"She held on to my knees and looked up at my face, a mass of waist-long auburn hair now loose upon her back. And she was beautiful—her hair reflecting firelight from flambeaux, deeply auburn, her eyes the blue of glacier ice—a classic face, exquisite, but no tenderness as we know it. Only passion.
"Quickly she got to her feet, her arms locking me close against her splendid breasts, an Amazon who worshiped only strength, which I was glad I had, for those above us now were coming down the sheer walls of the amphitheater like so many chamois, bringing their flambeaux with them. Let me repeat—big fellows! Six-six on the average, and running upward of two-thirty, chests like bulls. And so damned agile! To see them scamper down that precipice toward me, depending on the quickness of their feet where I would certainly have found my hands not adequate, depressed me. I had the warclub and of course my .38, but if they meant to take me, neither was enough."
Instead, they lined up on both sides of him, then waiting while the woman motioned him to follow her, and began to lead the way. So at last they moved off in that strange procession, guided by flambeaux through the night, much as a bridal couple might move underneath an arch of swords.
"The simple act of splitting her noggin seemed to have inflamed—be damned if I'll tell it. Most natural thing in the world, I suppose, when it's the local custom. Yet it was embarrassing. And the studied indifference of our escort made it worse. How does one make love on the march, surrounded by a hundred men? For hours!"
Gradually they were descending the mountain, coming finally beneath an overhanging cliff into a narrow chasm, and there, around immense bonfires, a swarm of women and children waited—had waited, O'Hara now felt certain, throughout the long absence of their men, for all at once, silent but busier than ants, they began dragging great haunches of meat from a series of caves which were eroded deep into the stone face of the cliff, arranging them upon the fires to roast. O'Hara's woman indicated that they were to sit, and the men now ground out in the sand their smoking flambeaux and squatted beside them, silent, impassive, waiting.
Primeval, said O'Hara. There could have been nothing like it since—what were those ancient caves in France? Cro-Magnon man? The old boys who drew perfect little sketches of buffalo on the stone walls of caves? These silent giants, these women with their thick, abundant hair, the cliff and the caverns, the smell of roasting flesh, the constant scampering of fur-swaddled babies in the sand—primeval, certainly. The tribe—the clan!
Someone was chanting. It was the oldest of the men, using words that were no language that O'Hara knew, yet vaguely familiar. And as others joined in, the men's voices rich in a monotonous refrain, the women's working out a hymnlike counterpoint, O'Hara's woman arose and took him by the hands.
The chant changed now, a lament in it, a grieving for lost things, the women's voices dominating, keening, almost crystalline in iciness, like music locked within the chill stone of cathedral towers. O'Hara's woman led him toward one of the caverns, moving slowly, somberly erect. Within, deep in the gloom, a log fire smoldered. Smoke made fantastic shadows leaping on the living rock. She turned at last and stood there rigid, facing him.
Outside, the chant was changing now, a jubilating chorus of men's voices, gaining tempo until suddenly they ceased, and from the breathless silence finally a voice incredibly high, seeming incredibly remote, sang adoration.
O'Hara's woman freed his hand, then loosening a thong across her shoulders, shook herself, and stood there in the firelight nude. And the next instant she leaped at him, her hands like claws, tearing at his face and throat, driving him backward toward the entrance of the cave, back toward the clan. It was repetition of the struggle in the natural amphitheater, savage, passionate, and with O'Hara understanding now that he must master her or die. He swung his wooden club.