By this time the men had lain down to sleep, and in the darkness strange cries were heard from the forest. The roar of the lion, mingled with the howling of the wolves and the shrill laugh of the hyænas, told that they had come down to feed on the remains of the tiger. But none of these animals ventured near the glowing fire at the mouth of the cavern, behind which the men slept in security till the sun was high in the heavens. Then all was astir again, for weapons had been broken in the fight, and some of the men sitting on the ground outside the cave placed one flint between their knees, and striking another sharply against it drove off splinters, leaving a pointed end and cutting edge. They spoiled many before they made one to their liking, and the entrance to the cave was strewn with splintered fragments and spoilt flints, but at last several useful stones were ready. Meanwhile another man, taking his rude stone axe, set to work to hew branches from the trees to form handles, while another, choosing a piece remaining of the body of the stag, tore a sinew from the thigh, and threading it through the large eye of the bone needle, stitched the tiger's skin roughly together into a garment.
"This, then," said the magician to himself, "is how ancient man lived in the summer-time, but how would he fare when winter came?" As he mused the scene gradually changed. The glaciers crept far lower down the valleys, and the hills, and even the lower ground, lay thick in snow. The hippopotamus had wandered away southward to warmer climes, as animals now migrate over the continent of America in winter, and with him had gone the lion, the southern elephant, and other summer visitors. In their place large herds of reindeer and shaggy oxen had come down from the north and were spread over the plains, scraping away the snow with their feet to feed on the grass beneath. The mammoth, too, or hairy elephant, of the same extinct species as those which have been found frozen in solid ice under a sandbank in Siberia, had come down to feed, accompanied by the woolly rhinoceros; and scattered over the hills were the curious horned musk-sheep, which have long ago disappeared off the face of the earth. Still, bitterly cold as it was, the hunter clad in his wild-beast skin came out from time to time to chase the mammoth, the reindeer, and the oxen for food, and cut wood in the forest to feed the cavern fires.
This time the magician's thoughts wandered down to the south-west of France, where, on the banks of a river in that part now called the Dordogne, a number of caves not far from each other formed the home of savage man. Here he saw many new things, for the men used arrows of deer-horn and of wood pointed with flint, and with these they shot the birds, which were hovering near in hopes of finding food during the bitter weather. By the side of the river a man was throwing a small dart of deer-horn fastened to a cord of sinews, with which from time to time he speared a large fish and drew it to the bank.
Fig. 79.
Mammoth engraved on ivory by Palæolithic man.
But the most curious sight of all, among such a rude people, was a man sitting by the glowing fire at the mouth of one of the caves scratching a piece of reindeer horn with a pointed flint, while the children gathered round him to watch his work. What was he doing? See! gradually the rude scratches began to take shape, and two reindeer fighting together could be recognised upon the horn handle. This he laid carefully aside, and taking a piece of ivory, part of the tusk of a mammoth, he worked away slowly and carefully till the children grew tired of watching and went off to play behind the fire. Then the magician, glancing over his shoulder, saw a true figure of the mammoth scratched upon the ivory, his hairy skin, long mane, and up-curved tusks distinguishing him from all elephants living now. "Ah," exclaimed the magician aloud, "that is the drawing on ivory found in the cave of La Madeleine in Dordogne, proving that man existed ages ago, and even knew how to draw figures, at a time when the mammoth, or hairy elephant, long since extinct, was still living on the earth!"
With these words he started from his reverie, and knew that he had been dreaming of Palæolithic man who, with his tools of rough flints, had lived in Europe so long ago that his date cannot be fixed by years, or centuries, or even thousands of years. Only this is known, that, since he lived, the mammoth, the sabre-toothed tiger, the cave-bear, the woolly rhinoceros, the cave-hyæna, the musk-sheep, and many other animals have died out from off the face of the earth; the hippopotamus and the lion have left Europe and retired to Africa, and the sea has flowed in where land once was, cutting off Great Britain and Ireland from the continent.
How long all these changes were in taking place no one knows. When the magician drifted back again into his dream the land had long been desolate, and the hyænas, which had always taken possession of the caves whenever the men deserted them for awhile, had now been undisturbed for a long time, and had left on the floor of the cave gnawed skulls and bones, and jaws of animals, more or less scored with the marks of their teeth, and these had become buried in a thick layer of earth. The magician knew that these teeth marks had been made by hyænas, both because living hyænas leave exactly such marks on bones in the present day, and because the hyæna bones alone were not gnawed, showing that no animals preyed upon their flesh. He knew too that the hyænas had been there long after man had ceased to use the caves, because no flint tools were found among the bones. But now the age of hyænas, too, was past and gone, and the caves had been left so long undisturbed that in many of them the water dripping from the roof had left film after film of carbonate of lime upon the floor, which as the centuries went by became a layer of stalagmite many feet thick, sealing down the secrets of the past.