My two greatest handicaps in this encounter with the primitive were lack of weapons and my inability to make fire. The latter was probably the worse, since, without a knife, fire was indispensable to the fashioning of weapons.
At every rest I experimented. Duare became inoculated with the virus of the quest, and fire became our sole aim. We talked about little else and were forever experimenting with different combinations of wood and with bits of rock that we picked up along the way.
All my life I had read of primitive men making fire in various ways, and I tried them all. I blistered my hands twirling firesticks. I knocked bits of flesh off my fingers striking pieces of stone together. At last I was on the point of giving up in disgust.
"I don't believe any one ever made fire," I grumbled.
"You saw the nobargan make it," Duare reminded me.
"There's a catch in it somewhere," I insisted.
"Are you going to give up?" she asked.
"Of course not. It's like golf. Most people never learn to play it, but very few give up trying. I shall probably continue my search for fire until death overtakes me or Prometheus descends to Venus as he did to Earth."
"What is golf and who is Prometheus?" demanded Duare.
"Golf is a mental disorder and Prometheus a fable."