eware." He recognized the meaning of
these words without placing in his mind their origins in some tongue he
knew. He knit his sun-bleached brows and concentrated harder, striving
to wrest from that curious, murmuring whisper some hint of its original
root. He had a smattering of more tongues than he could have counted
offhand, and it was hard to place these scattered words among any one
speech.

But the word "Thag" had a sound like that of the very ancient dryland
tongue, which upon Mars is considered at once the oldest and the most
uncouth of all the planet's languages. And with that clue to guide him
he presently began to catch other syllables which were remotely like
syllables from the dryland speech. They were almost unrecognizable, far,
far more ancient than the very oldest versions of the tongue he had ever
heard repeated, almost primitive in their crudity and simplicity. And
for a moment the sheerest awe came over him, as he realized the
significance of what he listened to.

* * * * *

The dryland race today is a handful of semi-brutes, degenerate from the
ages of past time when they were a mighty people at the apex of an
almost forgotten glory. That day is millions of years gone now, too far
in the past to have record save in the vaguest folklore. Yet here was a
people who spoke the rudiments of that race's tongue as it must have
been spoken in the race's dim beginnings, perhaps a million years
earlier even than that immemorial time of their triumph. The reeling of
millenniums set Smith's mind awhirl with the effort at compassing their
span.

There was another connotation in the speaking of that tongue by these
timid bush-dwellers, too. It must mean that the forgotten wizard king,
Illar, had peopled his sinister, twilight land with the ancestors of
today's dryland dwellers. If they shared the same tongue they must share
the same lineage. And humanity's remorseless adaptability had done the
rest.

It had been no kinder here than in the outside world, where the ancient
plains-men who had roamed Mars' green prairies had dwindled with their
dying plains, degenerating at last into a shrunken, leather-skinned
bestiality. For here that same race root had declined into these tiny,
slinking creatures with their dusky skins and great, staring eyes and
their voices that never rose above a whisper. What tragedies must lie
behind that gradual degeneration!

All about him the whispers s