he heights where the Cave Folk had been dwelling, up along
the beach from which the rafts had just escaped, in countless
ravening, snapping swarms, poured hyenas by the myriad--huge hyenas,
bigger than the mightiest timber wolves, their deep-jowled heads
carried close to the ground. It was clear in a moment that they were
mad with hunger, driven by nothing but their own raging appetites.
They fled from nothing, but some of them stopped, in struggling
masses, to devour the bodies of the beasts which they found slain,
while the rest poured on insatiably, to pull down by sheer weight of
numbers and the might of their bone-crushing jaws the mightiest of the
monsters which fled before them. Here and there a mammoth cow,
maddened by the slaughter of her calf, or an old rhinoceros bull,
indignant at being hunted by such vermin, would turn and run amuck
through the mass, stamping them out by the hundred. But this made no
impression at all, either upon their numbers or the rage of their
hunger, and in a few minutes the colossus, its feet half eaten off,
would come crashing down, to be swarmed over and disappear like a fat
grub in an ant-heap. Here and there, too, a mammoth, more sagacious
than its fellows, would wade out belly deep into the water--upon
finding its escape cut off--and stand there plucking its foes one by
one from the shore to trample them under its feet, screaming shrill
triumph.

Grom turned with a deep breath from the unspeakable spectacle, looked
across to the green line of the opposite shore, and thanked his
unknown gods that it was so far off. With that great river rolling its
flood between, he thought the Tribe might rest secure from these
fiends and once more build up its fortunes.

CHAPTER XIV

THE LAKE OF LONG SLEEP

Driven from their home beside the Bitter Water by the great
migration of the beasts, the Tribe of the Cave Folk, diminished in
numbers and stricken in spirit, had escaped on rafts across the
broad river-estuary which washed the northern border of their
domain. There they had found a breathing-space, but it had proved a
perilous one. The whole region north of the estuary was little
better than a steaming swamp, infested with poisonous snakes and
insects, and with strange monsters, survivals from a still earlier
age, whose ferocity drove the Cave Folk back to their ancestral life
in the tree-tops. Under these conditions it was all but impossible
to keep alight the sacred fires--a