as leaning over the bulwarks watching them. I could contain my
excitement no longer.

"'Come,' I said to my friend, 'help me down, for I must go.'

"He climbed over, trembling, and assisted me to a standing on the ice. We
scrambled along the track of _debris_ left by the crew. At the moment
half a dozen of the latter were rolling back a broad flap of the hide, in
which they had found a long L-shaped rent revealed. Then a hoarse cry
broke from them, and I stumbled forward and looked down, and saw.

"They lay beneath the mighty ribs as in a cage, of which the intercostal
spaces were a foot in width, and the bars of a strength to maintain the
enormous pressure of that which had surrounded and entombed them; they
lay in one close group, their naked limbs smeared with the stain of their
prison--a man, a woman, and a tiny child. From their faces, and their
unfallen flesh, they might have been sleeping; but they were not; they
were come down to us, a transfixture of death--prehistoric people in a
prehistoric brute, and their eyes--their eyes!"

Dinah's voice trailed off into silence. Some expression that I could not
interpret was on her face. There was regret in it, but nothing of pathos
or mysticism. Suddenly she breathed out a great sigh and resumed her
narrative.

"You will want to know how they looked, these lifeless survivors of a
remote race from a remote time? I will try to tell you. The men hacked
away the ribs with their axes, and laid bare the group lying in the
hollow scooped out of the fallen beast. They were little people, and the
man, according to your modern canons of taste, was by far the most
beautiful of the three. He sat erect, with one uplifted arm projected
through the ribs; as if, surprised by the frost-stroke, he had started to
escape, and had been petrified in the act. His face, wondering and
delicate as a baby's, was hairless; and his head only a pretty infantile
down covered--a curling floss as radiant as spun glass. His wide-open
eyes glinted yet with a hyacinth blue, and it was difficult to realize
that they were dead and vacant.

"The woman was of coarser mould, ruddy, vigorous, brown-haired and eyed.
She looked the very hamadryad of some blossoming tree, a sweet capricious
daughter of the blameless earth. Everything luxuriated in her--colour,
hair, and lusty flesh; and the child she held to her bosom with a manner
that indescribably commingled contempt, and resentment, and a passion of
propr