es, but also between them and escape.
There was no way up or down or out--they simply had to stay there. Some
were for suicide, but not the majority. They must have been a plucky
lot, as a whole, and they decided to live--as long as they did live.
Of course they had hope, as youth must, that something would happen to
change their fate.

So they set to work, to bury the dead, to plow and sow, to care for one
another.

Speaking of burying the dead, I will set down while I think of it, that
they had adopted cremation in about the thirteenth century, for the same
reason that they had left off raising cattle--they could not spare
the room. They were much surprised to learn that we were still
burying--asked our reasons for it, and were much dissatisfied with what
we gave. We told them of the belief in the resurrection of the body, and
they asked if our God was not as well able to resurrect from ashes as
from long corruption. We told them of how people thought it repugnant to
have their loved ones burn, and they asked if it was less repugnant to
have them decay. They were inconveniently reasonable, those women.

Well--that original bunch of girls set to work to clean up the place and
make their living as best they could. Some of the remaining slave women
rendered invaluable service, teaching such trades as they knew. They
had such records as were then kept, all the tools and implements of the
time, and a most fertile land to work in.

There were a handful of the younger matrons who had escaped slaughter,
and a few babies were born after the cataclysm--but only two boys, and
they both died.

For five or ten years they worked together, growing stronger and wiser
and more and more mutually attached, and then the miracle happened--one
of these young women bore a child. Of course they all thought there must
be a man somewhere, but none was found. Then they decided it must be a
direct gift from the gods, and placed the proud mother in the Temple of
Maaia--their Goddess of Motherhood--under strict watch. And there,
as years passed, this wonder-woman bore child after child, five of
them--all girls.

I did my best, keenly interested as I have always been in sociology and
social psychology, to reconstruct in my mind the real position of these
ancient women. There were some five or six hundred of them, and they
were harem-bred; yet for the few preceding generations they had been
reared in the atmosphere of such heroic struggle tha