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Chapter 3
When I awoke, it was daylight, and I found Ajor squatting before a fine bed of
coals roasting a large piece of antelope-meat. Believe me, the sight of the new day
and the delicious odor of the cooking meat filled me with renewed happiness and
hope that had been all but expunged by the experience of the previous night; and
perhaps the slender figure of the bright-faced girl proved also a potent restorative.
She looked up and smiled at me, showing those perfect teeth, and dimpling with
evident happiness--the most adorable picture that I had ever seen. I recall that it
was then I first regretted that she was only a little untutored savage and so far
beneath me in the scale of evolution.
Her first act was to beckon me to follow her outside, and there she pointed to the
explanation of our rescue from the bear--a huge saber-tooth tiger, its fine coat
and its flesh torn to ribbons, lying dead a few paces from our cave, and beside it,
equally mangled, and disemboweled, was the carcass of a huge cave-bear. To
have had one's life saved by a saber-tooth tiger, and in the twentieth century into
the bargain, was an experience that was to say the least unique; but it had
happened--I had the proof of it before my eyes.
So enormous are the great carnivora of Caspak that they must feed perpetually to
support their giant thews, and the result is that they will eat the meat of any
other creature and will attack anything that comes within their ken, no matter
how formidable the quarry. From later observation--I mention this as worthy the
attention of paleontologists and naturalists--I came to the conclusion that such
creatures as the cave-bear, the cave-lion and the saber-tooth tiger, as well as the
larger carnivorous reptiles make, ordinarily, two kills a day--one in the morning
and one after night. They immediately devour the entire carcass, after which they
lie up and sleep for a few hours. Fortunately their numbers are comparatively
few; otherwise there would be no other life within Caspak. It is their very voracity
that keeps their numbers down to a point which permits other forms of life to
persist, for even in the season of love the great males often turn upon their own
mates and devour them, while both males and females occasionally devour their
young. How the human and semihuman races have managed to survive during
all the countless ages that these conditions must have existed here is quite
beyond me.
After breakfast Ajor and I set out once more upon our northward journey. We
had gone but a little distance when we were attacked by a number of apelike
creatures armed with clubs. They seemed a little higher in the scale than the
Alus. Ajor told me they were Bo-lu, or clubmen. A revolver-shot killed one and
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