Beneath this ornamental roof the slender equipment of an aboriginal camp was spread. A rude crane suspended from the roof, at a point where a chimney-like opening had been made in the surplusage of leaves and boughs, supported a stone vessel, pendent from it by cords of tree fibre or coarse grass. The stone vessel was blackened by repeated exposure to the dull fires made from leaves and peat moss, and resembled the few others which, discarded and broken, seemed carefully laid aside at one corner of this well ventilated apartment. The only other noticeable furnishment of the room were the skins of foxes and bears, rankly oleaginous and discolored, thrown down around the central fire place, where were gathered in a disorderly pile a few stone axes with wooden handles, some awkwardly made bows, and a few delicately chipped blades of stone, neatly united to shafts of wood by means of a black pitch.
No walls enclosed this defective suggestion of a house, and only on one side hung a woven mat of natural fibre hideously bedaubed with red paint or iron ochre, most shockingly constrained to portray a portentous animal rising hobby-horse like on its hind and abnormally lengthened legs.
It was thirty thousand years, more or less, before the birth of Christ that a woman stood leaning against one of the four corner posts of this simple habitation at the widened and worn opening of the highland path described above, and gazed upward to the sky, in whose sapphire depths the rising sun of day had begun to form clouds, sucked up from the broad western ocean.
CHAPTER III.
Lhatto—The Woman.
Ageless woman! The beckoning centuries seem to run before her tireless energies, still stretching forward the span of her sublime motherhood, still exacting the tribute of her sons and daughters to meet the needs of History!
She becomes in retrospect the origin of human life, the vast procreative source of all civilization and all progress, and from her bosoms, clutched by the fixed hand of infancy, flows the milk that has formed the tissues of all known human annals.
Prophecy dwells upon her head, for from her proceed the nations of the earth. Poetry and Drama surround her, for she, in her evocative charm, haunts the innermost chambers of Desire, and it is her touch that lights the fires, else unseen, upon each altar of Passion, of Aspiration, of Revelry, of Joy.