* * *
Eric Nelson, stunned and incredulous, felt the strong vibration of thought die away in his mind. He stepped back in awe from between the platinum pillars, with Tark and Nsharra.
"Good Lord!" Nelson husked. "That incredible story — it means that the myth of the Cavern of Creation is true!
Yes, it was true, that fantastic legend to which he had not given even second thought, at which even the Humanites had scoffed!
* * *
Out of this cavern — this cavern that was a buried star-ship of long ago— had come the first intelligence on Earth! Intelligence that had embodied itself in the five great clans of which man was but one.
"The Clans and men were really equal, from the first!" he whispered. "In Brotherhood from the first! And then some of the human Clan, leaving this valley and spreading out over Earth—"
The riddle that had mystified anthropologists, the riddle of man's enigmatic origin in Central Asia, was solved at last. Long ago ancient and alien beings whose physical nature he might never know had transferred their minds into the bodies of the five species of Earthly animals. Had done that with machines which still survived, one of which Kree had used so weirdly upon himself!
And of the five Clans originally in this valley, it was the man-Clan that had gone out and subdued the rest of the wild earth and its animals, had made itself tyrannical master of the unthinking brutes outside the valley.
And this valley L'Lan, where the five clans were still equal in intelligence and where the Brotherhood still held true, had been forgotten by the conquering human hosts in the outer world! Nelson felt shaken by the revelation. He looked with widened eyes around the vast gloom, the towering platinum machines.