ling source of water supply.

One thing we both noticed among their other characteristics: they never
laughed nor smiled; and then we remembered that Ahm had never done so,
either. I asked them if they knew Ahm; but they said they did not.

One of them said: "Back there we may have known him." And he jerked
his head to the south.

"You came from back there?" I asked. He looked at me in surprise.

"We all come from there," he said. "After a while we go there." And
this time he jerked his head toward the north. "Be Galus," he
concluded.

Many times now had we heard this reference to becoming Galus. Ahm had
spoken of it many times. Lys and I decided that it was a sort of
original religious conviction, as much a part of them as their instinct
for self-preservation--a primal acceptance of a hereafter and a holier
state. It was a brilliant theory, but it was all wrong. I know it
now, and how far we were from guessing the wonderful, the miraculous,
the gigantic truth which even yet I may only guess at--the thing that
sets Caspak apart from all the rest of the world far more definitely
than her isolated geographical position or her impregnable barrier of
giant cliffs. If I could live to return to civilization, I should have
meat for the clergy and the layman to chew upon for years--and for the
evolutionists, too.

After breakfast the men set out to hunt, while the women went to a
large pool of warm water covered with a green scum and filled with
billions of tadpoles. They waded in to where the water was about a
foot deep and lay down in the mud. They remained there from one to two
hours and then returned to the cliff. While we were with them, we saw
this same thing repeated every morning; but though we asked them why
they did it we could get no reply which was intelligible to us. All
they vouchsafed in way of explanation was the single word Ata. They
tried to get Lys to go in with them and could not understand why she
refused. After the first day I went hunting with the men, leaving my
pistol and Nobs with Lys, but she never had to use them, for no reptile
or beast ever approached the pool while the women were there--nor, so
far as we know, at other times. There was no spoor of wild beast in
the soft mud along the banks, and the water certainly didn't look fit
to drink.

This tribe lived largely upon the smaller animals which they bowled
over with their stone hatchets after making a wide circle about t