing to my bow and hatchet.

These folk having no weapons, I was at a loss to know how he had recognized what mine were for; because the instant I had thrown up my bow he had seen I meant to shoot, first him and then his tame dogwolves. But after a moment's thought I remembered that in two or three of the old pictures there were depictions of the bow and arrow. I went back down the wall and found them. Evidently these people had once known the use of such things, for here they were, rather hairy but not yet covered with the thick shag, stalking a deer with bows. Somewhere in their evolving they had either lost the art or found a better. Here, in a later picture, they were hunting a great knifetooth bear. Ah, that was it; they had domesticated the dogwolves, and given up the bow. I imagined that it might have come in handy to protect themselves, for surely they could not always travel amongst a howling pack of their canine friends; but obviously they had discarded it entirely.

I returned to the startling picture of the guardian, and pointing to the horrid figure of The Nameless, I bent my head in pantomime and gave an exaggerated shudder.

Dy-lee repeated my motions exactly, and pointed away to where I imagined they dwelt. He said something, apparently his name for the beings. I said, "The Nameless." Again he shivered--it was a real reaction this time--and pointed east.

* * * * *

East? But that was the direction in which lay the Fearful Forest, the three brooks, Sunset Fields, and my own glen. I had not realized this at his first motion, being somewhat confused by the underground cavern. I shook my head, pointing west. _There_ dwelt The Nameless.

He would have none of that. No, they lived to the east. I pointed west, he pointed stubbornly east.

But _I_ came from the east! If there were such beings in that direction, would I not know it? I tried to tell him this, showing that I came from there; very well, said he in signs, so did the guardians, and I was obviously a relative, a son perhaps, or at least a member of the tribe of the guardians. Yes, I agreed, but....

I gave it up. Could I still be confused by this roof that shut out the sun? Hastily I looked at the last of the pictures, which were scenes of hunting and domesticity, with one more guardian at the end, though not with one of The Nameless; then I signed to him that we should leave the place. He scrambled up to the opening and I followed, the daylight from the high entrance hole of the inclosure above striking my eyes sharply after the torch's flickering gleam. The dogwolves roused themselves and nosed our hands as we came out among the broken stones.

"There!" I said, showing him the west; and, "There!" said he, in his own language, thrusting a dark furry finger eastward. Could we be talking of different things? No, there had been the guardian and the changing figure of horror.

_The guardian?_

What had a guardian been doing here? And the one picture had been old, but the other fairly recent, or I knew nothing of the manner in which dyes fade with age!

These hairy folk had seen guardians, not once in the dim past, but evidently often, and recently; had not my friend signed to me that there was a place of meeting, out on the blackened plain? No wonder that Dy-lee and his folk, while charmed with my singing and interested in me, had shown no overwhelming wonder. So the guardians knew, had perhaps always known, that here in the ruins and the raw red cliffs there lived another race of men!

* * * * *

I sat down on a flat rock and puzzled the matter over, beginning with what I conceived the early history of these people--of both our peoples--to have been. A terrible killing among men, with many strange weapons that spread slaughter wholesale, resulting in a leveling of their huge structures and a splitting of the race into two parts, one remaining in places like this, the other going into the distant glens and plains. The folk of the ruins gradually becoming hairy--could it be because nature saw they needed protection for their tender flesh, living as they did in caves? The thought made me open my eyes with my own cleverness! Then the discarding of weapons and the taming of the dogwolves. I wondered if they had thrown away _all_ weapons, or whether they had some secret slaying tool for their defense? Or a magic ointment to rub on their bodies? Or what?

To this point it all seemed clear, and while it was a thing to churn the imagination, still it was a plain and possible happening, not destroying any concepts or deepsunk training of my youth; because no man of my folk knew whence we had come, or anything of our history save that it had always been, so far as our elders knew, the same as it is now: easy and pleasant, with no enemies save the beasts of prey, and a mate for every man and woman.

But then came the problem of the guardians. These folk knew them too. They passed between us, it was clear, living with us of the glens but visiting these of the caverns. I tried Dy-lee with a question: did he know there were many, many more like me, living beyond the Fearful Forest? I made a mark in the gritty dirt with my knife point, showed him that it stood for myself, then made a great number of similar marks beside it and pointed east. He understood. He could scarcely believe at first, but after a period of astonished grunts and reassurances, he believed. There were many like me, over yonder to the east.

Then something took him with eagerness, so that he nearly burst with what he could not tell me; and at last he ran furiously away to his cave, leaving me to sit with eyes popping till he returned with a bag made of hide. From this he took a number of little bones, hollowed and corked with plugs of wood, and some sticks tipped with carefully-trimmed stiff feathers. Sensing that I would be curious, he handed me one of the bones. I pried out the plug and saw that the hollow was full of a green-blue dye, mixed, as I had suspected, with something to make it stiff and thick. As I sniffed at it and touched my fingertip to it gingerly, he set to work on the flat stone beside me, dipping his feathered stick into first this bone and then that one, making marks upon the cold rock. I watched the dyes spread and grow into the shape of a man.

Dy-lee, my friend, was a maker of pictures!

I embraced him. I was overcome with his genius. That this animal-looking fellow could himself make the wondrous _peeshas_!

* * * * *

Impatiently he motioned to me to be seated while he worked. I sat down and, hoping to repay him for the pleasure I took in his craft, I began to sing. He nodded vigorously and chuckled. We were enchanted with each other's accomplishments.

Watching him, I saw the roughly outlined form of a man grow into a tiny likeness of myself, with hunter's loincloth and bow. He prodded me with the stick, quite unnecessarily. I could see that it was Ahmusk there on the flat stone.

Then hastily he made pictures of two others, one of which seemed to be his conception of a female of my race. Hesitantly then, he pointed east.

I told him, Yes, and flickered my fingers to show that there were many of us there. His thatch-shaded eyes blinked with amazement.

The next picture was that of a guardian, with black and white furs and stern mien. I said the name aloud, and he said something like "rees," which I took to be "guardian" in his tongue.

With this series of pictures to aid us, we could make our queries clear to one another. I asked how many of these guardians he had seen or knew; and he answered, Fifteen or twenty. There being twenty-four guardians living in our glen, I knew that all of them, or nearly all, must at one time or another come here to commune with the hairy folk.

I asked whether they ever lived with his people, and he said, No, that they lived beyond the woods somewhere, he thought perhaps in the sky. I managed to make him understand that they lived among my people, and he seemed surprised that they had never told his folk of us.

Then he made a curious little vague shape beyond his row of pictures, which I could not fathom until he had dyed in two glowing fiery eyes; when I knew that this was meant for one of The Nameless. I asked if he had seen such an ogre, and he signed, No, that no man ever had except the guardians; and that to see them was death.

Then as well as I could I showed him that we knew of these things too, calling them The Nameless. His word for them I could not dominate, though he said it several times.

* * * * *

I wondered how he knew what they looked like, having never seen one; but remembered the picture in the second underground inclosure. Then I thought of the shadowy outlines of that thing, and it occurred to me that this was possibly but a common symbol for the beings, as no man knew their exact form. It was such a picture as a man might make, who knew only that The Nameless were terrible, evil, beyond all thought malignant.