t I might have a strong string for my bow. The other
women did likewise, and when the wall was attacked, stood shoulder to
shoulder with us, in the midst of our spears and arrows raining down
potsherds and cobblestones on the heads of the Snub-Noses.

Even the patient Snub-Noses we well-nigh out-patienced. Came a time when
of ten men of us, but one was alive on the wall, and of our women
remained very few, and the Snub-Noses held parley. They told us we were
a strong breed, and that our women were men-mothers, and that if we would
let them have our women they would leave us alone in the valley to
possess for ourselves and that we could get women from the valleys to the
south.

And Nuhila said no. And the other women said no. And we sneered at the
Snub-Noses and asked if they were weary of fighting. And we were as dead
men then, as we sneered at our enemies, and there was little fight left
in us we were so weak. One more attack on the wall would end us. We
knew it. Our women knew it. And Nuhila said that we could end it first
and outwit the Snub-Noses. And all our women agreed. And while the Snub-
Noses prepared for the attack that would be final, there, on the wall, we
slew our women. Nuhila loved me, and leaned to meet the thrust of my
sword, there on the wall. And we men, in the love of tribehood and
tribesmen, slew one another till remained only Horda and I alive in the
red of the slaughter. And Horda was my elder, and I leaned to his
thrust. But not at once did I die. I was the last of the Sons of the
Mountain, for I saw Horda, himself fall on his blade and pass quickly.
And dying with the shouts of the oncoming Snub-Noses growing dim in my
ears, I was glad that the Snub-Noses would have no sons of us to bring up
by our women.

I do not know when this time was when I was a Son of the Mountain and
when we died in the narrow valley where we had slain the Sons of the Rice
and the Millet. I do not know, save that it was centuries before the
wide-spreading drift of all us Sons of the Mountain fetched into India,
and that it was long before ever I was an Aryan master in Old Egypt
building my two burial places and defacing the tombs of kings before me.

I should like to tell more of those far days, but time in the present is
short. Soon I shall pass. Yet am I sorry that I cannot tell more of
those early drifts, when there was crushage of peoples, or descending ice-
sheets, or migrations of meat.

A