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After a while they became less suspicious of us and then quite friendly in their
brutish way. They picked at the fabric of our clothing, which seemed to interest
them, and examined my rifle and pistol and the ammunition in the belt around
my waist. I showed them the thermos-bottle, and when I poured a little water
from it, they were delighted, thinking that it was a spring which I carried about
with me--a never-failing source of water supply.
One thing we both noticed among their other characteristics: they never laughed
nor smiled; and then we remembered that Ahm had never done so, either. I
asked them if they knew Ahm; but they said they did not.
One of them said: "Back there we may have known him." And he jerked his head
to the south.
"You came from back there?" I asked. He looked at me in surprise.
"
We all come from there," he said. "After a while we go there." And this time he
jerked his head toward the north. "Be Galus," he concluded.
Many times now had we heard this reference to becoming Galus. Ahm had
spoken of it many times. Lys and I decided that it was a sort of original religious
conviction, as much a part of them as their instinct for self-preservation--a primal
acceptance of a hereafter and a holier state. It was a brilliant theory, but it was
all wrong. I know it now, and how far we were from guessing the wonderful, the
miraculous, the gigantic truth which even yet I may only guess at--the thing that
sets Caspak apart from all the rest of the world far more definitely than her
isolated geographical position or her impregnable barrier of giant cliffs. If I could
live to return to civilization, I should have meat for the clergy and the layman to
chew upon for years--and for the evolutionists, too.
After breakfast the men set out to hunt, while the women went to a large pool of
warm water covered with a green scum and filled with billions of tadpoles. They
waded in to where the water was about a foot deep and lay down in the mud.
They remained there from one to two hours and then returned to the cliff. While
we were with them, we saw this same thing repeated every morning; but though
we asked them why they did it we could get no reply which was intelligible to us.
All they vouchsafed in way of explanation was the single word Ata. They tried to
get Lys to go in with them and could not understand why she refused. After the
first day I went hunting with the men, leaving my pistol and Nobs with Lys, but
she never had to use them, for no reptile or beast ever approached the pool while
the women were there--nor, so far as we know, at other times. There was no
spoor of wild beast in the soft mud along the banks, and the water certainly
didn't look fit to drink.
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