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Updated: June 9, 2025
Here and there naked natives squatted on the rocks, motionless, or looking lazily for crabs; among the huge boulders they looked tiny, and their colouring scarcely distinguished them from their surroundings; so that they seemed rather like animals, or the shyest of cave-dwellers. Floating slowly on the grey sea, in the sad broken light, I thought I had never seen a more inhospitable coast.
The men had sent gifts: some arrow-heads and a curiously fashioned vessel from the cañon of the cave-dwellers; some chips from the petrified forest; a fern with wonderful fronds, root and all; and a sheaf of strange, beautiful blossoms carefully wrapped in wet paper, and all fastened to the saddle.
They were, of course, in a higher state of civilisation than mere cave-dwellers, but their huts may have been of perishable wattle, or they may have come from some of the hut-circles of the Bodmin Moors. The remains, like those around St. Piran's, bespeak a somewhat dense population.
The ermine of kings and judges, the white rabbit-tails with which the university graduate adorns his left shoulder on solemn occasions carry us back in thought to the age of the cave-dwellers. Moreover, the fleecy animals still clothe us in a less primitive fashion. Our woollens are made of hairs interlaced.
There being but three thousand of these cave-dwellers merely the population of a village would they not come to know each other, after a week or two, and familiarly; insomuch that the fortunate or unfortunate experiences of one would be of interest to all? Those are the materials furnished by history. From them might not almost anybody reproduce for himself the life of that time in Vicksburg?
When peace shall dawn and the Turk shall heed the voice of United Democracy as it proclaims with force, "Thou shall not oppress, nor shalt thou close the gates of these straits again!" then shall visitors from many lands wander through these trenches and marvel what kind of men were they that held them for so long against such odds, and gaze at the honeycombed cliff where twentieth-century men lived like cave-dwellers, and sang and joked more than the abiders in halls of luxury.
They have become cave-dwellers, troglodytes in the worst form. Our heavy batteries are placed on the slopes of the Argonne forest, while the light field-howitzers occupy the summits.
But when they all reached the sand-bank, where were the "cave-dwellers"? They had burrowed in the sand till completely out of sight! "Hello! Where are you"? screamed Jimmy. There was no answer. In enlarging the cave they had loosened the very dry earth, and thus caused the roof over their heads to fall in upon them, actually burying them as far as their arm-pits!
To the right and left stretched endless streets between the towering barracks, as beneath frowning cliffs pierced with a thousand glowing eyes that revealed the watch-fires within a mighty city of cave-dwellers held in the thraldom of poverty and want. Outside there was yet hurrying to and fro.
He soon found out. The natives who had remained in the hut drew up to the pot. They dipped their bare hands in, drew out pieces of meat and wads of the moss, and ate without ceremony. "Fingers were made before forks," quoted the professor. "We'll have to eat as the old cave-dwellers did. Well, I'm hungry enough not to stand on politeness." He reached in the vessel and got some meat.
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