"Nothing herbivorous here," thought the scientist. "All flesh--food of--who knows what sort!"
Quickly his mind ran over the outlines of the problem. He knew at once that these Things were lower than any human race ever recorded, far lower even than the famed Australian bushmen, who could not even count as high as five. Yet, strange and more than strange, they had the use of fire, of the tom-tom, of some sort of voodooism, of flint, of spears, and of a rude sort of tanning--witness the loin-clouts of hide which they all wore.
"Worse than any troglodyte!" he told himself. "Far lower than De Quatref.a.ge"s Neanderthal man, to judge from the cephalic index--worse than that Java skull, the pithecanthropus erectus, itself! And I am with my living eyes beholding them!"
A slight sound, there behind him in the room, set his heart flailing madly.
His hand froze to the b.u.t.t of the automatic as he drew back from the cleft in the wall, and, staring, whirled about, ready to shoot on the second.
Then he started back. His jaw dropped, his eyes widened and limply fell his arm. The pistol swung loosely at his side.
"_You?_--" he soundlessly breathed, "You--_here?_"
There at the door of the great empty room, magnificent m her tiger-skin, the Krag gripped in her supple hand, stood Beatrice.
CHAPTER XX
THE CURIOSITY OF EVE
At him the girl peered eagerly, a second, as though to make quite sure he was not hurt in any way, to satisfy herself that he was safe and sound.
Then with a little gasp of relief, she ran to him. Her sandaled feet lightly disturbed the rubbish on the floor; dust rose. Stern checked her with an upraised hand.
"Back! Back! Go back, quick!" he formed the words of command on his trembling lips. The idea of this girl"s close proximity to the beast-horde terrified him, for the moment. "Back! What on earth are you _here_ for?"
"I--I woke up. I found you gone!" she whispered.
"Yes, but didn"t you read my letter? _This_ is no place for you!"
"I had to come! How could I stay up there, alone, when you--were--oh!
maybe in danger--maybe in need of me?"
"Come!" he commanded, in his perturbation heedless of the look she gave him. He took her hand. "Come, we must get out of this! It"s too--too near the--"
"The _what?_ What _is_ it, Allan? Tell me, have you seen them? Do you know?"
Even excited as the engineer was, he realized that for the first time the girl had called him by his Christian name. Not even the perilous situation could stifle the thrill that ran through him at the sound of it. But all he answered was:
"No, I don"t know _what_ to call them. Have no idea, as yet. I"ve seen them, yes; but what they are, Heaven knows--maybe!"
"Let me see, too!" she pleaded eagerly. "Is it through that crack in the wall? Is that the place to look?"
She moved toward it, her face blanched with excitement, eyes shining, lips parted. But Stern held her back. By the shoulder he took her.
"No, no, little girl!" he whispered. "You--you mustn"t! Really must _not_, you know. It"s too awful!"
Up at him she looked, knowing not what to think or say for a moment.
Their eyes met, there in that wrecked and riven place, lighted by the dull, misty, morning gray. Then Stern spoke, for in her gaze abode questions unnumbered.
"I"d much rather you wouldn"t look out at them, not just yet," said he, speaking very low, fearful lest the murmur of his voice might penetrate the wall. "Just what they are, frankly, there"s no telling."
"You mean--?"
"Come back into the arcade, where we"ll be safer from discovery, and we can talk. Not here. Come!"
She obeyed. Together they retreated to the inner court.
"You see," he commented, nodding at the empty water-pail, "I haven"t been to the spring yet. Not very likely to get there for a while, either, unless--well, unless something pretty radical happens. I think these chaps have settled down for a good long stay in their happy hunting-ground, after the fight and the big feast. It"s sort of a notion I"ve got, that this place, here, is some ancient, ceremonial ground of theirs."
"You mean, on account of the tower?"
He nodded.
"Yes, if they"ve got any religious ideas at all, or rather superst.i.tions, such would very likely center round the most conspicuous object in their world. Probably the spring is a regular voodoo hangout. The row, last night, must have been a sort of periodic argument to see who was going to run the show."
"But," exclaimed the girl, in alarm--"but if they _do_ stay a while, what about us? We simply must have water!"
"True enough. And, inasmuch as we can"t drink brine and don"t know where there"s any other spring, it looks as though we"d either have to make up to these fellows or wade into them, doesn"t it? But we"ll get water safe enough, never fear. Just now, for the immediate present, I want to get my bearings a little, before going to work. _They_ seem to be resting up, a bit, after their pleasant little soiree. Now, if they"d only all go to sleep, it"d be a walk-over!"
The girl looked at him, very seriously.
"You mustn"t go out there alone, whatever happens!" she exclaimed. "I just won"t let you! But tell me," she questioned again, "how much have you really found out about them--whatever they are."
"Not much. They seem to be part of a nomadic race of half-human things, that"s about all I can tell as yet. Perhaps all the white and yellow peoples perished utterly in the cataclysm, leaving only a few scattered blacks. You know blacks _are_ immune to several germ-infections that destroy other races."
"Yes. And you mean--?"
"It"s quite possible these fellows are the far-distant and degenerate survivors of that other time."
"So the whole world may have gone to pieces the way Liberia and Haiti and Santo Domingo once did, when white rule ceased?"
"Yes, only a million times more so. I see you know your history! _If_ my hypothesis is correct, and only a few thousand blacks escaped, you can easily imagine what must have happened."
"For a while, maybe fifty or a hundred years, they may have kept some sort of dwindling civilization. Probably the English language for a while continued, in ever more and more corrupt forms. There may have been some pretense of maintaining the school system, railroads, steamship lines, newspapers and churches, banks and all the rest of that wonderfully complex system we once knew. But after a while--"
"Yes? What _then?_"
"Why, the whole false sh.e.l.l crumbled, that"s all. It must have!
History shows it. It didn"t take a hundred years after Toussaint L"Ouverture and Dessalines, in Haiti, for the blacks to shuck off French civilization and go back to gra.s.s huts and human sacrifice--to make another little Central Africa out of it, in the backwoods districts, at any rate. And _we_--have had a thousand, Beatrice, since the white man died!"
She thought a moment, and shook her head.
"What a story," she murmured, "what an incredible, horribly fascinating story that would make, if it could ever be known, or written! Think of the ebb-tide of everything! Railroads abandoned and falling to pieces, cities crumbling, ships no longer sailing, language and arts and letters forgotten, agriculture shrinking back to a few patches of corn and potatoes, and then to nothing at all, everything changing, dying, stopping--and the ever-increasing yet degenerating people leaving the city ruins, which they could not rebuild--taking to the fields, the forests, the mountains--going down, down, back toward the primeval state, down through barbarism, through savagery, to--what?"
"To what we see!" answered the engineer, bitterly. "To animals, retaining by ghastly mockery some use of fire and of tools. All this, according to _one_ theory."