—I don’t know. I’m not as sure as I was. You might manage it. Perhaps some large experience, or even a good, sharp shock, might put you on the track. Perhaps you are wrong even to listen to me.

—Then why do you talk so much, and throw out so many dangerous suggestions?

—It’s my métier. You thinkers drive me to shake you up.

Maddening woman!

>> >> >> >> << << << <<

Dec. 24, Wed. and Christmas Eve: Was this the worst day of my life, or the best? Both.

Liesl insisted this morning that I go on an expedition with her. You will see the mountains at their best, she said; it is too cold for the tourists with their sandwiches, and there is not enough snow for skiers. So we drove for about half an hour, uphill all the way, and at last came to one of those cable-car affairs and swayed and joggled dizzily through the air toward the far-off shoulder of a mountain. When we got out of it at last, I found I was panting.

—We are about seven thousand feet up now. Does it bother you? You’ll soon get used to it. Come on. I want to show you something.

—Surely the view elsewhere is the same as it is here?

—Lazy! What I want to show you isn’t a view.

It was a cave; large, extremely cold as soon as we penetrated a few yards out of the range of the sun, but not damp. I couldn’t see much of it, and although it is the first cave I have ever visited it convinced me that I don’t like caves. But Liesl was enthusiastic, because it is apparently quite famous since somebody, whose name I did not catch, proved conclusively in the ’nineties that primitive men had lived here. All the sharpened flints, bits of carbon, and other evidence had been removed, but there were a few scratches on the walls which appear to be very significant, though they looked like nothing more than scratches to me.

—Can’t you imagine them, crouching here in the cold as the sun sank, with nothing to warm them but a small fire and a few skins? But enduring, enduring, enduring! They were heroes, Davey.

—I don’t suppose they conceived of anything better. They can’t have been much more than animals.

—They were our ancestors. They were more like us than they were like any animal.

—Physically, perhaps. But what kind of brains had they? What sort of mind?

—A herd-mind, probably. But they may have known a few things we have lost on the long journey from the cave to—well, to the law-courts.

—I don’t see any good in romanticizing savages. They knew how to get a wretched living and hang on to life for twenty-five or thirty years. But surely anything human, any sort of culture or civilized feeling or whatever you want to call it, came ages later?

—No, no; not at all. I can prove it to you now. It’s a little bit dangerous, so follow me, and be careful.