But I came from the east! If there were such beings in that direction, would I not know it? I tried to tell him this, showing that I came from there; very well, said he in signs, so did the guardians, and I was obviously a relative, a son perhaps, or at least a member of the tribe of the guardians. Yes, I agreed, but....
I gave it up. Could I still be confused by this roof that shut out the sun? Hastily I looked at the last of the pictures, which were scenes of hunting and domesticity, with one more guardian at the end, though not with one of The Nameless; then I signed to him that we should leave the place. He scrambled up to the opening and I followed, the daylight from the high entrance hole of the inclosure above striking my eyes sharply after the torch's flickering gleam. The dogwolves roused themselves and nosed our hands as we came out among the broken stones.
"There!" I said, showing him the west; and, "There!" said he, in his own language, thrusting a dark furry finger eastward. Could we be talking of different things? No, there had been the guardian and the changing figure of horror.
The guardian?
What had a guardian been doing here? And the one picture had been old, but the other fairly recent, or I knew nothing of the manner in which dyes fade with age!
These hairy folk had seen guardians, not once in the dim past, but evidently often, and recently; had not my friend signed to me that there was a place of meeting, out on the blackened plain? No wonder that Dy-lee and his folk, while charmed with my singing and interested in me, had shown no overwhelming wonder. So the guardians knew, had perhaps always known, that here in the ruins and the raw red cliffs there lived another race of men!
I sat down on a flat rock and puzzled the matter over, beginning with what I conceived the early history of these people—of both our peoples—to have been. A terrible killing among men, with many strange weapons that spread slaughter wholesale, resulting in a leveling of their huge structures and a splitting of the race into two parts, one remaining in places like this, the other going into the distant glens and plains. The folk of the ruins gradually becoming hairy—could it be because nature saw they needed protection for their tender flesh, living as they did in caves? The thought made me open my eyes with my own cleverness! Then the discarding of weapons and the taming of the dogwolves. I wondered if they had thrown away all weapons, or whether they had some secret slaying tool for their defense? Or a magic ointment to rub on their bodies? Or what?
To this point it all seemed clear, and while it was a thing to churn the imagination, still it was a plain and possible happening, not destroying any concepts or deepsunk training of my youth; because no man of my folk knew whence we had come, or anything of our history save that it had always been, so far as our elders knew, the same as it is now: easy and pleasant, with no enemies save the beasts of prey, and a mate for every man and woman.
But then came the problem of the guardians. These folk knew them too. They passed between us, it was clear, living with us of the glens but visiting these of the caverns. I tried Dy-lee with a question: did he know there were many, many more like me, living beyond the Fearful Forest? I made a mark in the gritty dirt with my knife point, showed him that it stood for myself, then made a great number of similar marks beside it and pointed east. He understood. He could scarcely believe at first, but after a period of astonished grunts and reassurances, he believed. There were many like me, over yonder to the east.