sed what you did.
That voice or some combination of frequencies or overtones within it,
is resonant to the essence of evil--the fundamental life-hating
self-destroying evil in man--even to have glimpsed it, to have heard
the brainless beast mocking, was an outrage to humanity that a man
must...."

Dalton paused, got a grip on himself. "But, consider--the outrage was
wiped out, humanity won its victory over the monster a long time ago.
What if it isn't quite extinct? That record was fifty thousand years
old."

"What did you do with the record?" Thwaite looked up sharply.

"I obliterated that--the voice and the pictures that went with it from
the film before I returned it to the Museum."

Thwaite sighed deeply. "Good. I was damning myself for not doing that
before I left."

The linguist said, "I think it answered my question as much as I want
it answered. The origin of speech--lies in the will to power, the lust
to dominate other men by preying on the weakness or evil in them.

"Those first men didn't just guess that such power existed--they
_knew_ because the beast had taught them and they tried to imitate
it--the mystagogues and tyrants through the ages, with voices, with
tomtoms and bull-roarers and trumpets. What makes the memory of that
voice so hard to live with is just knowing that what it called to is a
part of man--isn't that it?"

Thwaite didn't answer. He had taken the heavy rifle across his knees
and was methodically testing the movement of the well-oiled breech
mechanism.

Dalton stood up wearily and picked up his suitcase. "I'll check into
the hotel. Suppose we talk this over some more in the morning. Maybe
things'll look different by daylight."

But in the morning Thwaite was gone--upriver with a hired boatman,
said the natives. The note he had left said only, _Sorry. But it's no
use talking about humanity--this is personal._

Dalton crushed the note angrily, muttering under his breath, "The
fool! Didn't he realize I'd go with him?" He hurled the crumpled paper
aside and stalked out to look for a guide.

* * * * *

They chugged slowly westward up the forest-walled river, an obscure
tributary that flowed somewhere into the Xingu. After four days, they
had hopes of being close on the others' track. The brown-faced guide,
Joao, who held the tiller now, was a magician. He had conjured up an
ancient outboard motor for the scow-like boat Dalton had bought from a
fis