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noses, more prognathous faces and hairier bodies. The question puzzled me.

Possibly in the outer world the answer to it is locked in the bosom of the Sphinx.

Who knows? I do not.

Thinking the thoughts of a lunatic or a dope-fiend, I fell asleep; and when I

awoke, my hands and feet were securely tied and my weapons had been taken

from me. How they did it without awakening me I cannot tell you. It was

humiliating, but it was true. To-jo stood above me. The early light of morning

was dimly filtering into the cave.

"Tell me," he demanded, "how to throw a man over my head and break his neck,

for I am going to kill you, and I wish to know this thing before you die."

Of all the ingenuous declarations I have ever heard, this one copped the

proverbial bun. It struck me as so funny that, even in the face of death, I

laughed. Death, I may remark here, had, however, lost much of his terror for me.

I had become a disciple of Lys' fleeting philosophy of the valuelessness of human

life. I realized that she was quite right--that we were but comic figures hopping

from the cradle to the grave, of interest to practically no other created thing than

ourselves and our few intimates.

Behind To-jo stood So-ta. She raised one hand with the palm toward me--the

Caspakian equivalent of a negative shake of the head.

"Let me think about it," I parried, and To-jo said that he would wait until night.

He would give me a day to think it over; then he left, and the women left--the men

for the hunt, and the women, as I later learned from So-ta, for the warm pool

where they immersed their bodies as did the shes of the Sto-lu. "Ata," explained

So-ta, when I questioned her as to the purpose of this matutinal rite; but that

was later.

I must have lain there bound and uncomfortable for two or three hours when at

last So-ta entered the cave. She carried a sharp knife--mine, in fact, and with it

she cut my bonds.

"Come!" she said. "So-ta will go with you back to the Galus. It is time that So-ta

left the Band-lu. Together we will go to the Kro-lu, and after that the Galus. To-

jo will kill you tonight. He will kill So-ta if he knows that So-ta aided you. We will

go together."

"I will go with you to the Kro-lu," I replied, "but then I must return to my own

people `toward the beginning.'"

The Land That Time Forgot