They stepped it: just on fifty yards long, indefinitely wide, running out into little bays, here and there tailing off so that it was impossible to discover any definite edge, sinking away out of sight like a dream.
The sun was blazing hot and the top of the mud dry. In places they went down upon their hands and knees, peering; but really one saw most standing a little way off, with one’s head bent, eyeing it sideways.
It was in this way that Rhoda found It—Him!
“Look—look! Oh, I say—there’s something.... A thing—an animal! No—no—a—a——”
“Sabre-toothed tiger!” The boy’s wild shriek of triumph showed how he had hugged that old conjecture.
He came running, but until he got his head at exactly the same slant as hers he could see nothing, and was furiously petulant.
“Idiot! Silly fool!—nothing but a bough. You——” A lucky angle, and, “Oh, I say, by Jove! I’ve got it now! A man—a man!”
“A monkey—a great ape; there were no men, then, with ‘It.’” There, it seemed, she conceded him his tiger. “A little nearer—now again, there!”
They crept towards it. It was clear enough at a little distance; but nearer, what with the blazing sun and the queer incandescent lights on the mud, they found difficulty in exactly placing it. At last they had it, found themselves immediately over it; were able, kneeling side by side, to gaze down at the strange, age-old figure, lying huddled together, face forward.
It was not more than a couple of feet down; the semitransparent mud must have been silting over it for years and years: silted away again through centuries. And all for them—just for them. What a thought!