Page:A Wild-Goose Chase - Balmer - 1915.djvu/270

256 be real now no longer came to Geoff, and he souldcould [sic] see also that no longer it came to Price Latham. Instead of this seeming some strange, impossible, outlandish dream of slow starvation, which one could banish merely by shaking oneself awake, now it was established as the only actual condition of existence.

As Geoff thought of his life at the club and at home, that life sometimes seemed not six months but six thousand years away, and not in the past but somehow far in the future. Among men of the stone age—living or dying according as to whether they were able to stab a spear through the brain of a seal as the animal rose for breath and before he dived again—Geoff and the rest had become as men of that age, with civilisation thousands of years ahead. They were not just a few weeks' journey north of the cities of America and Europe. They were living in Britain and France in the ice age when the glaciers crept down and filled the valleys, driving before them the men of the ice and snow—the Cave Men of a time so long ago that it was called by the name of a geological era. The bones of the musk-sheep