IN THE MORNING OF TIME
By CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS
Author of: The Heart of the Ancient Wood; The Feet of the Furtive
Illustrated by Egbert Norman Clark
Slow, slow and gradual beyond the power of man’s mind to realize, was the dawn of the morning of Time—of Time that marched under the observation of conscious and considering eyes and intelligences that could concern themselves about it. But whether the stages of that stupendous dawn are to be measured in terms of the ten thousand, the hundred thousand, or even the million of years, matters nothing to the epic splendor of the event; for the lapse of fifty thousand years eludes the grasp of our imagination no less completely than the lapse of fifty million, however glibly our tongues may deal with the designating symbols. Of those earliest ape-like four-handed creatures, narrow-browed and wide-jawed, which were to evolve a bodily structure fit to house the soul of man, the records of the rocks have as yet revealed to us little clearly. They were tree-dwellers; and we may infer that they were too sagacious to ever let themselves get mired in the smothering morasses which, slowly hardening into stone, have preserved for us so many remains of their duller-witted contemporaries. In the remarkable death-trap which has been revealed by the explorations of the University of California in the famous tar pool at Rancho La Brea, near Los Angeles, seemingly every animal that lived in that region has been caught through the long ages. Birds and mice and harmless grazing creatures were snared in the treacherous ooze; lions and wolves and condors and the terrible sabre-tooth tigers followed them into the clutch of that black death. Where was Man? How did he escape the surprise of the tar pool when quicksands have caught his brothers of today? Perhaps he did not escape. The fossil wonders of that deposit are not all revealed. The remains of Man may yet be found sharing sepulcher with the creatures of the morning of Time.
Surely the dimly man-like inhabitants of the trees must have striven for long ages upon the earth before evolving such a skull-structure, such a development of the brain-pan, as are shown by the only fossil relics as yet discovered. It is therefore fairly safe to infer that the latest stage in the existence of those colossal Dinosaurian monsters—which Nature experimented with so recklessly and then wiped out so ruthlessly—may have well overlapped the time when man came down out of the tree-tops and began the first daring assertion of his sovereignty. He was pretty certainly an age or so too late to have seen the Diplodocus and his fellows; but the latest and most terrible of the monster Dinosaurs, the Triceratops, was so amazingly equipped both for offense and for defense that it may well have survived far into the period of the giant mammals and found itself confronted by Earliest-Man. It is hard to understand how Mature, having perfected so tremendous an invention, could have brought her self to exterminate it at the last.
Mr. Roberts, looking back along that dim trail, believes that Man actually came face to face with the terror of the prehistoric landscape, the King of the Triple Horn. The following brief account of that meeting, grim as it is, is a fitting prelude to the romance of Grôm and A-ya, two lovers at the dawn of the race, the story of whose adventures, in the morning of Time, Mr. Roberts will begin in the October number of Sunset.
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