As they turn away in frightened dismay, the sunlight flashes from their tawny necks, their girdled arms and ankles, and from the bunched tresses of their dark hair, flashes from gold. They are the gold ornaments formed in naive and curious ways which these early children of the earth filched from the stream beds, that soon, before their gaze, from shore to shore, will be wedged tight with black dikes of rock, holding down the sealed bonanzas, until in Time’s own time the life of a later day shall search the primeval sands again, and dress its beauty too with the same entrancing glitter.
The picture disappears, but we are standing where the Calaveras Skull, the discovery of human implements beneath the Table Mountains of California have proven that Man was a witness of these geognostic changes in the great internal valley of that state.
Shall we pursue the western trail of men’s birth, bending our eyes upon the mysterious regions of southeastern Asia, where perhaps a too inquisitive scrutiny will reveal the very beginnings of the human tribe?
We have no reason to go further. We have observed the changing aspect of man from the edges of the ice sheet in western Europe and eastern North America, his ameliorated habits in the loess valley of the Mississippi and Missouri. In the far west where the contemporaneous climatic conditions were milder, or even conjoined with phases that were semi-tropic we have found him, at the same time that farther north, and pervasively to the east, frigid or boreal aspects prevailed.
It is with the story of Love, told of these strange and remote periods of Time, that we are now concerned, and we place the Woman of the Ice Age far in the West, somewhere not exposed to the extreme arctic vicissitudes of a glacial imprisonment, although not quite beyond the rumors and tokens of its partial survival, nor quite within the lassitudes of a southern and perennial summer, but at a possible point of such picturesque contrasts, of such organic fascination, of such compromises in physical expression, that we may discern in her the elements of poetry, elements born of her response to Nature’s vitality and variousness, and with them elements of passion born of her inheritance of blood instincts, which had formed in her ancestors, under the same diversity of natural features. In Her, prehistoric and primal, the type of all women since, we shall find the instinct of love, evincing its supremacy over her nature, holding her before the mirror of her own vanity, rousing her to the extremest verge of her emotional design and activity, nursing her on the breast of its satisfaction, and filling her life with the currents of its amorous expectations.
CHAPTER II.
The Place.
It was a region of splendid contrasts. A continental zone which presented in the wide range of its mere longitudinal extent a succession of physical features that were opposite and embraced a variety of climate, that by reason of meteorological diversity had carved and dressed those physical features into a series of natural wonders.