The ground under the canopy was covered with the tiny leaves that had shattered off through countless years. This carpet was several inches thick, with dry, newly shattered leaves on top, and, below these, leaves in various stages of disintegration, down to the bottom layer of powdered leaf-mould. To stand erect and try to push one’s way into this thicket would be as useless as attempting to forge through a barbed-wire entanglement. But underneath the branches the ground was clean, and no limbs grew from the sturdy trunks of the bushes lower than a foot from the earth. And as the limbs had a decided upward trend, like the limbs of a cypress tree, there was ample opportunity for one to crawl on hands and knees for any distance that he might choose. Of course now and then close-growing bushes would balk him, but there always would be a way around. To travel through the thicket depended entirely on one’s powers of endurance in reverting to the mode of going calling employed by his simian precursors. To hack a trail through was a task for an army of axemen. The pilgrims seated themselves on the ground and looked expectantly at each other. “What do you think of it, Doctor?” asked Charmian. “I think,” replied Shonto, “that we’d better go back.” “Honestly?” “Honestly.” For a long time Charmian was thoughtful, a little pucker between her eyebrows. Then she resolutely shook her head, and her upper lip turned up a trifle in her characteristic smile. “No, we’ve set our hands to the plough,” she said. “‘Go back’ is not in my lexicon.” “I think,” Shonto returned, “that a half-hour or so of crawling on all fours under that tangle of branches will convince the two of us that we’ve never known fatigue before.” “Which doesn’t mean that you’re not game, of course.” “I am thinking more of you than of myself,” he told her. “Don’t do that,” she requested. “I think I’ve shown that I’m pretty tough. And I’m of the opinion, Doctor, that I shall crawl better than you will. I have less weight to push along, and I’m somewhat of a tumbler, though I guess I’ve never told you. I can turn handsprings, do the cartwheel, and throw flip-flops forward and backward. My life has not been entirely wasted, you see. Besides all that, women are more primitive than men, both mentally and physically. I imagine that, ’way back in the misty ages when we were learning to pick up a club to defend ourselves instead of biting altogether, man was walking erect a long time before the female of the species stood up and tried the new fad. Don’t you know that a woman can sit down on the floor with more comfort than a man? You birds are over-civilized, and that’s what’s the matter with the world. Are you ready? Let’s go!” In an hour Dr. Inman Shonto was ready to admit that her logic was sound. “You go back farther than primitive man,” he puffed, as he lumbered along after her. “You go back to when we were saurians wallowing in the slime and the seaweed. You’re a lizard.”