On the second wall there was an enormous picture, full seven paces long and as high as the roof, and this one I could not grasp though I studied it for a long time. It was a place such as this plain—once there must have been many such, in the far olden times—from the center of which there sprouted up a great mushroom, like those in the Fearful Forest, but all creamy-white and so big as to shatter the imagination. I cannot say how huge it was. All our glens and valleys would be hidden in the shadow of such a mushroom. Though I looked at it until my eyes watered, and Dy-lee had to light his third flambeau, still I could not understand how such a thing could grow in the midst of the tall inclosures.
The next picture I could grasp, however. They were of ruins, like those below which we stood, and all among the ramparts and broken walls were the bodies of men. Some calamity had laid its dreadful hand on the place. I wondered if the giant mushroom had been to blame, wreaking this havoc as it grew.
And now the pictures were different. No more men slaying men, or tall majestic structures spearing the very sky with their tops, but only ruins and blackened plains, raw cliffs and far-flung wastes, the wreckage of great metal things I did not recognize, and among them a few, a very few human figures, prowling like jackal-rats furtively in the chaos. These pictures were all very ancient, with their dye-stuffs flaked and marred by time.
There was a view of a prairie, waving with orange grass, on which moved men who might have been my own tribe. Naked, with bows and hatchets, they stalked an animal something like a cave cat, which had a great mane of hair all down its back. I touched this picture and nodded to Dy-lee. He pointed to me. He knew that these were my kindred. And this picture too was older than the oldest man of the glen-folk, for it was much dimmed and discolored.
Down the walls I went, and now the pictures seemed to be less ancient, and in them I saw a weird change coming over the race of men, for they grew more hairy, and leaving the fields and pleasant glens (why, I wonder?) they appeared to take up their homes in the blighted places and in the caves of the raw red cliffs. Time passed, the pictures were brighter and less flaked, and mankind was furred as a beast, growing little by little to look like my friend, Dy-lee.
This series of pictures I pored over for a long time, going back and forth along the wall, judging the age of each in relation to the others; and I could not apprehend why, but it was true—these men were the same race, but growing shaggier in every succeeding picture. How long was the time gap between the pictures? A generation, a hundred years, a thousand? I could not tell. I went back across the floor to look at the earliest pictures, those in which men fought together. They exuded the aura of an incredible antiquity. And what of those in the other cavern? Their dyes were more brilliant, newer looking; yet the people were dressed in the queer garments that I saw in the oldest portrayals here. Did it mean that there were folk existing even now like them—folk impossible to believe in!—or simply that the dyes in their pictures were better and lasted longer than these? There were many things here that I could not understand, and I felt small and stupid and as young as the youngest pink rabbit with still-blind eyes.
Dy-lee made a speech then, indicating that I should look at the final pictures; so I left my speculation and came to him and gazed.
Here, immediately after the series in which mankind grew hairy, was a large square with dyes that were still vivid and clear, though it still seemed quite an ancient picture. It portrayed a number of Dy-lee's folk crouching amid the ruins, perhaps of this very plain above our heads. Their attitudes showed perfectly that they were afraid, for they drew back, with arms about their females and young ones. Then, in a cleared space, there stood a man of my own race, smooth-skinned and wearing the raiment of a guardian, the long fringed black fox pelts hanging from his waist and the short mantle of white hares' skins about his shoulders. He faced away from the cave folk, with his arms lifted in just such a mystical gesture as I had often seen the guardians making; and beyond him, from the edge of an especially well-limned forest, there arose a being whose every line suggested evil—evil beyond the power of words. There was no definite outline to the thing. It appeared to change slightly even while I stared at it, as though the dyes had been mixed with smoke or mist. It seemed to have horns, and then when I looked again, the horns had vanished. There were great columns of legs, and arms that hung loosely before its chest with an indescribable air of menace. Perhaps there were two sets of arms. I could not tell. It is strange to speak of a picture this way, for after all it was but dyes of many shades laid upon rock; but all I could recall definitely about the evil being, when I had turned away, was that its color was that of a dead fish's belly, and that from its amorphous head there blazed out two terrible eyes of purest lambent flame.