MYTH
The crack was only about body width and, as 1 worked
my way downward, the light turned dark and became a narrow slit
of distant blue, and the sandstone was cool to my hands on either
side. The slit was a little sinister - like an open grave, assuming
the dead were enabled to take one last look for over me
the sky seemed already as far off as some future century I would
never see.
I ignored the sky, then, and began to concentrate
on the sandstone walls that had lead me into this place. It was
tight and tricky work, but that cut was a perfect cross section
through perhaps ten million years of time. I hoped to find at
least a bone, but I was not quite prepared for the sight I finally
came upon. Staring straight out at me, as I slid farther and deeper
into the green twilight, was a skull embedded in the solid sandstone.
I had come at just the proper moment when it was fully to be seen,
the white bone gleaming there in a kind of ashen splendor, water
worn, and about to be ground away in the next torrent.
It was not, of course, human. I was deep, deep below
the time of man in a remote age near the beginning of the reign
of mammals. I squatted on my heels in the narrow ravine, and we
stared a little blankly at each other, the skull and I. There
were marks of generalized primitiveness in that low, pinched brain
case and grinning jaw that marked it as lying far back along those
converging roads where, as I shall have occasion to establish
elsewhere, cat and man and weasel must leap into a single shape.
It was a the face of a creature who had spent his
days following his nose, who was led by instinct rather than memory,
and whose power of choice was very small. Though he was not a
man, nor a direct human ancestor, there was yet about him, even
in the bone, some trace of that low, snuffling world out of which
our forebears had so recently emerged.
The skull lay tilted in such a manner that it stared,
sightless, up at me as though I, too, were caught a few feet above
him in the strata and, in my turn, were staring upward at that
strip or sky which the ages were carrying farther away from me
beneath the tumbling debris of falling mountains. The creature
had never lived to see a man, and I what was it I was never going
to see.