Another few minutes while we sat at the cabin windows. The giant reptiles went down into defeat. The archaic mammals flourished and rose into the higher mammals. The lemurs were here. And then the anthropoids. Apes of pseudo-human form skulking in these lush jungles.
The stage was set for man.
I saw all life here driven away into defeat with a glacial sweep of ice coming down. It enveloped the aero for an instant. We must have been within it—glaciers over us with our phantom vehicle speeding through them.
The ice age passed. The land and the sea sprang once more into shadowy form. The gray phantom jungles were here again. The living things, driven elsewhere, came back. The giant mammals like all the giants were losing the battle. The smaller creatures were surviving. The ice came again, and passed. And again. Vast climate changes. Was the axis of the earth altering in its inclination? I think so.
The ice ages passed. The apelike man had been roaming Java for nearly half a million years now. Roaming, and spreading.
Two hundred thousand years and, a little less apelike, the Heidelberg man was wandering throughout Europe—and Asia perhaps. The Piltdown men flourished and fell and left their record in England and Europe. I wondered if here in this Space of New York City there could have been men like apes in those ages. We did not stop; there is no one to say.
The glaciers withdrew. The Neanderthal race gave way to higher forms. The Cro-Magnons struggled with their primitive thinking.
Reason had come. Man—true mankind—was upon the earth at last. His earth!
He held it now, rising against environment and against all the efforts of the beast to hold him down!
The Indian at the dials said abruptly: "25,000 B.C."