Page:Under the Sun.djvu/201

Rh away from ill-tempered things of the rhinoceros and elephant kind. Gradually, however, he began to defend himself, and from defence he rose at last to the dignity of offence. Armed only with flint-stones, he had the audacity, this progenitor of ours, to attack the bulky pachyderms; and, if the testimony of the crags and clay may be believed, he actually overcame the Goliaths of the forest with his pebbles. Were it not, indeed, for these relics of the age of flint weapons, it might be doubted whether man was ever contemporary in Britain with the mammoth; but as matters stand, there is every reason for supposing that he was. Whether this juxtaposition of human implements and animal skeletons means that our ancestors slew the beast or that the beast ate our ancestors, it is impossible to say. Probably they both gave and took.

It was an age of silence and twilight and snow; an epoch of monsters.

In Australia a huge marsupial, with the head of an ox, and compared to which our kangaroo is only a great rat, straddled and hopped about as it pleased, in the company of wombats as big as bears; and in America the megatherian sloth crept browsing among the forests of the primeval continent, like some bulky thing of Dreamland, voiceless, solitary, and slow-footed; while the glyptodon — the wondrous armadillo of the past, that could have driven its way through a street of houses as easily as the mole tunnels through the furrows of a field — wandered with the same strange loitering pace along the river banks. In those days there was no need for the beasts to hurry, for life was long and there was nothing to harm them; so they crawled about on land and waded in the water as lazily as they pleased. It is true that the extinct