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Updated: May 4, 2025
Seeing that their intended prey made no further effort to flee, the two monsters grew still more excited. For a moment Grôm thought they would dare the passage of the barrier, but he was reassured to see that the flames filled them with an insuperable fear. They dared not come nearer than the thin edges of the verdure.
"Why not?" demanded Grôm, his eyes still fixed upon the monsters. "Oh! The bees! The terrible bees!" whispered A-ya. "Where can we go?" Grôm turned his head and scanned the belt of woodland, his ears now suddenly comprehending a deep, humming sound which he had hitherto referred solely to the winged foragers in the grass-tops.
The giant groaned in self-abasement, and beat his chest with his great fists. But Grôm, who would allow no dissensions in his following, answered sternly: "Be silent. You might have done no better yourself." Then for a time there was no more said, while Grôm, sitting there in the dark with the girl's face buried in his great shaggy chest, thought out his plans.
At ground-level the swarms of stinging insects were always with them, till Grôm invented the use of smudges. When every alternate member of the tribe carried a torch of dry grass and half-green bark, the march was enveloped in a cloud of acrid smoke, which the insects found more or less disconcerting. Of the grave perils of this weary march to the hills a single instance may suffice.
Once more, therefore, he held himself in check; while Bawr, his eyes easily reading the trail, crept on with the soundless step of a wild cat. But Grôm was not the only hunter lying in ambush in the sun-drenched ravine. Out from a bed of giant, red-blooming canna arose the diabolical, grinning head and monstrous shoulders of a saber-tooth, and stared after Bawr.
The next moment, she was jerked violently to the left. "This way!" panted Grôm, the sweat pouring down his livid face; and there, through the stems to the left, her dazed eyes perceived that the hated rosy glow was paling into the whiteness of the natural day. It was a big white rock, an island thrust up through the sea of treacherous bloom.
But there were enough so headlong in their ferocity that both Grôm and Mô were kept busy beating them off with spears, while A-ya fed the fires; and the ground inside the circle was littered with the radiant bodies of the dying insects, which, even in dying, bit like bull-dogs if foot or leg came within reach. Grôm noticed that their supply of fuel was all but gone, and his heart sank.
The rich plain-land at their feet had once been a shallow, inland sea, and now its grasses washed along their base in a gold-green, scented foam. Turning to the right, Grôm led the way close along the cliff-foot toward the water, which glowed like brass about a mile ahead.
She had sprung to her feet and stood staring behind her, not knowing which way to run because of her fear of the fire. And there, not twenty paces from her, their giant grey bulks half emerging from the thicket, stood the bears, slavering in their fury but afraid to come nearer the flame. With a shout, Grôm darted at them, and the wind of his going fanned his spear-point to a fierce blaze.
Under these conditions it was all but impossible to keep alight the sacred fires as precious to the tribe as life itself which they had brought with them in their flight upon the rafts. And Grôm, the Chief, saw his harassed people in danger of sinking back into the degradation from which his discovery and conquest of fire had so wonderfully uplifted them.
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