(1907)

CHAPTER I

"These are our ancestors, and their history is our
history.

Remember that as surely as we one day
swung down out of the trees and walked upright,
just as surely, on a far earlier day,
did we crawl up out of the sea
and achieve our first adventure on land."

Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did
I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged
my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never
seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented my childhood,
making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little
later convincing me that I was different from my kind, a
creature unnatural and accursed.

In my days only did I attain any measure of happiness. My
nights marked the reign of fear--and such fear! I make bold to
state that no man of all the men who walk the earth with me
ever suffer fear of like kind and degree. For my fear is the
fear of long ago, the fear that was rampant in the Younger
World, and in the youth of the Younger World. In short, the
fear that reigned supreme in that period known as the
Mid-Pleistocene.