THE MEETING.
In the newly systematized psychologies the analysis of love carries our
introspection to equilibrating shocks of feeling, of an accommodation
between an objective irritant and a subjective impulse, to
gratification of sense inwrought with the emotional satisfactions that
arise from perceptions of fitness, sympathy, congruity and the like;
and doubtless a process of ratiocination would make of love, or find in
it, all this. But love remains, and can we not be thankful that it does
so remain, a penetrating ecstacy that invades sense and thought, and
issues, like an electric fluid, instantaneously from all the surfaces
of our feeling, and thus transmutes that feeling, giving it glory and
radiance; that it changes the being in whose enraptured soul its flakes
of fire have fallen, making the limit of his excellence possible,
the range and widest capability of his nature patent, and along with
its energizing influence upon all his dynamic powers, awakening the
spiritual fires as well; or, more aptly and truly, elevating the
outlook, the intention, the design, thrusting upon him by a sort of
imperious moral necessity, the sweeter aspects of his relations to
beings, to himself, and widening his love by the whole compass of his
possible emotional exaltation, so that he become protagonistic, chaste
and fair.
At least in the best men this is so, and even by some sort of
adumbration and suggestion, giving them momentary periods of nobility,
of insight, of joyful self-sacrifice, also true in the poorer sort.
Ogga was indeed a wild man, a prehistoric, a creature of the plain,
living next to nature, supplying his daily needs by a harsh ingenuity,
wringing from obstacles a concession to his daily requests, a being
utterly removed from all modern conceptions of social physics, a
being on whose uplifted face no word of revelation or literature or
exhortation had ever fallen, one whose instincts, the germinal moments
of whose mind, with its inseparable faculties of observation and
deduction, had only become active and projected under the influences
of nature. But then what a nature it was. It was the dying years
of an extraordinary geological phenomenon, the Ice Age, when the
splendid relics of the crystalline ice-cap yet clung to the higher
elevations of the continent, when in their retreat there had been left
a weird confusion of ice and river, and refuse masses of a denuded
world, monumental in extent and meaning, when animals, strange, big,
and desperate, ranged through the land, while in the scene, chosen
for this imaginative creation, to these boreal stages of life and
topography, were conjoined the insistent claims of warmer conditions
on the south in the Fair Land; and again to the east entered the
majestic desolations of the canyon country. In the chapter on The
Place the marvellous variety of natural conditions under which both
Ogga and Lhatto lived--for we have seen in their various and errant
life, however specialized, they were meeting all of them--were those
which appealed to their wonder, their fear, their admiration, awoke
in them joy and amazement and desire, fed the springs of poetic
impulse, stirred the sense of worship and dependence, and propagated
the thrilling currents of question and imagination. They reacted more
intricately, more coherently upon their moral nature by which, better
perchance than through the agency of books and stories, lessons and
education, the fine outlines of courage and devotion, self-sacrifice
and concentration, grew in their character, and without vagueness or
confusion, lifted them into a relief, stalwart and unique.
As Ogga saw Lhatto he loved her, and he loved her nobly. The
whole process of approach, preparation, attack and capture was
instantaneously traversed. How could it be otherwise! The physiological
instant was critical and victorious. Ogga was young, the tides of blood
in his veins bore with them the impetuous claims of nature. And who,
born amongst men, shall not know beauty? Ogga’s eyes had only met the
forest, the wild animal, the untenanted steppes, the sky, the ice,
the river, but when they met the face of Lhatto, the charm of abiding
there was unquestioned. It fed his heart with a satisfaction, and
passion leaping to the cup, from whose fulness its own thirst should be
quenched, suddenly became realized; importunate, defiant, triumphant,
mature and regnant.
And then by the dear subtlety of all things great and good, with
passion came also, with unhesitating foot, reverence and happiness and
aspiration, and Love thus born made of Ogga a divine thing, and of
Lhatto, yet unwaking, yet unknown, a woman drifting ashore in a little
awkward boat from the irresolute sea, it made of her a wonder of life,
full of affluent loveliness, full of assured excellence, full of peace,
and Ogga, feeling all these things, knelt and touched the hand of the
sleeping girl.
Lhatto awoke. The rising sun, with its steeper rays, would soon have
smitten her eyelids apart. Was it not better to awake and find her
eyes looking in the face of a lover? It was a benison of destiny,
and, like all appointed things, seemed only a part of nature, as
do the stars, the moon, the showers, the flight of birds; and to
Lhatto, Ogga standing there smiling and listful, seemed a necessary
recompense, a blissful completion of her dreams, a friend coming down
from the unknown, and yet stamped with all the traits of familiar
acquaintanceship and loyalty. With that, the operatic stage of their
encounter passed, though all its shrewd and fine results remained, and
Lhatto jumped from the boat and stood by Ogga, and then both seized the
boat, lifted it to the rock on which they were, and carried it to the
shore.
The passage to the shore, with their inconvenient load, over the
separated rocks, had not been without difficulties; and in the way of
caution, encouragement and direction, Ogga had spoken to Lhatto. Now
he told her to stop, now to lift her end of the boat higher, again to
rest it until he could more securely hold it, then anon, he asked her
to wait because the harpoon or the paddle or the seal had changed their
places and threatened to fall out.
Besides, though he carried the heavier end where the seal lay, he
essayed to carry it all, at places where the slippery rocks made the
transit harder, and then Lhatto spoke and reproached him and laughed,
and held her end and tugged away from him. And so it happened that
in the work they became known to each other, and when the mute canoe
rested on the sandy beach between them, it was their common friend and
they shook hands over it and laughed, and Ogga caught Lhatto in his
arms and kissed her.
And Lhatto, yet unblemished in that dawn of time, took Ogga’s face
between her hands, and pressed her own lips upon his, and there was
neither shame nor surrender in the act, for both were fair and free,
and in the simplicity of their hearts lived on the impulse that ruled
each minute, without check of calculation or artifice, duplicity or
sloth or strategy. An instant later, Lhatto fell backward to the
ground. Her endurance was overcome, hunger and fatigue, the long
exposure, the last efforts with the canoe, broke down her strength.
Ogga realized all this. He placed her higher up the bank, upon the
thick turf, and under the shade of trees, he brought her water from a
spring. He emptied his pemmican bag, he made a fire and cooked portions
of the seal; and Lhatto, returning to herself, thanked him and ate;
and life, restored to her by this sudden power that met her hopes and
completed them, seemed more gracious and caressing and dear.
Then Lhatto told him, as they sat by the waning fire with the canoe
a little way before them, the torn seal at Ogga’s feet, the spilled
basket of pemmican on one side, the whispering branches overhead, and
the broad rapture of the far-away ice-peaks shining about Zit, before
their eyes, told him of her strange adventure; the morning spent on the
shore, the sudden wicked tide--Lhatto called it “the Water God”--the
dreadful icebergs, her escape, her forgetfulness, and then her waking
amongst the rocks with Ogga sent to her by “the Air-Spirit--the Spirit
of Zit.”
And Ogga shook his head and asked: “Where are your people?” Lhatto
pointed southward to the jutting capes, and standing up, her eyes
screened by her hand, told him to look well and he too might see a dark
hill on the water--“It was from there, a deer’s run back in the land;”
and Lhatto turned to him, who rose above her, so strong and eager, and
moved by the most feminine of motives, asked--“And where are yours?”
Then Ogga motioned her to the bank again, and told her the story of
his life: he had pictures in his mind of a flat grassy table where he
played with other wild boys amid a great desolation of rocks, deep
chasms, ragged and grisly cliffs, but on the table the air was sweet
and cool, and there was a little deer that the older men had brought in
to the grassy table, and Ogga loved the animal and played with it, and
fought the other boys who plagued it and mocked him.
Now amongst these boys was one of his age and size, strong like him,
but silent and envious. And one day as Ogga held the deer in his arms,
the boy pushed against the deer and struck it with a stone, so that the
deer was hurt, and they were at the edge of a little cliff on one side
of the grassy tableland. Ogga became enraged and struck the intruder
and they wrestled on the edge of the little cliff, and Ogga was strong,
for he was coming into manhood, and he pushed the enemy over the cliff
and he fell amongst the rocks and lay there moaning.
Then Ogga became frightened, for this boy was the son of the head man.
When this happened it was about night fall and Ogga knew the path down
the rocks to the river, for he had carried up water that way, and he
snatched up the deer and hurried down the rocks and reached the river
and forded it and went up on the other side, and so wandered on and on.
The deer died and Ogga made food of it, drying its flesh in the sun,
still angry and wondering and frightened; he went on and on and on. And
he came to the Fair Land; its berries, fish and animals supported him.
He made stone knives for himself, he framed spears, he clothed himself
with skins, sewed with thread of plant fibres and with needles of bone.
Ogga was skillful in fashioning, and his skill grew, and as he lived
so, he came northward toward the steppe country and saw the mastodon.
Then he felt a desire to possess its great white tusks, and one day
he found a dead mastodon, and from its tusks he made many things,
patiently working in the woods for many years. He met men who bought
these things, exchanging baskets and green stone knives and even gold.
And so he became a hunter and lived alone in a bark tent watching
the Mastodon and becoming fearless and strong and knowing. Such was
Ogga’s story. And, though these two were wild denizens of nature, yet
so palpable is this human soul of ours, so fraught with kindred sense
in all its aspects, that as Lhatto listened she became as Desdemona did
before the Moor, “_She loved him for the dangers he had passed._”
Scarcely had Ogga told his story, with halting phrase perchance, and
yet with words then loaded with the poesy of infancy, when a low roar
increasing in loudness was heard by the two, and with it the ground
about them trembled, a dislodged bird’s nest fell at their feet, the
water shrank suddenly from the shore, uncovering the glistening rocks
like worn teeth in a colossal jaw, and then returned with bristling
vigor rushing backward up the land in pell mell surges.
Ogga and Lhatto sprang to their feet. A weird and purplish light
invaded the sky, another rumble, louder, with irregular reverberations
like the lateral explosions of sound in a summer thunder storm,
followed the first; and the ground shook constantly, a tree slipped
with a patch of earth above them, the ocean tumbled headlong on the
land, and, raising their eyes, they saw with a new terror smoke forming
on Zit.
It was indeed far below Zit that the gush of ashes and volcanic dust
were emitted. A small cone had become the conduit of an igneous
outburst, its heated summit had already bared it of snows, and its
riven top opening with successive shocks had become a chimney for the
evolved lapilli, the erupted gases, and the slowly exuded lava flow.
The ashen cloud rose up, densely straight at first, and encountering
some upper current, was spread out in dark layers, which, expanded
by rapid propulsion, descending and ascending, blurred and enveloped
the ice region, and whirled outward began to rain an impalpable dirt
about Ogga and Lhatto. As if, with repeated strokes upon its prison
doors, the enclosed fires of the earth struggled outwards, the shocks
continued, the waves rolled far up on the land. Spray flung from the
billows covered the two terrified spectators. They had retreated
inland. Suddenly a blast of flame seemed to mount upward in the
wreathing column of smoke, and then a wind pouring down upon them,
blinded them with dust and suffocating gases. Ogga, still mindful of
the uses of his spear, had snatched it from the ground upon the first
alarm, and now turning with bewildered eyes to Lhatto, he stretched
it before him to the woodlands southward, and they ran on, her hand
upon his shoulder, over the rugged land. They entered the forest, and
threading an open way, reached the banks of one of those rivers which
were indicated as reaching to the shore, in wide mouths, and bordered
by almost unimpeded meadow land. It was as if at some former time the
meadow land had formed part of the river bottom, and now formed its
banks, and the woodland had not as yet succeeded in establishing itself
upon this virgin soil.
The refuge was welcome. The incredible horror they had seen, unknown
before, the thought of some superhuman conflict in which their minds
linked the powers and destiny of Zit, had baffled and stunned them.
To the strange vagrant bodies of men who in little groups occupied
this diversified land, and of whom both Lhatto and Ogga were somewhat
contrasted types, Zit, the unchanging apex in the same sky that bent
over all, was a sort of religious fixity, a God, the open and clear
manifestation of the supernatural.
And it had happened by reason of this mountain’s structural prominence,
its very great physical grandeur, its appealing beauty, that the simple
tendencies in aboriginal worship had been greatly elevated. Fetichism
was not as prevalent, the absurd and pernicious frivolities of a
childish idolatry had no such absorbing play, and under the absorption
of interest in the great mountain, fable and legend had woven about Zit
a curious mythology, and to it the worship of these races had been
lifted. The mid-day sun half flooded the solitude which Ogga and Lhatto
had reached, for even here a murky veil latticed the sunlight with
skeins of shadow.
The two fugitives had stopped just where a solitary tree, stricken
by some accidents of storm, had been thrown down across the stream.
Its spreading top still green and full of leaves lay on one bank,
its enormous trunk crossed the river like a bridge, and the upturned
roots, shooting out, like distracted arms, from the huge flake of
ground enclosing them, marked its opposite extremity. Ogga and Lhatto
scrambled through the branches, and quickly reached the other side, and
when they came to the disk of earth they leaned against it and looked
upward. Broken palls of black clouds were thickening above them, and
tremors still quivering in the rocks shook their support.
Lhatto took Ogga’s arm and drawing him to her said: “The Fire-Breather
fights with Zit.”
And Ogga asked her what it meant, and so, watching the sombering sky,
even noting the falling dust of ashes sprinkling the water underneath
them with a minute rain, Lhatto told him the legend of Zit.
THE LEGEND OF ZIT.
“It was long ago, and Zit, the spirit of the Snow and Cold, rose on the
earth. His mouth blew icy blasts, his fingers dripped with icicles,
from his nose fell blinding storms of snow, his ears poured out sleet
and rain, and his eyes froze everything on which they fell. He walked
over the earth. He walked over the earth and the rivers stopped in
their running, the hills were hidden in snow, the trees grew pale and
naked, the lakes became as floors over which the wild beast roamed, and
the great sea was crowded with the big drops of ice-like towers which
broke off from his fingers.
“And he went on and on, the animals fled before him, for they shivered
when he opened his mouth, the trees broke and fell with the load of
snow that shot from his great white nose, the rivers were filled with
rain from his ears, and they became stiff and quiet again when the
glitter of his eyes shone upon them, and so the world was disappearing
before Zit, the Spirit of Cold and Snow.
“Then the Fire-Breather, way down in the breast of the earth, asleep,
felt the chill through the thick skin of the ground which he wore
around him, and he woke with a cry and hurried out to try to get to the
top of the earth and kill Zit, with his hot breath, with the fire from
his eyes, with his warm hands. And the Fire-Breather knocked and pushed
at the doors of his own house, and he could not move it, it was frozen
tight, and he tried to get out at the window and it was stopped with
snow, and he broke a hole in the roof and was half way out, with his
head above the earth, when Zit rushed on him and with his mouth and his
fingers and his nose and his ears and his eyes, pushed him back and he
sank in the earth groaning and shaking.
“Then Zit took the highest mountain which stood where the Fire-Breather
tried to climb out of the earth, and laid down on it and covered it
with ice and snow, and he sat there and broke icicles off his fingers
to sail in the sea, and blew snow from his nose till all the hills were
buried, and when the sun came he looked at it and kept it cold, and the
Fire-Breather was dumb and still.
“And now and then when Zit falls asleep the Fire-Breather knows it
by his snoring and then he pushes up again and gets on his hands and
knees and fights Zit. Some time he will escape. He is trying now, he is
fighting Zit, for Zit has fallen asleep.”
So Lhatto told Ogga, and they crept down from the stump on which they
stood, and as the day darkened, ran on together with backward glances.
They had entered a wide valley running south between two ridges of
rather high foot hills, behind which on the east extended a mountain
range up which clambered the deep woods, but leaving its higher
summits bare. A muddy stream filtered through this valley which
shortly spread out variously and became a sort of inland savannah of
tall waving grasses that crept up to and even entered the limits of
a very considerable lake or pond. It was shallow, however, and in the
incipient stages of natural redemption by filling up from the deposits
of the sluggish silt-laden stream that fed it on one side. This stream
indeed, falling with broken descent from the mountain range, betrayed
its distant water-falls by the roar that came to the ears of the
wanderers through the thick woods above them. Throughout the lake were
low emergent banks of mud on which plants were growing, while thick
mattresses of water weed dotted its surface everywhere. The valley
stretched on indefinitely beyond.
Ogga suddenly cried out and pointed to the farther edge of the lake.
From the distances in the produced valley there was swarming, in
rushing companies, an army of wild horses. They seemed countless.
They were entering in a solid stream, merged into a single surface by
compression, producing a curious semblance, in their crowded compact
progression, to the serpentine undulations of some titanic snake
or worm, whose skin bore flecks or monticules of hair. They were
yet so far away that to Ogga and Lhatto their individual forms were
indistinguishable.
As they advanced upon the savannah they visibly distended, and then
the rapidity of their approach became obvious, even calculable. In a
few minutes this avalanche of wild horses would surround or overwhelm
the lovers. And the animals were panic stricken. The sudden violence
of the seismic convulsion had communicated an indescribable terror to
these nomads--the pleistocene horse of North America--and with neighs,
attaining a falsetto note like piercing shrieks, they came bounding
on, momentarily freed, in the broader arena of the savannah, from the
restraint of mutual impingement.
Ogga realized the danger. He turned sideways and with Lhatto now
clasping his arm, with a new fear, flew across the field to the nearest
outlying grove of trees. Among their dense trunks there was safety. The
diversion was made none too quickly. As they reached the trees, the
first arrivals brushed past them, their heads erected and their eyes
blazing and wild in an agony of terror. Soon the feral current, dense
and expressive of some illimitable pressure, crushed upon them, and
they saw horses thrown down, trampled into unrecognizable mutilation,
while others, thrown against trees or rocks with ribs and legs broken,
writhed in mortal torments.
The pleistocene horse of the Americas, both North and South, was a
reality. Developed through the slowly piled up centuries from the
Eohippus of the first tertiaries, the modern horse was practically
given to the world in the Ice Age. Then he lived on this Continent and
the men of that polar day knew and used him; the drawings on the rock
walls of the Combarelles Cave in France show that in Europe. There can
be no pretense of objection to the same claim here.
But it has been an unsolved mystery how the pleistocene horse should
have so utterly vanished that when the Europeans came to North
America he had no existing representation, and even the Indians had
no legendary lore narrating their past knowledge of him. Sudden
and extensive destruction only can account for so extraordinary a
disappearance. It was under circumstances doubtless as strange and
awful as that which Ogga and Lhatto now witnessed that the horse owed
in some measure his rapid and complete extinction.
Scarcely had the amphitheatre before them become filled with the equine
multitude, accessions to whose numbers seemed constantly received,
until it seemed as if no possible foothold could be secured by a new
individual, when, in some way, developed through the volcanic outbursts
upon Zit, a stupendous electric storm burst upon the valley. Before it
came the picture before the man and woman was a strange one. Lhatto
reached and touched the sweating breast of a stallion pinned against
the tree behind which she stood. The vast breathing mass emitting
the ordurous odors of their steaming bodies, seemed crushed into one
dark palpitation, its unity here and there broken by some plunging
horse smitten with madness, and rearing upward, an image of sudden art
with mane and distended nostrils, bloodshot eyes and beating hoofs
falling in a hail of blows upon the back of a quivering companion.
Sudden shocks of agitation swept through them, and then, by reason
of an increased compression, the agonized cries increased, as if, in
the almost human susceptibility of the horse, his sounds took on the
piteous vocality of suffering men.
In an instant the ragged or bold outlines of the rising mountains bore
along their crests rushing pinnacles of clouds, a wind sucked through
the valley, driving, the shallow water of the lake into waves, and
tearing millions of leaves from the trees, hurling them broadcast or
projecting them in vortices through the air; upon this followed a lurid
twilight, beneath whose stifling solemnity the equine concourse became
stilled, and then a dreadful cold, some precursor of disaster, sank
upon the doomed multitude. It was the awful pause before destruction.
Leaping with incredible frequency from cloud to cloud, great forks of
lightning rent the sky; the bulging and cavernous outlines of vapor
dissolved in sheets of water, beneath the reverberations, peal upon
peal, of incessant thunder. The blackness of night descended, the
wind rose in tornadoes, and in the shrill blast, like some inconstant
titanic accompaniment of voices, the multitudinous wail of the horses
rose and fell.
The descending torrents swept through the forests, tearing gulches
in the ground, ripping out boulders from their beds and racing madly
through the herd of animals. Ogga, with superhuman strength, held
Lhatto and himself to the trunk of a small sapling that had twined its
roots about a deeply sunken stone.
And the horses? With the last pathetic impulse of unbearable panic,
they plunged by thousands into the insatiable lake of mud and water,
its extent now swollen beyond all limits by the avalanches pouring in
on every side. They were ingulfed almost as soon as they entered this
inland sea, and as the lightning flung its quick and keen glances into
the valley, the awful horror of the scene, converted into a saturnalia
of animal carnage, made Ogga and Lhatto shudder with a horrible
surprise.
The storm slowly abated, the rolling thunders receded amongst the
mountains, the lightnings shrank back northward, the rainfall was over.
With the dying storm the tumult in the valley ceased. The dreadful
sounds of drowning and submerging beasts, the spasms of conflict
amongst those on the banks and in the plain had passed. The decimated
host, now free to move in the unencumbered space, had taken flight. The
thud and impact of their fleeing hoofs were plainly heard by Ogga and
Lhatto. They moved southward, out through the embrasure by which they
had come, into the long reaches of valley land that perhaps extended
for leagues and from which, by some common whim of madness, they had
converged into the fatal pool.
When the sun stood upon the mountains, in the morning, only the cruel
vestiges of their presence remained. The disturbed and hideous lake
exposed their bodies, erect legs sticking up from reversed trunks,
heads enveloped in tangled manes, carcasses broken and bleeding, their
convex sides excavated and yawning, and over the plain in heaps rose
the signals of the shocking struggle.
Nature, with that stoical placidity, that unruffled and heartless
evenness of temper that often seems to make her beauty only the mask
of some implacable enmity, was again calm and beautiful. The palls of
ash had been washed from the heavens, the mountains were radiant, the
trees radiant also; the torn ground yet bore witness to the slaughter
of the night, and the fouled lake, its islands of vegetation riotously
dismembered, like some dishevelled bacchanale, lay in the morning light
a picture of shame.
Ogga and Lhatto, sleepless through the long and dreadful night, wearied
with fatigue of body and soul, stumbled out from the shadows of the
forest into the sunlit valley. Lhatto motioned to the entrance from the
river by which they had yesterday ascended. Ogga said--“It is best,”
and they left the hateful spot, where the processes of death had worked
so triumphantly. The fecundity of life and the powers of destruction
move with even foot, and in the necessary and remorseless balance of
life and death, Nature involves no blame for her equanimity, for in
the eternity of her design, all incidents of joy or woe are equally
invisible and unimportant.
Observations on the heartlessness of nature were certainly not made by
Ogga and Lhatto, whatever indefinite mutiny the woman’s heart of the
latter may have felt against it. They hurried away from the fateful
place, and returned to the river valley. The tree over whose convenient
boughs they had crossed the stream was swept away and, ferried by the
flood, had been cast ashore some distance down, high on the terrace,
from which the subsiding waters had again retreated. It lay there gaunt
with every naked root extended. Neither one of them knew exactly their
present position, but Ogga, watching the wind above them, concluded
that eastward there was escape from the walled-in gorge. They were the
more willing to reach higher ground because they could again see Zit,
and, if the struggle between him and the Fire-Breather had given him
the upper hand, as both believed, his serene and splendid brow would be
again visible.
The travellers were indeed worn and hungry. The warm light revived
their spirits, and--shall it be recorded--they embraced each other
with tears and smiles and kisses. Hunger was to be appeased, for no
circumstances of sentiment or grief will ever permit us to forget that
both sentiment and grief live on food and drink. The water of the river
was fresh and pure, and Ogga, who yet carried his sturdy and useful
spear, and wore about his neck the green stone knife, though the basket
had been abandoned when they began their flight from the shore, knew he
would soon secure food.
His alert eyes had already detected the trail of bear, and as they
moved up the river he clung with Lhatto to the river’s bank, fearing
some ambush. They had proceeded on the way a long distance, in which it
was most noticeable that the river bed was rising, from its frequent
cataracts and long inclines covered with foaming waves, when the fall
and splash of water was heard and a waving mist above the forest
indicated the nearness of a waterfall.
Ogga had become especially eager, rushing in and out amongst the
shrubs, which clustered now, more and more closely, to the river’s
brim. At one point he followed a fresh trail which he had discovered,
and a moment later a savage growl broke upon the sylvan stillness, and
Lhatto ran into the shadows whence the sound issued. She hurried up
a winding way half broken through the first undergrowth and finally
emerging in the woodland, where its plain outlines led her on until she
came to a cliff-side, part of the walls of the valley. Here an exciting
combat was in progress; Ogga was holding at bay a brown bear which had
retreated to a ledge which it had gained by a flight of most natural
steps, and up these steps Ogga was himself slowly ascending, the bear
fiercely objecting but awed by the spear which Ogga flourished in his
face, and which had already once penetrated his tough sides. The wound
the bear had received was a serious one, he was already disabled.
Ogga, encouraged by Lhatto, who clapped her hands with admiration,
pressed upon the creature. He had now touched the threshold of the
ledge. It was some thirty feet above the stones, talus, and boulders
at the foot of the cliff, and the encounter promised to be final, for
one or the other. Ogga avoided the thrusts of the animal, keeping
it away by savage punches with the spear’s point. The bear realized
its predicament as it came nearer to the limit of the rocky table,
and reared and ambled forward. It was this moment that Ogga had
anticipated; stooping as quickly as the bear rose on its haunches, he
drove the ivory javelin into its exposed abdomen. With a deep howl of
pain the bear fell sideways and slid from the ledge, dropping heavily
almost at the feet of Lhatto, dead. Ogga had held his spear and it
became disengaged from the bear, as it tumbled from the cliff. He
stood upright, looking down, and there was pride and happiness in his
face, and in Lhatto’s there was no less.
Ogga opened the bear, cutting with the sharp nephrite blade broad
strips of meat; he took two stones, choosing them carefully from the
boulder pile, and gathered a kind of dead wood from the under sides of
fallen trees, and bending flat to the ground, blowing softly, ignited
the natural tinder with the sparks from the stones. The cheerful flame,
nursed with little sticks, grew into a fire, and he placed stones in
the heat, piling upon them more wood. At last, with a broken bough,
he brushed the fire aside and thrust the bear strips upon the stones,
almost covered with fervent cinders. Thus was it cooked, and Ogga and
Lhatto, prototypes of the long retinue of woodmen who have found life
and wonders and new gastronomic pleasures in the primeval forests,
were again made strong and buoyant and resolute. Through the favoring
fortune of birth, these two aboriginal lovers carried within their
untutored natures, some of the quintessence of noble instincts, and
there was between them neither violence nor shame.
Their further progress was prevented by an encircling cliff, high
and unassailable. It was over this that the head-waters of the river
poured, forming in their descent the falls, whose shattered and
buoyant spray floated above the trees. The wall seemed impregnable, a
sheer verticality actually leaning forward so that the falls, dripping
in a descent of more than a hundred feet, arched forward and left
behind them a deep recess, a cold drenched cavern. Into this, behind
the thundering solidity of the continuous sheet of water, leaping
from the sunlight above, where its coruscating folds entwined, to the
rayless depth in the forest-land below, Ogga and Lhatto carefully
peered and entered. They were in strange and unusual surroundings; they
moved in a sort of semi-conical cave, almost dark from the interception
of the outer light by the falls that seemed scarcely translucent.
Groping backward to the rock, Lhatto, exclaiming with surprise, called
Ogga to her, and showed a crevice running upward in the beds of rock
through which a crepuscular light, apparently shining from above, was
seen. Hesitatingly Ogga crept into the gash, which was almost dry.
He disappeared for a moment, then his voice calling Lhatto summoned
her, and the girl crept after him. The crevice, cleaving the vertical
schists, ran upward at such an oblique angle, and so discontinuously,
being somewhat faulted in its ascent, that without cutting across the
floor of the stream it passed the falls, piercing to the light at some
point on the table-land above. It was just possible to squeeze through
this cryptic passage, but it offered no real danger or difficulty, the
very closeness of its parallel sides affording constant support.
Lhatto and Ogga went on, and after some not unusual and helpful
exercise, emerged upon an upper elevation, a sort of mesa-land, crowned
by the ranges from whose boisterous crests the storm of the last
night had descended. They had indeed turned the northern edge of this
Sierra and before them, in the purple and indistinguishable shadowed
distances, where peaks and minarets and sculptured stone seemed melting
together in a vaporous uncertainty, lay the Canyon Country, and far
westward, shining in all his ermine and beryl hues, Zit remained
unchanged. The Fire-Breather had withdrawn to the earth and again lay
still.
And here Ogga and Lhatto rested. The love that ran with increasing
ardor through their souls, had now risen to that impassionate chance
when each word and gesture of endearment thrust anew upon them
the expectation and the opportunity of bliss. The warm night sank
breathless upon those verdurous highlands, the fragrance of the pines,
the half momentary delicacy of the odors of wild plants, the succoring
murmur of the river, the dull lustre of the moon as it rose amongst the
phantom-laden fogs, coming from hidden streams in all that creviced and
monumental land before them, engaged, in languorous alliance, to give
their love its final consecration.
And Ogga, standing by the river and taking Lhatto by the hand, bent
himself and her towards the white pallor of Zit, and said--“I take thee
for my wife.” And Lhatto, answering, said--“I am yours.”
The earth’s orb wheeled on through its incredible pathway in space,
which no consecutive movement through ages and ages shall ever yet
define or limit, the agencies of nature sprang to their appointed
places in the economy of all things growing, moving and acting; the
Eternal Law, with executions blind and patient, fulfilled the Great
Intention, and then, as it were, the next instant, the Moon sank on the
western wave, the Sun swimming upward in the East flooded the expectant
earth with light, and Ogga and Lhatto, awaking, saw the figure of a man
standing motionless on the brink of the river.
[Illustration]