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"I vote we take the heart," said Ayrault, "and cook it, since otherwise the mammoth will be devoured before our eyes." While Bearwarden and Ayrault delved for this, Cortlandt, with some difficulty, parted the mammoth's lips and examined the teeth. "From the conical projections on the molars," said he, "this should be classed rather as a mastodon than as a mammoth."
Near the end of the cavern, at about 100 yards from the entrance, various holes dug in the yellow soil showed where the bone-searchers had been at work. I had ample encouragement, for I had only to stir the earth a little to find bones half turned to stone. I selected two or three teeth with the hope that a scientific friend would say they were a mastodon's or a mammoth's.
So it is true that the first picture whether drawn by the imagination alone in the constellations, on the walls of the cave with ochre and similar materials, or engraved with keen splinters of flint on the mammoth's tusk the first picture was of the chase. Animals are earliest, the human form next, flowers and designs and stories in drawings next, and landscape last of all.
"Baldur is dead!" the Valkyries cried; and even the old mammoth's bones which had lain for centuries under the hills, burst into tears, so that small rivers gushed forth from every mountain's side. "Baldur is dead!" said the messenger maidens as they swept over silent sands; and all the shells wept pearls.
The pieces of decayed bone were not much to look at; yet, submitted to an expert, they did a tale unfold. He showed them to be the remains of the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth's even more unwieldy comrade, of the reindeer, of two kinds of horse, one of them the pony-like wild horse still to be found in the Mongolian deserts, of the wild ox, and of the deer.
Then there was a Pantomimic Interlude, with a great deal of genuine knockabout, and, the crowning item of the entertainment, a comic song and stump-speech, announced to be given by The Anonymous Mammoth Comique an incognito not dimly suspected to conceal the identity of the Chief himself, being delayed by the Mammoth's character top-hat a fondly cherished property of the Stiggins brand and the cabbage umbrella that went with it, having been accidentally left behind at the Mammoth's hotel, the Master of the Revels, still distinguished by the jib-sail collar and shiny burnt-cork complexion of the corner-man, was sent to the front to ask if any lady or gentleman in the audience would kindly oblige with a ten-minute turn?
He saw another the other his friend pursuing and intending to take what he wanted to be his and what had become to him more than all else in the world; more than much eating and the skins of things to keep him warm, more than a mammoth's tooth to carve, more than the glorious skin of the great cave tiger, the possession of which made a rude nobility, more than anything and all else!
The industrious French have recognised that old countries, whose area is limited, can only compete with America, whose area is almost unlimited, by rendering transit easy and cheap. We in England shall ultimately have to apply the same fact. The most ancient attempt to delineate the objects of sport in existence is, I think, the celebrated engraving of a mammoth on a portion of a mammoth's tusk.
On comparing notes it was found that each had, according to his own views, made the best possible use of his time, the professor having not only placed the mammoth's skin in the hands of an eminent taxidermist, but also prepared and read before the Royal Society a paper on "The Open Polar Sea," which had created a profound impression on the collective mind of that august body; Lethbridge and Mildmay had seized the opportunity for paying a too-long- deferred visit to their respective mothers; and Sir Reginald had, acting upon the best obtainable advice, conveyed the four parcels of diamonds belonging to the party over to Amsterdam, where they had been left in the care of a thoroughly trustworthy diamond merchant, with instructions that certain of the jewels were to be cut and set in the handsomest possible manner, whilst the rest were to be disposed of as opportunity might offer.
Towards sunset or that pale parody of sunset which set the forest swimming in a ghastly, colorless haze the mammoth's trail of ruin brought us suddenly out of the trees to the shore of a great sheet of water. It was a desolate spot; northward a chaos of sombre peaks rose, piled up like thunder-clouds along the horizon; east and south the darkening wilderness spread like a pall.
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