We laughed, but the Professor stared at me thoughtfully.
“Alfred,” at length he solemnly began, “the Vestiges of Creation—Who knows but—”
The sentence was never finished and to this day I only dimly suspect the lurking and indefinable thought that those world-dreams of the past, with Eden placed at the North Pole, and a still more irreclaimable theory of a residual population descending from some God-made primal ancestor, confusedly rose in the Professor’s mind, and that he was groping his way to express this cryptic and impossible illusion.
No! the Professor was probably utterly stunned into dumbness, as we were made half wild with wonder by a cry from Goritz:
“SEE! Over there are the head and arm of a dead man sticking out through the sand.”
We jumped to our feet, followed with our eyes his stiffened, outstretched arm and rigid finger, and saw the chubby face of a corpse, with closed eyes, streaming black hair, pushed out from a blanket of sand, while an arm with a clenched hand was protruding from the same covering. For a moment—perhaps for several—we remained motionless, perusing the face which was so astonishingly contrasted with the lineaments of the diminutive aeronautical philosophers, and noting too the convexity of the earth covering the body, which indicated a man or woman, of an average size or a little undersized. What struck each one of us at once was the unmistakable Eskimo type, the narrow eyes, small joufflu nose, wide mouth, puffed cheeks, low forehead and coarse, straggling and profuse hair.
A little later and we had dug out of his grave the astounding figure. When it was uncovered it corroborated all our first impressions as to its Eskimo relationship, but we then detected that its construction was more slender and generally better proportioned, and the beardless face was more refinedly cut. Its dress was a yellow gown or tunic over very loose bluish trousers, and its feet were encased in roughly made loose slippers, fastened by laces or strings over the instep. The material of the dress was a woven wool. The tunic was clasped by a broad belt of the same substance, fastened by a leaden buckle; the trousers were held in at the bottom by a kind of anklet of bone and skin, and the sleeves of the tunic were similarly confined.
But perhaps it was the buckle that excited our curiosity the most, for there was engraved—not embossed—on it the same serpent and crocodile-like figure that had been seen on the gold buckle Goritz found, and over it too were the singular conventions of a branched tree encircled by a snake. Goritz compared his belt and buckle with it and was convinced of their identical interpretation. Nothing else was found. We detected no pockets of any sort in the clothing—Yes, there was something else, from under the body we dug up spectacle-like yellow glasses.
It was clear that the creature had been overwhelmed in a sandstorm, but it was not clear why he should have been alone and apparently wandering a long way from his home and companions. The incident incited us to greater haste, and when we had replenished our water skins, we resumed the exhausting tramp. The tree line became increasingly plainer to view, and it offered a goal and prize now that dissipated our fatigue and roused our ambition. We had not discussed the Eskimo waif but I guess through all of our minds slowly or quickly filtered the conviction that he represented a lower slave or working group; that we were soon to break into a world of industry and achievement, founded on social distinctions; that indeed up here in Krocker Land flourished perhaps an oldtime class regime with knowledge and power confined to a priestly or imperial class, like Egypt, like Mexico, like Peru.
