THE ETERNAL SAVAGE EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS Original Title: The Eternal Lover ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York 36, N.Y. THE ETERNAL SAVAGE (THE ETERNAL LOVER) This Ace edition follows the text of the first hard-cover book edition, originally published in 1925. Printed in U.S.A. ADVENTURE AT MANKIND'S DAWN Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan, tears apart time to bring the fiercely primitive world of the Stone Age to vivid life as a startling natural catastrophe throws a caveman into contact with the modern African jungle and brings a Twentieth Century American girl into the dawn world of the Niocene Age. Here is Nu, son of Nu, seeking to test his mettle against the terrible fangs of the ferocious saber-tooth tiger. Here is Victoria Custer, guest of Tarzan, seeking vacation and adventure and finding more than she could ever have dreamed of. Here is THE ETERNAL SAVAGE, filled with terrific adventure, of primitive man against monster beast, and of comely cavewoman against unending peril in a world where civilization was not even a cloud on the volcanic horizon. PART ONE NU OF THE NIOCENE Nu, the son of Nu, his mighty muscles rolling beneath his smooth bronzed skin, moved silently through the jungle primeval. His handsome head with its shock of black hair, roughly cropped between sharpened stones, was high held, the delicate nostrils questioning each vagrant breeze for word of Oo, hunter of men. Now his trained senses catch the familiar odor of Ta, the great woolly rhinoceros, directly in his path, but Nu, the son of Nu, does not hunt Ta this day. Does not the hide of Ta's brother already hang before the entrance of Nu's cave? No, today Nu hunts the gigantic cat, the fierce saber-toothed tiger, Oo, for Nat-ul, wondrous daughter of old Tha, will mate with none but the mightiest of hunters. Only so recently as the last darkness, as, beneath the great, equatorial moon, the two had walked hand in hand beside the restless sea she had made it quite plain to Nu, the son of Nu, that not even he, son of the chief of chiefs, could claim her unless there hung at the thong of his loin cloth the fangs of Oo.