Waldo was too horrified by this description of his soon-to-be antagonists to make any reply--his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth--all his vocal organs seemed paralyzed. But the girl did not notice. She went on joyously, ripping Waldo's nervous system out of him and tearing it into shreds. "You see," she continued, "Flatfoot and Korth are greater than the other men of my tribe. They can do as they will. They are frightful to look upon, and I have often thought that the hearts of others dried up when they saw either of them coming for them. "And they are so strong! I have seen Korth crush the skull of a full-grown man with a single blow from his open palm; while one of Flatfoot's amusements is the breaking of men's arms and legs with his bare hands." They had entered the valley now, and in silence they continued on toward the fringe of trees which grew beside the little river. Nadara led the way toward a ford, which they quickly crossed. All the way across the valley Waldo had been searching for some avenue of escape. He dared not enter that awful village and face those terrible men, and he was almost equally averse to admitting to the girl that he was afraid. He would gladly have died to have escaped either alternative, but he preferred to choose the manner of his death. The thought of entering the village and meeting a horrible end at the hands of the brutes who awaited him there and of being compelled to demonstrate before the girl's eyes that he was neither a mighty fighter nor a hero was more than he could endure. Occupied with these harrowing speculations, Waldo and Nadara came to the farther side of the forest, whence they could see the towering cliffs rising steeply from the valley's bed, three hundred yards away. Along their face and at their feet Waldo descried a host of half-naked men, women, and children moving about in the consummation of their various duties. Involuntarily he halted. The girl came to his side. Together they looked out upon the scene, the like of which Waldo Emerson never before had seen. It was as though he had been suddenly snatched back through countless ages to a long-dead past and dropped into the midst of the prehistoric life of his paleolithic progenitors. Upon the narrow ledges before their caves, women, with long, flowing hair, ground food in rude stone mortars. Naked children played about them, perilously close to the precipitous cliff edge. Hairy men squatted, gorillalike, before pieces of flat stone, upon which green hides were stretched, while they scraped, scraped, scraped with the sharp edge of smaller bits of stone. There was no laughter and no song. Occasionally Waldo saw one of the fierce creatures address another, and sometimes one would raise his thick lips in a nasty snarl that exposed his fighting fangs; but they were too far away for their words to reach the young man. CHAPTER V AWAKENING