A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

They hardly knew the way, but they also knew no fear. After they had left the haunted sand plateau, hurrying from it with averted faces, fearing lest the long arms of Lagk might reach out from the lake and pull them back to himself in the cold water; after they had left it and entered the shielding woods, moving with the acceleration of anticipation through the twilight day to the distant open valleys, to the rivers and the long pale copses of shinta bushes, their hearts beat high.

Their love enfolded them like a shining light that threw on all things its own radiance, and their enlaced bodies chasing through the solitudes seemed a tantalizing replacement, in the dim distant America of the Prehistorics, of some Hellenic fancy. The horse, mute companion and mute mourner, for Lagk possessed the singular traumeristic power over animals which is the sixth sense in some peculiar natures, had not followed them. Nor did they care. Even his intrusion spoiled their joy; so transcendental, by some choice accident of nature, had life become in these savage waifs, floating on the doorway of history, and yet thus prefiguring, before the dawn of records, the immutability of love.

And thus moving southward they discovered at length that they were skirting the foot hills of a range of mountains which placed its high barrier—a barrier that increased daily—between them and the sea. They did not notice that an insensible divergence, accentuated at times by sharper deflections to the east, was widening their distance from the ocean. They were anxious to find some path across the towering peaks, some defile of approach to the coast, but day by day the inexorable mountains seemed to raise their restraining hands and deny escape. The ranges multiplied. Lhatto and Ogga entered a region of manifold complexity, the Sierras developed about them in bewildering frequency, and the growth of the forests became more dense.

Their confusion increased; the valley which had, like a broad avenue of transit, led them on, now was lost in a series of parallel or divergent ravines. Their path, marked before, in monumental style, by the steep and bare crests of the cordilleras, was now hopelessly disconcerted by the intricacy and hardships of the new paths, and these children of nature, taught only in the rough methods of aboriginal calculation and instinct, slowly lost heart in the midst of a vast topographical difficulty. They could not surmount the intermediate ranges and push westward. The task dismayed them. The small game which Ogga had contrived to take, was becoming more scarce, the rivers disappeared and the asperity and disturbed condition of the ground offered in places almost insurmountable obstacles to their advance. In this dilemma, beginning to feel a strange loneliness and dread, a certain nervous irresolution, characteristic of the aboriginal mind, they began to elude the problem they could not determine, by following the most easy path, fleeing like children from an omnipresent danger along simple and self-indulgent ways.

And so it came to pass that they hastened into lower levels, traversing country that became more parched, more desolate and bare.

The herbage alone accompanied them; the trees already halted as if unable or fearful to enter the lowlands, and desert the protecting shadows and nutritious soil of the hills. The ground was baked and a saline efflorescence hid the surface with a dazzling crust. The sun devoured them with its flagrant power, water almost disappeared, and what they drank acted with terrifying distress and inscrutable pains. They had indeed entered a desert charged with all the powers of annihilation, itself a sepulchre, remote and pitiless. Over it hung the oppression of irrespirable volumes of air quivering with heat, and from it came the infiltrating currents of minute alkaline dust, stirred into invisible clouds by the accidental winds, winds that came from the hot fires of a furnace, and bore with them the pang of flames.

The pair had grown thin and haggard and hollow eyed, despairing with a gaunt terror that stalked behind them, holding each other’s hands and blind to prudence or reprieve, still driving on, believing it would pass, even as they saw miraged before them a distant limit, verdant, shadowy, with mirrors of water and bending and rising grasses.

The moment of unreason had come, their brains pierced by the awful heat lost the tottering balance of sanity, and their vagabond footsteps carried them wherever the illusions of their blinded eyes led. But still linked by the potent power of their affection, in this last sad travesty of union, they kept their hands closed together.

It was the end of day. Lhatto and Ogga had fallen on the caustic desert almost unconscious. The clouds had robbed the sun during the last hours of its persecuting zeal, of something of its power. They gathered still more closely as the light died out in the sky, and the momentary assuagement of the heat restored the lovers to temporary reason and self possession.

It was Lhatto, looking still with the tenderness of sympathy upon the sufferings of Ogga, his own eyes growing brighter in the supervening moments of restoration, who spoke, and her voice came as a whisper, the inarticulate breath of death.