And best of all, back in the little pocket in the mountainside, they
found old and disused cells of hunting wasps. The walls of the pocket
were made of soft sandstone with alternate layers of clay, and the wasps
had found digging easy.
There were a dozen or more burrows, the shaft of each some four feet in
diameter and going back into the cliff for nearly thirty feet, where
they branched out into a number of cells. Each of the cells had once
held a grub which had grown fat and large upon its hoard of paralyzed
crickets, and then had broken away to the outer world to emerge as a
full-grown wasp.
Now, however, the laboriously tunneled caverns would furnish a
hiding-place for the tribe of men, a far more secure hiding-place than
the center of the mushroom thickets. And, furthermore, a hiding-place
which, because more permanent, would gradually become a possession for
which the men would fight.
It is a curious thing that the advancement of a people from a state of
savagery and continual warfare to civilization and continual peace is
not made by the elimination of the causes of strife, but by the addition
of new objects and ideals, in defense of which that same people will
offer battle.
A single chrysalis was found securely anchored to the underside of a
rock-shelf, and Burl detached it with great labor and carried it into
one of the burrows, though the task was one that was almost beyond his
strength. He desired the butterfly that would emerge for his own use.
He preempted, too, a solitary burrow a little distant from the others,
and made preparations for an event that was destined to make his plans
wiser and more far-reaching than before.
His followers were equally busy with their various burrows, gathering
stores of soft growth for their couches, and later--at Burl's
suggestion--even carrying within the dark caverns the radiant heads of
the luminous mushrooms to furnish illumination. The light would be dim,
and after the mushroom had partly dried it would cease, but for a people
utterly ignorant of fire it was far from a bad plan.
Burl was very happy for that time. His people looked upon him as a
savior, and obeyed his least order without question. He was growing to
repose some measure of trust in them, too, as men who began to have some
glimmerings of the new-found courage that had come to him, and which he
had striven hard to implant in their breasts.
The tribe had been a formless gathering of people. There were six or
seven men and as many women, and naturally families had come into
being--sometimes after fierce and absurd fights among the men--but the
families were not the sharply distinct agreements they would have been
in a tribe of higher development.
The marriage was but an agreement, terminable at any time, and the men
had but little of the feeling of parenthood, though the women had all
the fierce maternal instinct of the insects about them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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