The chant changed now, a lament in it, a grieving for lost things, the women's voices dominating, keening, almost crystalline in iciness, like music locked within the chill stone of cathedral towers. O'Hara's woman led him toward one of the caverns, moving slowly, somberly erect. Within, deep in the gloom, a log fire smoldered. Smoke made fantastic shadows leaping on the living rock. She turned at last and stood there rigid, facing him. Outside, the chant was changing now, a jubilating chorus of men's voices, gaining tempo until suddenly they ceased, and from the breathless silence finally a voice incredibly high, seeming incredibly remote, sang adoration. O'Hara's woman freed his hand, then loosening a thong across her shoulders, shook herself, and stood there in the firelight nude. And the next instant she leaped at him, her hands like claws, tearing at his face and throat, driving him backward toward the entrance of the cave, back toward the clan. It was repetition of the struggle in the natural amphitheater, savage, passionate, and with O'Hara understanding now that he must master her or die. He swung his wooden club. "She fell," he said. "I was getting expert at it--she fell, and that was it. Brutal, you think? Perhaps. I will not argue that. What mattered was that Nedra did not think of it that way. That was her name, Nedra--I learned that, as I was to learn so many things within the next few days." But that learning came swiftly only after he understood their language. It was a decadent English, elided and bastardized and purified of abstracts, a working language for mountain people, verbs and nouns, only the simplest adjectives. The trick of understanding it was not to attempt to get it word for word--the words themselves no longer had their English identity--but by complete sentences, for three syllables might express an idea which in the original of his school days would have required ten or more words. Much of it depended of course on inflections, whether a question or a command or a statement of fact. And yet, slurred in his mind's ear, repeated rapidly, it suggested the more complex English structure, always excepting the abstract. Or ideas born since the establishment of the Atomic Curtain. It was not difficult, once O'Hara had grasped the basic sounds. His key to it, his teacher, was Nedra. For two days and nights, by custom of the clan, O'Hara was not permitted to leave the nuptial cave, Nedra herself going only to procure what was necessary in food and water, returning then at once and always with that mating ferocity of her people.