All this Rog knew, although he had never seen metal before, or glass, or heard of a floor. But somehow he felt more at home in here than he did in the cave with Sarak and Monah. With perfect confidence he went to the staircase and climbed to the first floor.
A low, shining fence leading from the stairway made it plain that he was to follow inside it and view each exhibit as he went. Rog went to the first table, and within five minutes he was plunged into a maze of conjectures and mysteries that made his aboriginal brain ache.
The first table bore a number of short groups of symbols, completely lost on him. There were flowing, cursive characters; then a line of wedge-shaped pictures; line after line of characters differing only slightly; and finally, at the very bottom, something he could understand.
There was pictured a figure that brought a quick smile of apprehension to Rog's face—an old man, bowed with age. Beside him was a young child, enclosed in a red circle that set him off from the old man. A word leaped to his lips.... Not, perhaps, the word that the artist had intended, but close enough.
"Beginning!" was the thought that came from his lips.
After that the messages in the words and pictures made more sense to him. Stupefied, trembling with excitement at this thing that was happening to him, he went on and on.
He ignored the symbols as mere decorations, and read the pictures, hurrying from one group to the next. He stared long and amazed at amazingly life-like representations of the life of a tribe such as his own. The men and women even looked like his did—short, squat, hairy. The scenes showed them killing great animals somewhat similar to the ones on whose meat they lived, portrayed them chipping flint holes, and doing the other dozens of things life demanded of them.
But as he went on the life changed.
From cave-houses the migration was to peculiar dwellings of poles and boughs, making box-like affairs in which men and women lived. The tribe-folk, even, changed. They grew more upright and less hairy, and their faces looked something like the reflection that stared back at Rog from quiet forest pools.