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A sudden vision comes to me of one of the first far-away ape-men who tried to use reason instead of instinct as a guide for his conduct. I imagine him, perched in his tree, torn between those two voices, wailing loudly at night by a river, in his puzzled distress. My poor far-off brother!
Poor devils they were, down-faced little chaps, and had enough to make them so. It seems that the humans hold one side of this plateau over yonder, where you saw the caves and the ape-men hold this side, and there is bloody war between them all the time. That's the situation, so far as I could follow it.
To bolster up the hypothesis, that some of the scraps of bones belonged to ape-men; who lived about 50,000 years ago, we are told that, in many caverns there are paintings of animals, some of which are extinct, proving that the artists were ape-men of advancing intellect, living in that day. These drawings are rude, and inexact, and the resemblance to extinct animals rather fanciful.
At every other point the king was an absurd parody of the Professor. All this, which takes me so long to describe, impressed itself upon me in a few seconds. Then we had very different things to think of, for an active drama was in progress. Two of the ape-men had seized one of the Indians out of the group and dragged him forward to the edge of the cliff. The king raised his hand as a signal.
First and not least formidable to the tribe had been an incursion from the east of beings who were plainly men, in a way, but still more plainly beasts. Had the tribe of the Little Hills but known it, these Ape-men were much like their own ancestors except for the blackness of their skins beneath the coarse fur, the narrow angle of their skulls and the heavy forward thrust of their lower jaws.
By this, no doubt, both ape-men and Indians had at different epochs reached the top, and Maple White with his companion had taken the same way. Only the year before, however, there had been a terrific earthquake, and the upper end of the tunnel had fallen in and completely disappeared.
Sin makes men more fit, and hence sinners only survive! Is evolution simply ridiculous, or a crime? When in the "ascent of man" did he become a sinner? A million years ago? Judging from the pictures of fierce alleged ape-men, it must have been a long, long time ago. Did all become sinners then? What became of the progeny of those who had not secured the attainment of sin?
Along this a party of the ape-men were passing. They went in single file, with bent legs and rounded backs, their hands occasionally touching the ground, their heads turning to left and right as they trotted along. Their crouching gait took away from their height, but I should put them at five feet or so, with long arms and enormous chests.
Kovudoo, realizing the danger of coming to close quarters with these mighty ape-men, seized Meriem and called upon his warriors to retreat. For a time the apes followed them, and several of the blacks were badly mauled and one killed before they succeeded in escaping.
Two of them entered and dragged us forth. The perilous pathways and the surrounding trees were filled with the black ape-men, their females, and their young. There was not an ornament, a weapon, or a garment among the lot. "Quite low in the scale of creation," commented Perry. "Quite high enough to play the deuce with us, though," I replied. "Now what do you suppose they intend doing with us?"
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