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Some twenty paces further along the fringe of mingled light and shadow, their bodies thrust half way forth from the undergrowth, stood a pair of huge, ruddy cave-bears, their monstrous heads held low and swaying surlily from side to side as they eyed the prey which they dared not rush in and seize.
But, coming to my Tin Islands again: they'll delight you. And I tell you, a kingdom will not be so hard to carve out as it was in Egypt, or as you found in Yucatan. There are beasts there, of course, and no one who can hunt need ever go hungry. But the greater beasts are few. There are cave-bears and cave-tigers in small numbers, to be sure, and some river-horses and great snakes.
Soon afterwards, appearing from no man could say just where, came a scattered incursion of mammoth cave-bears, saber-toothed tigers and a few gigantic cave-lions. These ravenous monsters not only slaughtered wholesale the game on which the Hillmen most depended, but strove each for himself, fortunately to seize the caves.
For these beasts are obstinate, and will never give up from pursuing us. And, unlike the red cave-bears they seem to know how to climb trees." When both bears were high in the two trees, Grôm and the girl slipped down by the bending tips of the branches, almost as swiftly as falling.
Fragments of earthenware occurred in the Hohefels cave near Ulm, in company with the bones of reindeer, cave-bears, and mammoths, whose joints had doubtless been duly boiled, a hundred thousand years ago, by the intelligent producer of those identical sun-dried fleshpots; and M. Joly, of Toulouse, has in his possession portions of an irregularly circular, flat-bottomed vessel, from the cave of Nabrigas, on which the finger-marks of the hand that moulded the clay are still clearly distinguishable on the baked earthenware.
Mind, by the way, that you do not fall into that round hole in the floor. It is enormously deep; and more than forty cave-bears have left their skeletons at the bottom, amongst which your skeleton would be a little out of place. Next day let us move off eastwards to the Little Pyrenees to see another cave, Niaux, high up in a valley scarred nearly up to the top by former glaciers.
Further, these ancient men had an astonishing talent for delineating animals and hunting scenes. In the caves of France have been found carvings on bone and ivory, probably many tens of thousands of years old, which represent in the most life-like manner mammoths, cave-bears, and other animals now extinct. Strangely enough, of all existing savage peoples the Eskimo alone possess the same faculty.
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