Chapter II: Prologue

He had come gently and observantly up the glen, tapping here and scratching there as he climbed, and ever and anon straightening an elderly back to deliver a small cough. Also at intervals he would turn his face to the way by which he had come to rest the plantar muscles and study the lie of the land.

Chance-led he came and unadventurously, as one might say, and with no more premonition of impending change, or of this being a White Day in his life than had you, yourself, dear reader, when you left your breakfast-table this morning.

He was a little person in the clerical wideawake and dark tweeds of a don in vacation, elderly and grey, with heavy, lower-middle-class features refined by expression as a sunset refines a dull street.

Something about the rounded shoulders and narrow chest bespoke the bookish man, the "scholar's slope," they used to call it. His hands were large and broad at the finger-tips, such must have done manual labour in their time, pick-and-shovel work, possibly. At the moment of his walking into this story they were--I will not say dirty, but redolent of the soil, for as he went he would still be fumbling in a roomy wallet which pulled down his shoulder, and be taking therefrom for close and loving inspection this or that shapeless fragment of stone which he would presently return to the society of its fellows.

"It never came here by accident--there is no such thing," he murmured, conversing with himself, thought discussing matters with thought, as do the thoughts of those of us who live the single life, or cherish interests which are unshared by those with whom we cohabit. "We have no example from this level," he went on, turning in hand a something small and angular which he had picked up a few yards down the slope, a fragment of grey chert it was. "Three conchoidal fractures are sufficient, when associated with such patination. Here are--six--eight minor flaws in these cutting edges, apart from the cross-fracture--(patinated too). Yes, undoubtedly a used-up flake. And the thing hasn't travelled half-a-mile from home.... Where's the floor?"

"And, to think," he went on, "that such evidence would be lost--wasted upon that young doctor-fellow. It is almost incredible, the crass ignorance of our so-called scientific men.... Tried to interest him ... no use.... 'Out here to climb,' he says!... And with lovely things like these under his feet.... Amazing!"

In fact, the professor exhibited the impatience which the man of one idea feels for the man of another, and had even the personal repulsion which a man with the Oxford manner experiences for one who begins all his sentences with "_M'yess!_"

From which disjointed self-communings the reader will have already deduced that the professor was an ethnologist, one of that small band of heroes who during the past hundred years have quietly dug out and fitted together the buried past of the human race, pelted all the while by Ignorance and Bigotry as they delved.

The little grey professor had come in for his share of pelting: not very recently, for his science has won her right to exist and speak her mind. Dogma, which would have burned the ethnologist some time back, and more recently did her best to starve him, has of late lifted the boycott. He is now merely glanced at with a pitying shrug and passed over when anything good is going, as "Eminent in his own line, but--peculiar," and forthwith, the good thing goes to a safe man, someone who never did anything, nor ever will. This is Dogma's way of coming round. The sons of the men who pelted us will build our sepulchres, never fear, whilst themselves making a cock-shy of some other poor devil whom their sons will canonise in turn: for the bigots, and the poor, ye have always with you.

So it had come to pass that the professor by dint of giving to fossil-grubbing the forty-five years of life which he might have given to money-grubbing, and spending upon the collection and verification of tiny fragments of unpopular evidence the time which he might have spent more profitably in the delivery of sermons in St Mary's, which would have delighted the stupid by the "safety" of what they didn't see the bottom of, and amused the clever by the preacher's address in skating upon cat-ice, had come to know as much as was known about the Magdalanian Period.

Others worked at River-drift, Thames gravels and the terraces north of Amiens: and other some questioned the Plateaux deposits for eoliths and got but uncertain answers, as to which our professor reserved his judgment, unconvinced, but not wishing to be found sitting in the seat of the scornful at the Last Day. Neoliths he pretended to know nothing about whilst knowing everything that had been written. It was the men of the Madelaine Cave, the giant hunters of Mentone and their artist fellows to whom he had given his life.

Now some studies can be pursued by the fireside, the mathematics of a boomerang, for instance, or why a breakfast egg, if you set it spinning vigorously upon its side, will presently arise and spin upon its end. For the collation of Syriac gospels the neighbourhood of the Bodleian is as good a neighbourhood as any, but our professor, whose fireside was within a stone's-throw of the Bodleian, cared for neither mathematics nor codices, and as regards his own particular study had long since known that to prosecute it as it should be prosecuted entailed days and weeks in clammy dark caverns long miles from anywhere, and subsequent months put in with a series of little sieves and acids and gelatine and what not, cleaning-out and piecing together the uncleanly little bits of brittle rubbish which eventually would constitute a New Fact and take a place in the growing chain of evidence.

"To anybody capable of weighing testimony," muttered the professor, "this flake, which can only have been brought eighty miles up-stream by human agency, is as good evidence of Early Man at this end of the valley as if I had projected myself back a thousand centuries and seen the fellow break his tool and drop it."

He was somewhat out of breath with his climb, moreover the going was none of the best; there was no path, and the slope was clothed with a tall growth of flowering weeds, mountain coltsfoot, and the great purple gentian, dogwood, juniper and aconite. He replaced his hat after wiping his forehead, and, turning, parted the brush to find himself faced by a low bluff, an outcrop of the underlying bedrock, jutting through the rough slope of _débris_ into which the at-one-time precipitous sides of the glen had broken down. The bluff bore a ludicrous resemblance to the countenance of some ancient person asleep and half buried in bedclothes; there aloft was a massive nose and receding rocky forehead, nearer an upper lip overhung a transverse fissure, an open mouth, nearly filled with a tongue of soapy-looking brown stalagmite resting upon a lower jaw of the same material hidden by a growth of Martagon lilies. The professor, unaware of what Fate had in store for him, and, to tell the truth, expecting nothing out of the way, for a man of his years and experiences is past being sanguine, peered through the lush greenery and saw beneath the edge of that lower lip a jumble of small broken stone loosely cemented like ill-compacted concrete into which water has percolated (which was precisely what the material was and what had befallen it).

And, peering thus, a Something caught the professor's eye. Now the Thing, whatever it might turn out to be, could not fly away, nor was its finder a callow novice that he should howk out his trove at sight and, maybe, destroy evidence in so doing, so he made himself a mental rough sketch of its surroundings before disturbing them.

"A lot of weathering just here," he muttered. "Glen half filled-up since the watershed was cut back and the stream diverted. This was a cliff once upon a time, and this was a cave. Roof fallen in and cemented down to an ancient stalagmite floor ... breccia beneath with, apparently, a layer of charcoal in it.... If you please!" this to the lilies; they did please, or at least made way for him; he was down upon his elderly knees in the moist dirt breaking away the perished flooring of the old cave with his hammer; interested, of course, for the case was exactly in his line, but still without enthusiasm, when (see how our best things approach us unsought) the man made his great find, the chance of his lifetime came to him, such a trove as he had ceased to expect, for, despite many long vacations and snatched Easters spent in patient and systematic grubbing, the man had not been one of the successful cave explorers. But this was his day; a plate of stalagmite came away, and the disintegrated breccia beneath it gave to his cautious and practised handling, and lo, he drew forth the whole and perfect shoulder-blade of a Cave Bear, the mighty _Ursus spelæus_ himself, glazed all over back and front with a transparent film of carbonate of lime.

The relic bore abundant marks of the chert knife, a shard of which was cemented down to it; but, what raised its interest and value to the _n_th power, and made its discoverer's heart to flutter in his bosom, was the clear, boldly-drawn lines of the picture with which the flat surface of the bone was etched. Here was a find indeed, a leaf from the sketch-book of a Primitive, as good as anything found by Lartet and Christy. "_De_lightful! a find at last!" exclaimed the professor. "A contemporary picture of _Spelæus_, positively our first, I think. A bear attacking two humans, of opposite sexes, eh, what? but that seems unlikely. And what is this bent object in the hand of the indeterminate figure?--Weapon?--But what?" screwing up his eyes. "Bent throwing-stick, Egyptian type? Boomerang?--very curious. Same object repeated in corner of picture behind bear; conceivably boomerang in flight. But as to this--er--epicene figure--I doubt its being female somehow!--and yet--" He turned the bone, "Hey, what have we here?--this I might almost say justifies a feminine interpretation, there apparently was a woman in the case," for adhering to the back of the scapula was a bone needle! "Rough work this, for a female," remarked the professor, wagging his head whilst polishing his glasses, and attempting to realise the scene. "This fellow was as big as a horse, a grizzly would be considerably smaller and with inferior jaw power. The Magdalanian type was tall, I grant you,--she might have stood six feet and an inch, but--" he wagged his head again in disapproval of a woman participating in so rough a field sport as this sketch indicated. The professor was an old bachelor with mid-Victorian conceptions of the functions of womanhood.

"There is no getting over the charcoal--it was a cooking-place, a hearth. The design, here, implies leisure and permanent residence, and the needle a lady. This was a home, a housekeeping." He wrapped the relic in a silk handkerchief; it was more precious in his eyes than the arm of St Mark in those of a Venetian, and at least as authentic. This done he turned to take stock of the place, conversing gently with himself the while. "Cave more roomy at one time--hardly to call a cave now, possibly was never better than _un abri_, just the rock shelter that I once spent an uncomfortable night under among the Spanish Pyrenees." He glanced up at the overhang, fringed with fern. "Calls for systematic exploration.... Costly business at this height, short season and no quarters within any reasonable distance. Entails a camp, I fear. Wonder if the University would come down with a grant?... _Who were these people?_" he stroked the handkerchief. "We get no nearer; a hundred thousand years is a wide gap--very. It makes the pre-dynastic Egyptian seem neighbourly. We dig, we fit together, but--they are too remote. Personally, I despair of getting to closer quarters with them in my time." He mused with half-shut, speculative eyes. "The Myers and Gurney business gives unsatisfactory results at its best, and what communications they claim to have received seem chiefly from the recently deceased.... Classic idea of a _genius loci_ might have had something behind it ... but, _they_ approached the Surmise with propitiatory sacrifices,--we try the planchette--and get piffle! Other plan seems sounder, but, how to set about it? Language question a difficulty. Something might be attempted with an Esperanto of Eskimo and Bushman roots, eh?" he smiled. "And the offering? Coarsish tastes, I conceive...." In common with some three hundred millions of his fellow Europeans, the professor had never seen a sacrifice offered. The conception, once universal, has completely passed out of our ken. That a trousered, cravatted white man should take anything which he really valued--a horse, a motor, a family heirloom, a prize pedigree ram, a cask of claret--what you will, and deliberately destroy it in public for some definite religious object, or to purchase some visible result, recompense or immunity, is unthinkable.

The professor's mind fell back from this impermeable wall of alien thought and custom. He sighed and shifted himself as if about to rise, still muttering. "I'd give a good deal," said he, without the faintest idea that he was really and veritably offering Something to Someone, but, sincere as far as he went, "for one hour's genuine confab, _séance_, communication (call it what you like) with this couple, here. What _wouldn't_ I give?--ah--say a clear month out of my life--"

He said no more for that time, in fact he stopped short in the middle of his sentence and fell forward doubled up into a soft mass of the greenstuff which he had treated with so little ceremony, nor did he fall alone; a sheet of stalactite, part of the ancient roof of the cave, had detached itself from the impending lip and fallen upon and with him.

Was it possible that the _genius loci_ had taken him at his word?