then, you see, in a kind of a way he was backing his
prejudices against theirs and prejudices are pretty solid things when
you consider. Still, he took a hell of a chance.

"On the trail next day, for we left the following morning, I argued with
him about that, but he couldn't be budged. He said he stood for truth
and all that kind of thing. I put it to him that he would expect any
foreigner to conform to his national customs. He'd expect a Turk to give
up his polygamy, I said, no matter what heart-breakings it cost some of
the family. But he had a kink in his thinking, holding that his people
had the whole, solid, unchanging truth. Of course, the argument came
down with a crash then, for it worked around to a question of what is
truth. There you are. There was the limit. So we quit. As I tell you,
the human brain is not constituted to do much thinking. It's been
crippled by lack of use. We are mentally stunted in growth. I remember
that I began to say something about the possibility of there being
several gods, meaning that some time or other men with imagination had
defied some natural thing, but it came to me that I was talking
nonsense, so I quit. Yet I know right well that many tribes have made
gods of things of which they were afraid. But it's small profit to
theorize.

"It was near sundown when we came to that building shown in that
photograph. The vegetation was so thick thereabouts that the temple, for
I suppose it was that, appeared before us suddenly. One moment we were
crawling like insects between the trunks of great jungle trees that shot
upwards seventy feet or more without a branch, as if they were racing
for dear life skyward, and then everything fell away and there was the
old building. It startled the both of us. We got the sensation that you
get when you see a really good play. You forget your bodily presence and
you are only a bundle of nerves. You walk or sit or stand, but without
any effort or knowledge that you are doing it. We had been talking, and
the sight of that building, so unexpected, startled us into silence. It
would any one. Believe me, your imperturbable man with perfect, cool,
self-possession does not exist. Man's a jumpy thing, given to nerves.
You may deny it and talk about the unexcitability of the American
citizen and all that bunk, but let me tell you that your journalists and
moving picture producers and preachers and politicians have caught on to
the fact that man is jumpy, an