e have got
to hurry. Compared with the age of these, we've only a few minutes. It's
all right to talk jestingly about 'the crack of doom' but you know
there really was a crack of doom, and right here is where it cracked and
spewed out the material that hardened into these very rocks. Beside them
I feel as a shrimp must feel beside a whale, and I feel that we must
hurry."

"And so we must," said Donald. "I'm hungry as Likeliest when he waited
for them to find enough peacock tongues to satisfy his appetite."

"I wonder what brand of home-brew made him think of that," said Linda.

"Well, you know," said Donald, "the world was only a smallish place
then. They didn't have to go far to find everything to which they had
access, and it must have been rather a decent time in which to live.
Awful lot of light and color and music and unique entertainment."

"You're talking," said Linda, "from the standpoint of the king or the
master. Suppose you had lived then and had been the slave."

"There you go again," said Donald, "throwing a brick into the most
delicate mechanism of my profound thought. You ought to be ashamed to
round me up with something scientific and materialistic every time I go
a-glimmering. Don't you think this would be a fine place to have lunch?"

"You wait and see where we lunch today, and you will have the answer to
that," said Linda, starting back to the Bear Cat.

A few miles farther on they followed the road around the frowning menace
of an overhanging rock and sped out directly to the panorama of the sea.
The sun was shining on it, but, as always round the Laguna shore, the
rip tide was working itself into undue fury. It came dashing up on the
ancient rocks until one could easily understand why a poet of long
ago wrote of sea horses. Some of the waves did suggest monstrous white
chargers racing madly to place their feet upon the solid rock.

Through the village, up the steep inclines, past placid lakes, past
waving yellow mustard beds, beside highways where the breastplate of
Mother Earth gleamed emerald and ruby against the background of billions
of tiny, shining diamonds of the iceplant, past the old ostrich tree
reproduced by etchers of note the world over, with grinding brakes,
sliding down the breathless declivity leading to the shore, Linda
stopped at last where the rock walls lifted sheer almost to the sky. She
led Donald to a huge circle carpeted with cerise sand verbena, with
pink and yellow