Lest it should fade from their minds, there were days set apart for renewal of the vow, for public, ceremonial repetition of the creed and doctrine of ignorance; and, with the Ruin an ever-present memory to the remnant of humanity, the tendency was to interpret the Law with all strictness—there were devotees and fanatics who watched with a mingling of animal fear and religious hate for signs of relapse and backsliding. Denunciation was of all things dreaded; and outspoken regret for a world that had passed had more than once been pretext for denunciation. To dwell in speech on the doings of that world might be interpreted—had been interpreted—as a hankering after the Thing Forbidden, a desire to revive the Accursed.... Hence the parrying of questions, the barrier of protective silence which the newcomer broke through with difficulty. * * * * * It took more than a day for Theodore to understand his new world and its meaning, to grasp its social system and civil and religious polity; but at the end of one day he knew roughly the conditions in which he was destined to live out the rest of his life. Not that, in the beginning, he admitted that so he must live; it was long—many years—before he resigned himself to the knowledge that his limits, till death released him, were the narrow limits of his tribe. For years he held secretly—but none the less fast—to the hope of a civilization that must one day reveal itself, advance and overwhelm his barbarians. For years he strained his eyes for the coming of its pioneers, its saviours; it was long—very long—before he gave up his hopes and faced the certainty that, if the world he had known continued to exist, it existed too feebly and too far away to stretch out to himself and his surroundings. There were times when the longing for it flared and burned in him, and he sought desperately for traces of the world he had known—running hither and thither in search of it. Under pretext of a hunting expedition he would absent himself from the tribe, and trespass—often at the imminent risk of death—on the territory of alien communities; returning, after days, no nearer to his goal and no wiser for his stealthy prowlings. The life of alien communities, the prospect revealed from strange hills, was, to all intents and purposes, the life and outlook of his tribe.... He would question the occasional stranger from a distant village, in the hope of at least a word, a rumour—a rumour that might give guidance for further and more hopeful search. But those who came from distant villages spoke only of villages more distant; of other hunting-grounds, of other tribal feuds, of other long stretches of ruin.... The world, so far as it came within his ken, was cut to one pattern, the pattern of a cowed and brutalized man, who bent his face to the stubborn ground and forgot the cunning of his fathers. XIX