Page:Rowland--The Mountain of Fears.djvu/60

  primitive—to my mind all of these things sweep together through the same sluice." There are no words which will convey the bitterness of Leyden's tone; mockery soared high in comparison.

"B'r'r'rrgh! how I loathe all such unicellular impulses in a man—a finished animal product! And that night on that mountain I yelped and howled in fear with those other two hairy animals—and I think that we fought and bit and struggled, for the next morning we were masses of minor wounds. Yet so far had we harked back on the trail of our savage forbears, driven screaming before that primitive and degraded passion of fear, that none of us was badly hurt!—which was even more shameful. I suppose, Doctor, that our terror was too elemental and reasonless to lead us to use weapons, whereas our limbs lacked the strength to enable us to kill each other with our naked hands; so that, instead of digging out each other's hearts with our finger-nails, we suffered most from [ 44 ]