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Updated: May 21, 2025
"Why-why!" gasped Billy in an astonished tone of voice, "they have manes!" In some concern for her sanity I glanced in her direction. She was staring, not to her left, but straight ahead. I followed the direction of her gaze, to see three lions moving across the face of the hill. Instantly we dropped off our horses.
It was absolutely certain that his tribe and Verva's kin had never been within a thousand miles of each other. In a few impassioned words he explained to Verva his faith, his simple creed that a thing was not necessarily wrong because the medicine-men said so, and the tribe believed them. The girl's own character was all trustfulness, and Why-Why was the person she trusted.
They then turned him loose, imposing on him his name of Why-Why; and when his shaven hair began to show through the clay daubing, the women of the tribe washed him, and painted him black and white. The indignation of Why-Why may readily be conceived.
His own was "like a marsh full of reeds," said the poet of the tribe, in a song which described these events, "so thick the spears stood in it." When he was dead, the tribe knew what they had lost in Why-Why. Then the tribesmen withdrew from that now holy ground, and built them houses, and forswore the follies of the medicine-men, as Why-Why had prophesied.
He rather promptly, however, showed signs of a sceptical character. Like other sharp children, Why-Why was always asking metaphysical conundrums. Who made men? Who made the sun? Why has the cave-bear such a hoarse voice? Why don't lobsters grow on trees? he would incessantly demand.
Now, Why-why was a mourner whom the chief medicine-man was anxious to "spite," as children say, and at the end of three days' watching our hero had not received a morsel of food. The spoon had invariably chanced to miss him. On the fourth night Why-Why entertained his fellow-watchers with a harangue on the imbecility of the whole proceeding.
In vain did Why-Why plead that if he neglected his sister no one else would comfort her. His life was spared, but the unfortunate little girl's bones were dug up by a German savant last year, in a condition which makes it only too certain that cannibalism was practised by the early natives of the Mediterranean coast.
Among the primitive Ligurian races, however, Why-Why and Verva must be held the inventors, and, alas! the protomartyrs of the passion. Love, like murder, "will out," and events revealed to Why-Why and Verva the true nature of their sentiments. It was a considerable exploit of Why-Why's that brought him and the northern captive to understand each other.
In the cave she lived an unhappy life, as the other children maltreated and tortured her in the manner peculiar to pitiless infancy. Such protection as a man can give to a child the unlucky little girl received from Why-Why. The cave people, like most savages, made it a rule never to punish their children.
She wove for him a belt of shells, strung on stout fibres of grass. In this belt Why-Why would attend the tribal corroborees, where, as has been said, he was inclined to "sit out" with Verva and watch, rather than join in the grotesque dance performed as worship to the Bear.
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