THE CHASE.
In prehistoric time the camp was the stopping place, a few boughs, a
few skins, a fire amongst stones, perhaps a shelter under a rock. In
the southern land where they now were and in the summer, the young
hardihood and trained activity of these youths required little else,
and as the streams and ponds, or the life of the woods, furnished them
food, when inland, or the shores of the sea, sustenance, when on the
coast, their ease of movement was unlimited. In this respect also, Ogga
and Lhatto had been exceptional.
The early man roves but with stealth and with slowness along rivers and
coast lines. He finds his bearings by their familiar configuration,
and only furtively enters the untrodden and pathless wilderness.
But Ogga and Lhatto were not aimless, though in these first weeks
of indulgence, and from that superior loftiness of nature which had
fitted them for new tasks, they had been adventuresome. They intended
to fix their destination southward on the sea coast, and had at no
time, in these days of wandering, forgotten their intention. Lagk,
who was more familiar with the interior, had guided them, but with
many vacillations. Their steps had tended southward along the mountain
ridges. They calculated they were not now far distant from their rest.
Ogga pushed aside a wavering branch and stepped on the little cleared
space where for a few days he and Lhatto had lingered, feeling the
charm of its elevation in the clear salubrity of the air, the haunting
wonders of the distant view of the ocean, and those many laxative and
gentle interests that arise with lovers in solitude and remoteness.
Ogga, in the moonlight which made everything visible, saw that the
camp was deserted, and a sudden shadow darkened his face, the blood
surged to his cheeks, and he stood looking about him with a curious
inquietude. The horse that with Lagk had been their companion and had
proven not unuseful in their wanderings, was also gone. No trace of
thong or lasso which commonly hung from the branches, or lay tangled
and displayed on the rocks, was there and--he began to move rapidly to
and fro over the ledge--the skins that Lagk had prepared, which formed
a rude alleviation to their primitive condition, had also disappeared.
Ogga stopped, his head hung forward, he knelt and gazed at impressions
in the scanty soil at one side of the rock, where infiltrating and
creeping mosses, with a film of earth, formed a green carpet. He saw
the hoof marks of the horse, and the long foot marks of Lagk, but
nothing else. The slighter thin steps of Lhatto were not there, and yet
Lhatto also was gone. With a new accession of excitement Ogga rushed to
the opposite side, and throwing himself upon the ground that appeared
there, and which was part of the encroaching upland-field which he had
just crossed, looked for the telltale steps. There were none. Again he
leaped to his feet, and stood irresolute.
Fast swarming thoughts filled his mind. He recalled Lhatto’s
confession, he remembered the clinging constancy of Lagk to Lhatto,
he weighed well Lagk’s resentment for himself, he recurred to his own
distrust and wonder over Lagk’s importunate insistency that he should
go alone to hunt the sloth, and then there stole into his brooding
thoughts the hitherto suppressed suspicions of Lhatto’s faith. He
remembered--how vividly the images rose in quiet succession to taunt
and tempt his patience--when Lhatto asked so anxiously if it was not
late for Lagk to return from some hunt he had undertaken for her sake,
how she sat with Lagk and listened to his long stories of the birds and
beasts, how she had wandered away with him to see some nest or wild
flower, how she had helped him dress the skins, and had amused herself
with so much archness and tenderness, sticking bright feathers in his
hair, while he worked at his nets, or strengthened and stiffened and
lengthened his lassos. He remembered--could it be pain that spread like
an aching ulcer over his heart--how Lhatto had pitied Lagk’s deformity,
and once Lagk had held her in his arms and kissed her, and Lhatto did
not repel him, and once again--Ogga strode to the edge of the ledge
and looked down the steep sides of the rock, even leaning forward over
the peril below him--he found her bending over Lagk sleeping, and she
touched his face with her lips.
The strange unbidden thought of self-destruction, perhaps thus first
entering the heart of man, vanished, and following it, leaping like a
flame that has lain stifled in smoke, or moved unheeded, along hidden
tracts of heat towards the surface and the air, came the devastating
fire of jealousy and hatred and the thirst for vengeance.
The prehistoric man then discovered his endowment of emotions, and
under the sudden summons of his offended passions, became as modern
as Leontes or Agamemnon. Ogga’s face certainly assumed no extreme
distortion of rage, and the air was not imperatively needed to repeat
his imprecations to the surrounding rocks. He simply walked, with
perhaps the sparkle of a peculiar light newly awakened in his eyes, and
a slightly noticeable tension of the muscles of his arm as his hands
grasped the long used ivory spear, and there was, were our eyes near
enough to discern it, a sinister pallor in his cheeks; he walked to the
edge of the ledge and listened.
He turned his face to the directions below, above, around him, and,
motionless, like some lost animal expectant to regain his companions
by some wandering bleat or call, listened. Then, when that conjecture
proved fruitless, he fell upon his knees and studied the imprints that
were freshly made in the soil. The path Lagk and Lhatto had taken was
soon determined, and Ogga, with a sudden quivering ejaculation--the
first word he had spoken--followed the descending trail.
Lagk had hurried Lhatto away, and yet his movements were not neglectful
of her comfort. The horse sought its path with trepidation, down the
steeper defiles of the descent to the valley, and not infrequently
Lagk’s strength and presence of mind alone prevented a serious accident
to beast and burden. His progress, greatly as he wished to hasten it,
was slow, nor was his own knowledge of the aisles and passages of the
woods quite sufficient. He intended to gain a prolongation of the
valley where the sloth had been seen, and pass beyond the ranges east
of it by some clove or depression, or, if that was impossible, by some
shoulder of the cordillera from which he might more successfully plot
his return to the canyon.
The country was not altogether difficult to traverse. The forests were
continuous but not densely interrupted with undergrowth, and when the
valleys between the ranges were reached they formed quite open highways
for miles. Treeless areas extended on the mountain sides in places,
and here upon a plateau country the igneous agencies had developed a
landscape, weird and chaotic, where black shadows and glaring patches
of light marked the violent contrasts of cliff and plain.
Lagk had been solicitous and tender with Lhatto. He loved her, and his
passion, by the corrective influence of his mind, superior to brutal
concupiscence, had maintained a certain aboriginal gallantry. He
brought her water and food. He plucked tender berries and offered them
to her. Except for the acceptance of water Lhatto remained stolid and
stubbornly unresponsive. Lagk would have unloosed the irksome bonds
and taken her with him under less constraint, but the sense of capture
was delightful to him, the physical possession thus assured seemed to
enervate and entrance him. He often paused in their descent, and stood
near Lhatto, his hand upon her body and his keen eyes, brilliant, with
a seam of light crossing them, in a frenzy of anticipation, resting
upon her.
Such unwise surrenders to his fancy lost him time, the stumbling and
uncertain horse and his own hesitation as to the way added increased
delays, which were unfavorable for his escape from a resentful foe
whose feet were winged with anger, whose muscles sprang forward under
the whip of scorn, and in whose veins the blood bounded with a thirst
for murder.
Yes! in the prehistoric, in Ogga, the gaunt horror of the desire to
kill had arisen. The pallid beast of hatred, ridden by the clutching
hags of envy and jealousy and spite and terror, ran before Ogga in
his path. He--Ogga--stared wildly at the image of a man, stifled and
gasping, held at the throat by Ogga’s hand--his own--until the eyes
started from their sockets, turning their lifeless whitenesses downward
and upward in the wanton agony of death. Ogga’s hands, thrust before
him, caught, in his dreaming mind, the body of Lagk, and they raised
it, struggling, kicking, voluble with cries and tears and prayers,
above the earth, above the splintered rocks, harsh and ragged with
edges and translucent tips, and these same hands smashed the pitiful
and shrinking body upon the hard edges, the lacerating, piercing tips,
and it lay there before Ogga, palpitating like a slain animal, gushing
red tides of blood.
Ogga’s feet, whose impetuous haste, now sent him bounding like a
ball over an obstructing rock, now with slippery treachery sent him
sprawling from the damp mossiness of a fallen tree, those flying feet,
suddenly in Ogga’s inner sight, became immobile, stamped upon the
cracked and pensile neck of the deceiver, of the girl he loved, before
whom, before this happened, the wide earth and all the firmament of
stars were pale, inconsequent, and foolish things. With such surprising
madness did Ogga hunt the felons of his joy, the vague misery of his
desolation cutting his heart, in the sudden blackness which _touched_
him on every side.
Lagk had hurried up the valley where Ogga had found the sloth, and the
pale topped mountains rose, as he advanced, into flinty pinnacles,
gray and spectral, in the summer sun. They rose as the valley widened,
their bared heads destitute of covering, sending into the broad zenith
the half-visible rays of the reflected heat and light. They thrust
out wide shoulders, the shadows resting in the cold remoteness of
their elevations, revealing cliffs and recesses, ragged gorges and
wandering seams of dislocation. Lagk paused again and again, wondering
and dismayed. His path forward became more strange, and though he had
roamed for years through this country of the wild horses, this southern
marge frightened him with its sublimity. Its insistent immensity
oppressed him and the silent solitudes by some power of evocation, that
rests in all things majestic, summoned to his lips some confession of
disgrace and shame.
He had not been harsh with Lhatto. He curbed his own impatience and
fear by resting from hour to hour, for he was not insensible of the
restraint and discomfort which Lhatto suffered. He had even lifted
her from the horse, like some fragile burden, and laid her on soft
couches of grass or moss. But he did not change the thongs that held
her rigid, swathed in a panoply of imprisoning cords. He was afraid to
loosen her, fearful perhaps of her agility, her sylvan velocity that,
as the bird flies, or the wild cat leaps, or the squirrel runs, would
evade, confuse and escape him. He could not be sure. Her silence,
yet unbroken, though now and then her lips twitched with suffocating
rage, or perhaps with sharp aches and dull misery, made him bitter and
distrustful.
But now, before the awful splendor of the external world, before the
unvoiced appeal of those mountains up whose sides he was pressing and
whose altitudes, with their stony retinue of forms and faces gazing
unchanged, and yet with every moment a renewed persistency of inquiry,
made him tremble with alarm; before these things a kind of contrition
arose in him, and because it came from his own burning love--as in all
love there is something holy and self-condemning--he came slowly to the
side of Lhatto on the horse and spoke:
“Lhatto, I do not mean harm or hurt. You shall be with me in my land
and with my people. I will be so good to you. I love you. The spirit
men shall be good to you. You will have so much to eat, to wear, and
you shall do nothing. I took you because I cannot live anyway, besides.
I will bring you birds and little animals, and furs and flowers. You
shall be beautiful. And my people will do as you say, all of them, or I
will kill them. Let it be so. Forget Ogga. Love me.”
And yet as he spoke, Ogga, growing hotter, warier, keener, surer,
deadlier, followed his trail, even as the meteoric spark that crosses
the black night follows its inerrant path to earth.
But Lhatto did not answer. In that woman’s heart, primeval with the
centuries, the rapture of devotion had its birth. Her ears were deaf,
her eyes were filled with the image of the man who woke her sleeping
on the rocking waves, and her heart was still with the great hope and
prayer that he would find her. Such a spirit dwelt in this woman of the
Ice Age, the prehistoric, in whom grew, by some mystery of design, the
consecration of fidelity.
They hurried on. Lagk incensed, beat the lagging horse, and desperate
by an increasing apprehension of Ogga’s pursuit, breathlessly pushed
upward, expecting from a high and desert tableland, which he had
descried, to see more clearly his way eastward to the canyon land.
At last they reached, by toilsome struggles in which Lhatto suffered,
the edge of a wide plain. On its farthest margin still rose the
baffling mountain peaks. It was a bowl-shaped expanse, of sand and
pebbles, that sloped by the most imperceptible subsidence to a small
lake. Sage bushes, groups of cedars, presenting angular and dwarfed and
prostrate forms, offered in spots some relief to the unmasked stare of
the palpitating scent. The day was well advanced. By some peculiarity
of position, or by some vagary of weather, the air was motionless, and
the unclouded sun shone mercilessly, until the heated stones emitted a
radiant warmth and the parched herbage seemed melted and shrunken.
Over the singular field of stones and sand the little and exhausted
company forced their way, Lagk by turns pulling the reluctant beast, or
else from behind pelting it with pebbles. By means of such exertions he
reached the sides of the lake which revealed a border of mimic beaches
and low precipitous cliffs. Turning up a defile where a temporary
shade was secured from some fantastic trees, whose roots, by all the
available ingenuity of a subterranean quest for moisture, had fastened
themselves in riven rocks and over included boulders, they finally
emerged upon a flat exposure that rose from the lake in a vertical
wall, and like some miniature stage, commanded the desolate and
monotonous surroundings.
It was a granite ledge hollowed over its surface with small
depressions, which were now pools of water from some recent rain, and
upon it lay scattered blocks, a few crowded together in a low wall,
full of apertures and chance shelters, beyond which again the arid
deposit stretched to the last needles of the range. Beyond these peaks
Lagk felt certain he should find an avenue of escape. To the wall of
drifted or weathered boulders he made his way, the shadows of the horse
with its recumbent load and the short muscular body of Lagk, moving
over the granite floor of the pedestal, like phantom silhouettes, the
sun burning the crystalline edges of the roughened asperities of the
rocks into dust.
In the shadow of this wall they rested and Lagk looked long at Lhatto,
still silent. Slowly he passed his hand over her body, slowly his
fingers sought the knotted cords, slowly they unfastened the entwined
and embracing thongs, and slowly one by one the cords dropped from
Lhatto, and slowly the freed woman, with gestures of distress and
stiffness, rose on the back of the horse. It was not altogether painful
for her. She had been indeed cruelly confined, and on her legs and arms
and breast the strictures of the skin were visible. An enfeeblement
had overcome her, and as Lagk seized her in his arms and carried her
resistless to the rocks, his love seemed kindled to a more poignant
fury by the pressure of her warm and helpless body. She sat beside him,
her eyes with a wandering glance searching the strange spot. The color
had faded in her cheeks, its hue, that had been like the sheen of a
delicate bronze, was replaced by a pasty pallor, and a ring of shadow
lay beneath each eye. But to Lagk she was the same, but more precious,
more desirable, more his own. An eagle flying with convulsive leaps
from rock to rock approached them. Its whistling cackle seemed to mock
the loneliness and weakness of the girl.
Lagk placed his hand upon her neck. He stood before her so that his
broad body shut out the sun; his other hand lifted her toward him; her
supineness thrilled him with a strange insanity. His thoughts ran pêle
mêle towards the gratification of his love. And yet--and yet--; the
circling eagle with its senile chatter rose flapping in the blazing
light, a hundred scintillations seemed flashed before Lagk’s eyes, a
breeze that had arisen brought to his ears the patter of the waves
upon the highland lake, and off, far off beyond him the gray and white
needles of the cordilleras, like blanched images of rebuke, stood
waiting. Lagk spoke. His voice was thin and whispering, and the breath
that came with it on the cheeks of Lhatto was hot and humid. He said,
“Lhatto, you are mine.”
Then Lhatto sprang upward; at last her tired lips opened, and the faint
vestiges of her strength which had grown together in that interval of
resting, into something useful and vehement, forced him from her. Her
words, “I hate you,” were not misunderstood, nor misconceived, nor
welcomed. Lagk sprang back with tigerish zeal. The two, the Woman and
the Intruder, fought together on the silent radiant granite table,
while the horse nibbled the niggardly and grudging bunch grass.
It was an unequal effort. Lagk was strong and behind his strength was
the grizzly power of his rage and desire, and Lhatto, whose, strength
had been slowly ebbing, resisted only with the last cooperative fusion
of muscle and of will. Lagk forced her to the stones. For an instant
they rested, Lhatto’s head bent forward and pushed against Lagk’s
breast, who held her arms twisted from him in a vice-like clutch. The
coupled pair slowly fell backward to the rock they had for an instant
deserted, the slow retreat broken only by sudden wrenchings and
spasmodic returns of Lhatto’s expiring strength and revulsion.
It was over. Lagk bent down and bit Lhatto in the neck like any savage
or wicked thing that feels the impulse of an unquenchable thirst. And
then--a shadow from above shut out the light, a block of rock rolled
down the wall, a groan like the muttering and imprisoned sighs of a
tree bent in a storm of wind--all this happened in the acute silence
and sunlit splendor of the place. Lagk raised his head. Above him on
the tumbled stones stood Ogga.
Ogga had indeed hastened. His quick eye had followed the trail
unhesitatingly and he had never paused. His chase had been unbroken.
The springs or brooks here and there had quenched his thirst, but food
had not passed his lips nor sleep visited his body. Perhaps he was
not strong enough for the rescue. He had detected below the mountain
desert the fleeing footsteps of his rival and he had crept upon the
sandy mesa quite unseen. He had seen as he approached, bending behind
bushes, stalking in the grass, running from boulder to boulder, the
movements of the two before him. The approach he made had been a little
circuitous and it was while he was skirting the opposite side of the
cairn of stones that Lagk had attacked Lhatto. Ogga, the moment this
screen removed the chances of his detection, ran rapidly forward, and
climbing the rampart saw the waning fight. He stood almost directly
above Lagk. He heard Lhatto speak.
In an instant the dark torrent of vengeance lost its worst, its deepest
tint; the thought of Lhatto’s faith made him again more human. It was
now against Lagk that the fierce mutiny of his thoughts turned. And
as the agony of his rage burst forth, mixed with a strange sweetness
of reassurance, his lips moved, and the moan, that made Lagk look up,
issued on the rising wind. The two men--the prehistorics--were face to
face, and now all scores were to be wiped out between them. Thus at
the threshold, even beyond the threshold, in the untenanted spaces of
origin, the play of love and retaliation and jealousy and hate, began
its devastating path. Yes! and with one the sense of guilt was not
unnoticed.
Lagk hastily abandoned Lhatto. He too knew the crisis was reached, and
his old resentment against Ogga flamed up; expiation was at hand, or
else--that silence that he had sometimes seen amongst his own people in
the canyon. His mind worked quickly, and as he retreated, backing out
over the level floor of rock, he bethought himself of his resources.
He knew Ogga’s strength, his size and agility. He was himself strong,
but he felt a safety in craft, and the implement of his cunning was the
lasso, that had so often caught and tamed the wild horses.
Ogga leaped down towards Lagk, but turned to Lhatto. She was
breathless, she said nothing, she only pointed to Lagk, and her eyes
lit up with pleasure, with madness of joy even. Ogga had thrown away
his spear, in his hand was only the stone knife. The instant lost in
the recognition of the lovers allowed Lagk time to pass sideways and
recover a long skin rope with a sort of noose in it. He wound this
hastily, still hurrying away, anxious to bring Ogga after him in a
running attack.
It came. Ogga, crouching, ran like a dart upon him. Lagk hoped to see
him stumble and fall. The sure foot of the mastodon hunter skimmed the
ground as a bird’s wing. Lagk trembled. He too crouched. In a dizzy
circle, widening and contracting, thudding the air with a faint, steamy
whizz and whirr, the thong sped above his head. Then it widened the
rotating, undulous noose, and the line sprang from his hand and fell,
vibrating in an irregular elipse over the head of Ogga, upon his neck.
It lay unperceived by him upon his shoulders. It tightened; the quick
restraint was noticed. Ogga seized it with his hands, his knife dropped
to the rock and broke. He was already worsted.
As a spider, touching each radiating line of his web, feels the
telltale tremble that acquaints it with a new capture, so Lagk realized
his advantage, and with all his force, holding his place as best he
could, against the manifold and plunging struggles of his prey, he drew
him outward, outward over the granite ledge towards the lake. Ogga,
blinded by his own rage and bewilderment, helped the sinister purpose
of his enemy by too much resistance. The taut rope enabled Lagk to jerk
him again and again, upsetting and felling him, and every time he hit
the stone pavement over which in the hot sun, he was thus impatiently
sprawling, harsh wounds were given.
His strength already severely tested by his pursuit, by his long fast,
was unequal to this new emergency. Sometimes, in his overthrows, his
head struck the unyielding floor. He was succumbing, he grew dizzy, he
fought wildly with the implacable cord. His best efforts only saved
him from being choked, and his imprisoned hands, occupied in saving
his neck from the tightening rope, were useless. He reeled, the blood
flowed down his face. His eyes seemed rolling in his head, and then
sounds of confusion burst on his ears. As to all men, approaching
exhaustion and unconsciousness, pictures floated before his eyes, the
smilodon and mastodon, the steppe country, Zit and the ice blanket, the
ocean, the boat with Lhatto, the stampede of the wild horses and then,
again, and again, and again, Lhatto. How then he resisted his cogent
foe! How her face summoned up new desperate energies, but how pitiably
inadequate! He tossed to and fro on the rock, falling, rising, pitching
headlong, a toy, a waif, in the iron hands of the relentless Lagk. And
Lhatto, stealing outward too from the wall, following with even pace
Ogga’s circling and vain motions, held her hands before her face, in
great pain and sorrow.
Lagk knew his advantage, saw Ogga’s downfall and helplessness, but by a
cool precision of judgment, of prudence, risked nothing by coming too
near his prey, nor did he relax an instant the sharp pressure of the
cord. His plans slowly fixed, as the fight, now unequal and in his own
hands, drew certainly to a close. The fixation of his plan came with
the recollection of his own injury in youth at Ogga’s hands. Ogga had
pushed him from the cliff--he would push Ogga from the cliff, but into
the depthless waters; into the cold embrace of death; he would leave
him dead on the mountain top, in the blue hidden recess of the mountain
lake. And then Lhatto!
The quick comprehension of his life-long thirst for vengeance and the
possession of the woman who now claimed his heart with unspeakable
power, suffocated him with its delirium of satisfaction. He cried
aloud, he reviled Ogga; the ribald, the obscene, the torturing cruelty
of the savage, ran loose in his vulgar, wicked jubilation. Strength
came to his arms. He hurled the smarting, almost senseless Ogga this
way and that; each fall of the staggering victim elicited new shouts of
triumph. He waved his arms, his lips spat upon the prostrate hunter,
whom at length he drew to himself, to the cliff’s edge, and he watched
the bleeding body, the matted hair, the rolling eyes, the mouth
discolored and thick with gore. Ogga was vanquished. Lagk possessed the
earth and Lhatto! The Woman of the Ice Age was his! It was enough.
Lagk stood at the brink of the cliff, and Ogga, motionless, lay at
his feet. Below him the lake waters, yet disturbed by the wind which
had become stronger, colder with the sinking sun, splashed against
the broken face of the cliff. Their waves ran in upon half revealed
points of rock, and their spray was flung upward over higher edges
and irregular prominences. The cliff’s edge was undercut, and as Lagk
looked down, he stood upon a cornice of rock immediately above the
broken masses of granite, partially submerged, partially exposed.
The waters of the lake were at this point deep. Lagk noted that with
interest. He leaned over the splintered abyss.
A dark spot crossed the rocks. It was the shadow of the eagle flying on
broad pinions to the forests he had left. Lagk watched it obliviously.
The faint impact of running feet came to his ears. With a start he
turned; the thong about Ogga dropped from his hand, but he had not
turned too quickly--Lhatto’s hands were beating with a sudden shock
upon his unbalanced body. It needed but a touch to throw him over, and
she had come with the impetus which the swiftness of the wind gave her.
He slipped, the extreme lip of the granite crumbled as he fell,
writhing in a horror that smote his face with many grimaces, and stood
in his eyes like a spectre in a doorway and even ran through his thick
hair and bade it rise. Lagk fell. His hands clutched backward at
the woman, but they closed only on inviolable air. His head pitched
down and struck the splintered, rough faces of the stone. His body
lingered for an instant on the verge of the cold waiting waters and
as it turned in the last hideous convulsion, its eyes met Lhatto still
bending and gazing at his last chance.
The waters broke in crisping ripples and the white spray rose in
the red light of the sun, hid now in a sultry haze. Lagk lost
consciousness, the harsh bruise of his fall had crushed his ribs; he
sank into the green filminess of the lake like a heavy dark mass,
not altogether without resistance. The water was churned with the
involuntary muscular revolt; the currents rising upward from his
twisting body, his flail-like extended arms, seamed the surface with
interlacing currents. Lhatto still watched until all was gone, until
even the perturbed water, save for the brushing of the wind, had come
to rest.
Then Lhatto turned to Ogga. He was leaning on one arm with a wavering
effort at steadiness, the other mechanically engaged in freeing his
neck from the fatal noose, and his face, smeared and disfigured, was
lifted towards her. The young savage woman, the Prehistoric, knelt
beside him. She wiped his face with her hands, and put her cheeks to
his. She hurried to the lake and brought water in her scooped palms
and poured it on his head. She gathered skins from where they had been
thrown down by Lagk. These she brought to Ogga and so placed them under
and about him that he might rest more easily. She knelt beside him and,
as instinctively as might a nurse to-day, soothed and caressed him.
Ogga’s head lay in her lap, his eyes, now filled with tenderness and
shining with joy, were fixed on hers. She brought him food. The horse
was recovered. Finally, as Ogga was able to walk, though only feebly
yet, the harsh concussion on his head yet lingering in dumb aches and
dizzy and whirling shadows dancing before his eyes, she led him to the
slim shelter of the rocks. The nightfall hastened. The intense stars
shown in the inky vault above them, and the creeping cold followed the
dazzling sunshine and the intemperate heat.
They gathered the warm furs about them, they shrank together in the
night, they talked softly about Lagk, only a little way from them in
the bottom of the lake, and their yet wondering minds, timid before the
strange catastrophe of death, changed the shadows they saw about them
into his image. He seemed to lurk in the crevice behind them, he rose
suddenly at the end of the cairn, he stooped over them from the air, he
crept between them, motionless and unfelt. They clasped each other in
fright, and their eyes wild with a suffocating dread of interruption,
of dispersal, of some nocturnal vengeance sweeping with the bat’s wing,
from the air upon them, grew weary at length, and the shuddering horror
succumbed to sleep. The morning sun smote their faces, pressed together
by the pressure of love and fear. Their arms unlocked, their eyelids
wet with dew parted, their lips opened with smiles; love rested upon
them like a consecration, and with the sense of warmth, in the sunlight
of the full day, the bright haloes and beckoning joys of life came back
tumultuously, gay and sweet.
Ogga soon revived. The recuperative power in the wild man is part of
the recuperative power of the wild life about him, of the animals, the
plants, of the riven soil settling back into peace and cohesion and new
fruitfulness, after shock and storm and fire. So again they prepared to
move southward. Lhatto longed for the sea, and in both were growing the
hidden instincts of home seeking, of rest; and dreams of a fair spot
sheltered from storms, where there was good fishing, and trees and the
surf beaten beaches, and the long endless plain of the ocean stretching
into the scarlet blankets of the sunset, formed in their eyes, and drew
them onward with irrevocable power.
They hardly knew the way, but they also knew no fear. After they had
left the haunted sand plateau, hurrying from it with averted faces,
fearing lest the long arms of Lagk might reach out from the lake and
pull them back to himself in the cold water; after they had left it
and entered the shielding woods, moving with the acceleration of
anticipation through the twilight day to the distant open valleys, to
the rivers and the long pale copses of _shinta_ bushes, their hearts
beat high.
Their love enfolded them like a shining light that threw on all
things its own radiance, and their enlaced bodies chasing through the
solitudes seemed a tantalizing replacement, in the dim distant America
of the Prehistorics, of some Hellenic fancy. The horse, mute companion
and mute mourner, for Lagk possessed the singular traumeristic power
over animals which is the sixth sense in some peculiar natures, had not
followed them. Nor did they care. Even his intrusion spoiled their joy;
so transcendental, by some choice accident of nature, had life become
in these savage waifs, floating on the doorway of history, and yet thus
prefiguring, before the dawn of records, the immutability of love.
And thus moving southward they discovered at length that they were
skirting the foot hills of a range of mountains which placed its high
barrier--a barrier that increased daily--between them and the sea. They
did not notice that an insensible divergence, accentuated at times by
sharper deflections to the east, was widening their distance from the
ocean. They were anxious to find some path across the towering peaks,
some defile of approach to the coast, but day by day the inexorable
mountains seemed to raise their restraining hands and deny escape.
The ranges multiplied. Lhatto and Ogga entered a region of manifold
complexity, the Sierras developed about them in bewildering frequency,
and the growth of the forests became more dense.
Their confusion increased; the valley which had, like a broad avenue of
transit, led them on, now was lost in a series of parallel or divergent
ravines. Their path, marked before, in monumental style, by the steep
and bare crests of the cordilleras, was now hopelessly disconcerted
by the intricacy and hardships of the new paths, and these children
of nature, taught only in the rough methods of aboriginal calculation
and instinct, slowly lost heart in the midst of a vast topographical
difficulty. They could not surmount the intermediate ranges and push
westward. The task dismayed them. The small game which Ogga had
contrived to take, was becoming more scarce, the rivers disappeared and
the asperity and disturbed condition of the ground offered in places
almost insurmountable obstacles to their advance. In this dilemma,
beginning to feel a strange loneliness and dread, a certain nervous
irresolution, characteristic of the aboriginal mind, they began to
elude the problem they could not determine, by following the most easy
path, fleeing like children from an omnipresent danger along simple and
self-indulgent ways.
And so it came to pass that they hastened into lower levels, traversing
country that became more parched, more desolate and bare.
The herbage alone accompanied them; the trees already halted as if
unable or fearful to enter the lowlands, and desert the protecting
shadows and nutritious soil of the hills. The ground was baked and
a saline efflorescence hid the surface with a dazzling crust. The
sun devoured them with its flagrant power, water almost disappeared,
and what they drank acted with terrifying distress and inscrutable
pains. They had indeed entered a desert charged with all the powers of
annihilation, itself a sepulchre, remote and pitiless. Over it hung the
oppression of irrespirable volumes of air quivering with heat, and from
it came the infiltrating currents of minute alkaline dust, stirred into
invisible clouds by the accidental winds, winds that came from the hot
fires of a furnace, and bore with them the pang of flames.
The pair had grown thin and haggard and hollow eyed, despairing with a
gaunt terror that stalked behind them, holding each other’s hands and
blind to prudence or reprieve, still driving on, believing it would
pass, even as they saw miraged before them a distant limit, verdant,
shadowy, with mirrors of water and bending and rising grasses.
The moment of unreason had come, their brains pierced by the awful heat
lost the tottering balance of sanity, and their vagabond footsteps
carried them wherever the illusions of their blinded eyes led. But
still linked by the potent power of their affection, in this last sad
travesty of union, they kept their hands closed together.
It was the end of day. Lhatto and Ogga had fallen on the caustic desert
almost unconscious. The clouds had robbed the sun during the last hours
of its persecuting zeal, of something of its power. They gathered
still more closely as the light died out in the sky, and the momentary
assuagement of the heat restored the lovers to temporary reason and
self possession.
It was Lhatto, looking still with the tenderness of sympathy upon the
sufferings of Ogga, his own eyes growing brighter in the supervening
moments of restoration, who spoke, and her voice came as a whisper, the
inarticulate breath of death.
“Ogga, we go to the Ice Spirit. We go together. The Fire-Spirit kills
us. But there is no more hurt now. We are happy.” The voice was still.
And Ogga, denied of the last lingering impulses of effort and recovery,
yet by some interior remnant of volition, leaned forward upon Lhatto.
Their lips touched.
The atmospheric change had come. A few drops of water grudgingly
squeezed from the leaden sky fell upon them. Lhatto held up her hand
and in its wasted palm the falling drops ran together in a little
circle. Death was upon her, the agony of the creeping fires of thirst
was in her throat; Ogga had fallen backward, and upon him the silence
of Hereafter rested, but the woman, strong with the superhuman
strength of her great love, pressed the wet palm upon his lips, and
died.
So, in the far backward of time, as the Ice Age departed, the Man
and the Woman began the endless Poem of Life, endlessly beautiful,
endlessly sad.
THE LITERARY COLLECTOR PRESS
GREENWICH, CONNECTICUT
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:
Text in italics is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Archaic spelling that may have been in use at the time of publication
has been preserved.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.