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The audacity of the Norse vikings knew no bounds. They pillaged Paris, Bordeaux, Orleans, and nearly every other city of France accessible by water. Their hands fell heavily on the coasts of Spain and the British Isles. At one time a band of these fearless sea-robbers made their lairs in the Shetland and Orkney Islands and even plundered the coast of Norway, the abode of their kinsmen.
Presently from their lairs arose, and shook themselves and went stealthily forth, those of Earth's children to whom it is the law to prowl abroad as soon as the dusk has fallen. And they went pattering softly over the plain, and their eyes shone in the dark, and crossed and recrossed one another in their courses.
When for good behaviour I have been admitted to Tyrrell's inner sanctum here, and to the corridors behind the lairs, where hang cast skins like stockings on a line, I have handled many of his pets. I have never got quite as far as rattlesnakes, because rattlesnakes have a blackguardly, welshing look that I don't approve.
The aggressors of war should be pilloried in life and in history. Men must defend their country if attacked; to do less would be to sink lower than the beasts that defend their lairs; and for that reason all pacifists, and conscientious objectors, are abject, mean, and shabby.
The sole inhabitants of these melancholy though majestic solitudes are deer, buffaloes and wild boars, which being hidden in their lairs and dens in the daytime, come out at night in search of food. Birds are seldom seen, and the monkeys so common in the Philippines, shun the solitude of these immense forests.
The tree gave you a sense of great spaces, and depths, and differences, like a world; and it was full of life, like a city. Spiders hung in their gossamer lairs, only too tensely motionless not to seem dead; but if a gnat came with what swift, accurate, and relentless vigour they sprang upon and garotted him.
These were not finally ejected from their lairs until after one of their chiefs had been killed in a night skirmish by a young man defending his house, and the other chief, weary of his savage life, had surrendered himself to transportation.
They were only to start them out from their lurking-places and lairs, and drive them in toward the centre of the field. Great numbers of the men were provided with picks, spades, and other similar tools, with which they were to dig out the burrows and holes of such animals as should seek refuge under ground. They went on in this way for some weeks.
Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would have sought him in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical river valleys would you have found the squatting lairs of his little herds, a male, a few females, a child or so. He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led.
When the aëroplanes are home and the sunset has flared away, and it is cold, and night comes down over France, you notice the guns more than you do by day, or else they are actually more active then, I do not know which it is. It is then as though a herd of giants, things of enormous height, came out from lairs in the earth and began to play with the hills.
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