I crawled out through the low doorway and looked about me. There was much to see. In the east was the glow of the rising sun, its first clear rays making glitter the crests of the rollers which were tumbling and roaring in over reefs and boulders, and climbing far up a long sandy beach. There had been a storm. The beach, which was a wide one, extended from the shore backward to nearly the edge of a dense forest, and along this edge rose a great line of huts from some of which smoke was arising. The huts were rude affairs, built of driftwood and brush and resembling generally the one I had just emerged from, which stood at the southern end of the long line. There was something more. Directly in front of the line of huts, and parallel with them, rose a mound of regular height almost equalling that of the huts themselves and cutting off the view of the sea save where wide passages led through it here and there. It was the view of this mound which brought me to my senses, for, as I now knew, I had been dazed only by a dream, a dream of warm winds and hunting. All that was gone now, and I knew that I was but looking upon the huts inhabited by my own people, the shell-fish eaters, and that the vast mound extending before them, and which exhaled a mighty odour, was but the refuse of our eating. The “Kitchen-middens,” were such mounds as these to be called by far distant future peoples. Not alone were shells in the mound, but the bones of countless birds and beasts and fish, for we were hunters and fishermen as well as plunderers of the enormous beds of oysters and mussels and cockles and other shell-fish, and of the toothsome sea-snails in the shallow waters. It was to our disadvantage, though we did not know it, that such an abundance of sea food lay at our very doors, for so we had become more slothful and indifferent and were making no advancement. This I knew because when any accretions to our numbers on our peninsula crossed the narrow strait we called the Skaw, between us and the mainland, they bore better weapons than we and knew more of many things. We remained as we had been when our first ancestors crossed from the lands beyond the Kattegat--the sea bay connected at its ends with those seas the North and Baltic--and remained upon this jutland because of the abundant shell-beds they discovered.