"It's tragic how one little taboo can hold a race back," I went on. "You've seen how keenly intelligent they are. If that taboo hadn't plagued them for hundreds of years they'd be truly civilized by now."
"I'm afraid I don't understand," Kallatah said. "What do you mean by a pattern of starvation."
"Those lizards eat the natives out of house and home," I told her. "Literally—and it's horrible. When we come to the village you'll see what emaciated skeletons the women and children are. The lizards are so sacred they can't be killed off without angering the mountain."
It was then that Kallatah surprised me. She gave a low whistle.
"You mean that tribal law has decreed that?"
"Precisely. They breed fast and eat voraciously. You can't have agriculture and the storage of fruits and grains—any kind of stable handicraft culture even—with vicious tyrants like that on every patch of cultivated land. By rough estimate those beasts consume millions of tons of food a year. Even the small animal life is vanishing."
"And they don't dare kill one," Kallatah said. "It sounds insane."
"All primitive fear taboos are insane," I told her. "They're symptoms of the stark lunacy which possesses the human mind before it gets hold of the tools it needs to grasp the real nature of the physical world. Even when it gets such tools," I qualified, "a society can be psychotic in a more complex way. All societies are probably psychotic in one way or the other, but that's another story entirely."
"But the adult males seem well fed," Kallatah said, her eyes on the trail ahead. "How could starved children grow up into such robust-looking adults?"
"Deprivation has left its marks," I told her. "You've got to remember that only the strongest survive where the infant mortality skyrockets the way it does here. And those that do reach manhood have bad teeth, poor digestion—all kinds of psychosomatic ills. What you are seeing here is the warrior caste strutting its might. A warrior caste will always find a way to eat."