Along their face and at their feet Waldo descried a host of half-naked men, women, and children moving about in the consummation of their various duties. Involuntarily he halted. The girl came to his side. Together they looked out upon the scene, the like of which Waldo Emerson never before had seen. [Pg 52] [Pg 52] It was as though he had been suddenly snatched back through countless ages to a long-dead past and dropped into the midst of the prehistoric life of his paleolithic progenitors. Upon the narrow ledges before their caves, women, with long, flowing hair, ground food in rude stone mortars. Naked children played about them, perilously close to the precipitous cliff edge. Hairy men squatted, gorillalike, before pieces of flat stone, upon which green hides were stretched, while they scraped, scraped, scraped with the sharp edge of smaller bits of stone. There was no laughter and no song. Occasionally Waldo saw one of the fierce creatures address another, and sometimes one would raise his thick lips in a nasty snarl that exposed his fighting fangs; but they were too far away for their words to reach the young man. [Pg 53] [Pg 53] CHAPTER V AWAKENING "Come," said the girl, "let us make haste. I cannot wait to be home again! How good it looks!" ome Waldo gazed at her in horror. It did not seem credible that this beautiful young creature could be of such clay as that he looked upon. It was revolting to believe that she had sprung from the loins of one of those half-brutes, or that a woman as fierce, repulsive, such as those he saw before him, could have borne her. It made him sick with disgust. He turned from her. "Go to your people, Nadara," he said,
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