Untitled and Unfinished Fragment

A land of wild, fantastic beauty; of mighty trees and great rivers, of tangled, breathless jungle and boundless, unlimited prairies, of towering, awesome crags, and dank, gloomy, fever-ridden swamps, of reeking, far stretching savannas, and of great lakes. A land of pleasant summer and cruel, merciless winter. A land of beauty and terror. A land of wild beasts and wilder men. Mighty beasts roamed the mountains and the plains and jungle. Through the nights walked Na-go-sa-na, the tawny one, the Fear That Walks By Night, and Sa-go-na, the cruel sabertooth. Often upon the plains and among the brakes of the savannas, might be seen the gigantic form of Ga-so-go, the mammoth, the Hill That Walks. Among the savannas and in the jungle, Gola-ha, the Beast That Carries A Horn On His Nose, fought for supremacy with the A-go-nun, the Red One, the cone horned monster of another age. In the swamps and the deep jungle lived the Crawling Ones. The bearers of the Burning Death. And in the swamps and amid the deepest savanna reigned the E-ha-g-don, the frightful monsters of an earlier epoch–the dinosaurs. Such was the land in which dwelt my people, the Ta-an.

Through the plain and savanna and into an estuary, flowed a great river, The River of Blue Water. On one side of the river, the south side, rose moderately high cliffs. These cliffs rose abruptly, some yards back from the steep bank of the river. The top was rounded, sloping back steeply into the plain and ending in a drop of some score feet. In the cliff fronting the river were three tiers of caves, one tier above the other; and in these caves lived the tribe. The Ta-an numbered some one hundred and fifty strong. Most of these, of course, were women and children but there were at least seventy-five A-ga-nai, fighting men.

Ai, what a life that was! A life of battle; a life through which Fear stalked rampant from birth to death. For man was weak and helpless in those days, and Fear walked always by his side, and at night It lay down by his side. Even in sleep it did not depart from him but accompanied him in his troubled rest and haunted his dreams, so that in the midst of night he would start suddenly awake gripping his rude weapons and the cold sweat starting from his brow. For even as man’s waking thoughts were of Fear, so his dreams were of Fear. Through life man went in those early days, peering, creeping, cautiously, ready, always, to flee or fight like a cornered rat. His days, he passed in fear and watchfulness and his nights in troubled sleep and frightful dreams–dreams through which Fear stalked grisly and horrible. Thus through life he went and at last in a moment of carelessness–a sudden movement in the long grass or the bushes or the branches overhead, a great body launching through the air, an instant of awful agony and ghastly fear, and then the sound of bones crunching between mighty jaws. Or else, the rush of a heavy form across the ground, the quick lightning-like striking of a snake, the crash of a falling tree, the snapping that proceeds the parting of a rotten limb, these things heralded Death. Violent, sudden death.

In summer, pleasant was the land of the Ta-ans, except for the Fear. The much fruit was on the trees and the wild blueberries flourished at the edge of the swamps. The streams and rivers abounded in So-ga, the fish and the tribesmen caught them with slivers of bone tied to the end of a long fiber or a strip of rawhide. Ba-a the deer and O-ha the Swift One, blackened the plain with their numbers and among the forest wandered in great droves, Go-un the Grunter. The killers were gorged on the flesh of the grass-eaters and their attacks on man were less frequent. Man, too, feasted on the hoofed ones for so numerous were they, and so fat on the long, rank grass and the other rich vegetation, that they were careless of danger and unwary and the hunting was good. The tribesmen slew and slew, and what they did not eat on the spot, they cut in long strips to dry before the cave fires for winter. The trees and the undergrowth of jungle and forest were green and pleasant. The hills and crags were covered with a green covering of vegetation which softened their harsh and rugged outline.