ng
of one that uttered, explosively and regularly, with inflection that
rose and fell, "A-bang, a-bang! A-bang, a-bang!" One after another of
the self-centred Folk would yield to it, and soon all would be dancing
or chanting in chorus. "Ha-ah, ha-ah, ha-ah-ha!" was one of our favorite
choruses, and another was, "Eh-wah, eh-wah, eh-wah-hah!"

And so, with mad antics, leaping, reeling, and over-balancing, we
danced and sang in the sombre twilight of the primeval world, inducing
forgetfulness, achieving unanimity, and working ourselves up into
sensuous frenzy. And so it was that our rage against Red-Eye was soothed
away by art, and we screamed the wild choruses of the hee-hee council
until the night warned us of its terrors, and we crept away to our holes
in the rocks, calling softly to one another, while the stars came out
and darkness settled down.

We were afraid only of the dark. We had no germs of religion, no
conceptions of an unseen world. We knew only the real world, and
the things we feared were the real things, the concrete dangers, the
flesh-and-blood animals that preyed. It was they that made us afraid of
the dark, for darkness was the time of the hunting animals. It was then
that they came out of their lairs and pounced upon one from the dark
wherein they lurked invisible.

Possibly it was out of this fear of the real denizens of the dark that
the fear of the unreal denizens was later to develop and to culminate in
a whole and mighty unseen world. As imagination grew it is likely that
the fear of death increased until the Folk that were to come projected
this fear into the dark and peopled it with spirits. I think the Fire
People had already begun to be afraid of the dark in this fashion; but
the reasons we Folk had for breaking up our hee-hee councils and fleeing
to our holes were old Saber-Tooth, the lions and the jackals, the wild
dogs and the wolves, and all the hungry, meat-eating breeds.

CHAPTER XV

Lop-Ear got married. It was the second winter after our
adventure-journey, and it was most unexpected. He gave me no warning.
The first I knew was one twilight when I climbed the cliff to our cave.
I squeezed into the entrance and there I stopped. There was no room for
me. Lop-Ear and his mate were in possession, and she was none other than
my sister, the daughter of my step-father, the Chatterer.

I tried to force my way in. There was space only for two, and that space
was already occupied. A