Copyright, 1914, by
Doubleday, Page & Company

All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian

Copyright, 1914, by the
Frank A. Munsey Co.

CONTENTS

CHAPTERPAGE
[Introduction][ix]
[I.] The Link[3]
[II.] The Axemen[25]
[III.]The Bowmen[48]
[IV.]The Clansmen[63]
[V.] The Boatmen[81]
[VI.] The Sowers[101]
[VII.] The Tamers[121]
[VIII.] The Deluge[145]
[IX.] The Kitchen-Middenites[165]
[X.] The Lake-Dwellers[191]
[XI.] The Armourers[212]
[XII.] The Sailors[237]
[XIII.] The Hercynian Forest[271]
[XIV.]Alesia and the End[298]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[“His eyes were flaming, and his teeth shone white....We were alone to fight it out”][Frontispiece]
FACING PAGE
[“With long poles thrust to the bottom, we guided the boats here and there about the shallow waters”][90]
[“I, too, would seek to learn what might be done to make the wind our servant”][246]
[“I am weakening and dying. The Valkyrie are circling in the sky”][324]

INTRODUCTION

A waste of waters heaved sullenly beneath a dismal canopy. Thin, slimy masses floated here and there about the shallows of a little cove or clung to its sodden beach. The cove led into a bay, which opened, in its turn, upon a vast and soundless sea. But a single reach of land, gray, flat, and lifeless and encircling partially the cove, was all of earth there was in sight.

Close above and all about the huge and silent mystery and extending outward far into space, was a steaming world of vapour, condensed into enormous clouds beyond, an enshrouding curtain over all beneath. And ever this was smitten fiercely by the distant sun, whose rays could not yet fairly pierce the tremendous depths, yet shone through wanly here and there upon the sombre scheme, sombre in its awful lifelessness and silence, but with a promise, indefinable and yet assured, of life and light to come in the tremendous future.