But this woman was long before we reached India.
We were still in the mid-most of that centuries-long drift, and no
shrewdness of geography can now place for me that ancient valley.

The woman was Nuhila. The valley was narrow, not long, and the swift
slope of its floor and the steep walls of its rim were terraced for the
growing of rice and of millet--the first rice and millet we Sons of the
Mountain had known. They were a meek people in that valley. They had
become soft with the farming of fat land made fatter by water. Theirs
was the first irrigation we had seen, although we had little time to mark
their ditches and channels by which all the hill waters flowed to the
fields they had builded. We had little time to mark, for we Sons of the
Mountain, who were few, were in flight before the Sons of the Snub-Nose,
who were many. We called them the Noseless, and they called themselves
the Sons of the Eagle. But they were many, and we fled before them with
our shorthorn cattle, our goats, and our barleyseed, our women and
children.

While the Snub-Noses slew our youths at the rear, we slew at our fore the
folk of the valley who opposed us and were weak. The village was mud-
built and grass-thatched; the encircling wall was of mud, but quite tall.
And when we had slain the people who had built the wall, and sheltered
within it our herds and our women and children, we stood on the wall and
shouted insult to the Snub-Noses. For we had found the mud granaries
filled with rice and millet. Our cattle could eat the thatches. And the
time of the rains was at hand, so that we should not want for water.

It was a long siege. Near to the beginning, we gathered together the
women, and elders, and children we had not slain, and forced them out
through the wall they had builded. But the Snub-Noses slew them to the
last one, so that there was more food in the village for us, more food in
the valley for the Snub-Noses.

It was a weary long siege. Sickness smote us, and we died of the plague
that arose from our buried ones. We emptied the mud-granaries of their
rice and millet. Our goats and shorthorns ate the thatch of the houses,
and we, ere the end, ate the goats and the shorthorns.

Where there had been five men of us on the wall, there came a time when
there was one; where there had been half a thousand babes and younglings
of ours, there were none. It was Nuhila, my woman, who cut off her hair
and twisted it tha