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 forebearers
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.