That night, when every one was asleep, he took some hot coals from the fire before the cave, and carrying these coals in the clay bowl, he made a new fire at a hiding place he knew of among the rocks. All night he sat beside the fire, watching it, heaping on fresh wood to keep it blazing hot. In the morning, very sleepy and tired, he took the bowl out of the fire with a crooked stick, cooled, washed and dried it, and filling it with water, carried it proudly to his mother.
At first she would have nothing to do with it, because the first one had been such a failure, but after awhile, when she saw that the water did not soften it, and that it had such a pretty red colour, she was very much pleased, and called Tor's father and some of the others to come and look at it.
They did not see much use in it at first, since the nut shells they used for carrying water they thought quite good enough. They did, however, like the pretty red colour of the pottery, and Tor's mother was so proud of the bowl that she kept it in the cave, and would not let any one drink out of it but herself.
Soon Tor found that he could make much larger bowls and jars out of the smooth soft clay, and after a time, the cave people used these jars for storing nuts, or roots, or berries, when they had more than they needed at the moment. But still the thought had not occurred to them to store away food for use during the winter. Even in the coldest weather, they were able to kill animals, and fish, and they supposed they would always be able to do so.
Tor also made queer little figures, out of the clay, and red beads, with holes through them, which the women strung on bits of leather, or sinew, and used for ornaments, about their necks. And because in their simple language, Ad was the word for earth, or clay, they began to call the clay worker Tor-Ad, instead of just Tor.
It took the cave dwellers many many hundreds of years to learn how to ornament the bowls and jars they made with pictures and patterns in colours, and a much longer time, to find out a way of making them smooth and round by whirling them about on a flat wheel and pressing their fingers, or a wooden tool, against them as they turned. We must remember that the minds of the first men grew very slowly, and it often took them a very long time to think out what seem to us very simple ideas indeed. Even now, although many thousands of years had passed, since the days of Adh, they knew nothing at all about metals; their weapons and tools were made of stone, but as time went on, they made them better and better, so that among the relics we find of the later stone age are axes, beautifully polished and strong and sharp enough to be used in working wood, knives, with keen edges, spear and arrow heads, scrapers, for scraping the hair from hides in making leather, and even such fine things as razors, all made of stone. Some of the tribes during the latter part of the stone age were wonderful workers in both wood and stone. With tools of the very hardest flint they cut softer stones into great building blocks, built palaces and temples, and monuments of all sorts, some of which are found even to-day, buried in the sand or earth, and well preserved in spite of their great age. Whenever men of science dig up the ruins of these ancient villages and towns, they find weapons of flint and bone, the ashes of fires, and many pieces of broken pottery, showing that the use of fire, the making of stone implements, and the burning of clay pottery, were the first three great steps taken by Man in his progress toward what we call civilisation.
CHAPTER XII
HOW RA-NA SAVED HIS PEOPLE