ir jars. In
the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a
flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one's throat
and nostrils and held it on one's breath, caught the stream in a scale
of natural intervals.

IV

THEA had a superstitious feeling about the potsherds, and liked better
to leave them in the dwellings where she found them. If she took a few
bits back to her own lodge and hid them under the blankets, she did it
guiltily, as if she were being watched. She was a guest in these houses,
and ought to behave as such. Nearly every afternoon she went to the
chambers which contained the most interesting fragments of pottery, sat
and looked at them for a while. Some of them were beautifully decorated.
This care, expended upon vessels that could not hold food or water any
better for the additional labor put upon them, made her heart go out to
those ancient potters. They had not only expressed their desire, but
they had expressed it as beautifully as they could. Food, fire, water,
and something else--even here, in this crack in the world, so far back
in the night of the past! Down here at the beginning that painful thing
was already stirring; the seed of sorrow, and of so much delight.

There were jars done in a delicate overlay, like pine cones; and there
were many patterns in a low relief, like basket-work. Some of the
pottery was decorated in color, red and brown, black and white, in
graceful geometrical patterns. One day, on a fragment of a shallow bowl,
she found a crested serpent's head, painted in red on terra-cotta. Again
she found half a bowl with a broad band of white cliff-houses painted on
a black ground. They were scarcely conventionalized at all; there they
were in the black border, just as they stood in the rock before her. It
brought her centuries nearer to these people to find that they saw their
houses exactly as she saw them.

Yes, Ray Kennedy was right. All these things made one feel that one
ought to do one's best, and help to fulfill some desire of the dust that
slept there. A dream had been dreamed there long ago, in the night of
ages, and the wind had whispered some promise to the sadness of the
savage. In their own way, those people had felt the beginnings of what
was to come. These potsherds were like fetters that bound one to a long
chain of human endeavor.

Not only did the world seem older and richer to Thea now, but she
herself seemed old