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Where there had been five men of us on the wall, there came a time

when there was one; where there had been half a thousand babes and
younglings of ours, there were none. It was Nuhila, my woman, who

cut off her hair and twisted it that I might have a strong string
for my bow. The other women did likewise, and when the wall was

attacked, stood shoulder to shoulder with us, in the midst of our
spears and arrows raining down potsherds and cobblestones on the

heads of the Snub-Noses.
Even the patient Snub-Noses we well-nigh out-patienced. Came a time

when of ten men of us, but one was alive on the wall, and of our
women remained very few, and the Snub-Noses held parley. They told

us we were a strong breed, and that our women were men-mothers, and
that if we would let them have our women they would leave us alone

in the valley to possess for ourselves and that we could get women
from the valleys to the south.

And Nuhila said no. And the other women said no. And we sneered at
the Snub-Noses and asked if they were weary of fighting. And we

were as dead men then, as we sneered at our enemies, and there was
little fight left in us we were so weak. One more attack on the

wall would end us. We knew it. Our women knew it. And Nuhila said
that we could end it first and outwit the Snub-Noses. And all our

women agreed. And while the Snub-Noses prepared for the attack that
would be final, there, on the wall, we slew our women. Nuhila loved

me, and leaned to meet the thrust of my sword, there on the wall.
And we men, in the love of tribehood and tribesmen, slew one another

till remained only Horda and I alive in the red of the slaughter.
And Horda was my elder, and I leaned to his thrust. But not at once

did I die. I was the last of the Sons of the Mountain, for I saw
Horda, himself fall on his blade and pass quickly. And dying with

the shouts of the oncoming Snub-Noses growing dim in my ears, I was
glad that the Snub-Noses would have no sons of us to bring up by our

women.
I do not know when this time was when I was a Son of the Mountain

and when we died in the narrow valley where we had slain the Sons of
the Rice and the Millet. I do not know, save that it was centuries

before the wide-spreading drift of all us Sons of the Mountain
fetched into India, and that it was long before ever I was an Aryan

master in Old Egypt building my two burial places and defacing the
tombs of kings before me.

I should like to tell more of those far days, but time in the
present is short. Soon I shall pass. Yet am I sorry that I cannot

tell more of those early drifts, when there was crushage of peoples,
or descending ice-sheets, or migrations of meat.

Also, I should like to tell of Mystery. For always were we curious
to solve the secrets of life, death, and decay. Unlike the other

animals, man was for ever gazing at the stars. Many gods he created
in his own image and in the images of his fancy. In those old times

I have worshipped the sun and the dark. I have worshipped the
husked grain as the parent of life. I have worshipped Sar, the Corn

Goddess. And I have worshipped sea gods, and river gods, and fish
gods.

Yes, and I remember Ishtar ere she was stolen from us by the
Babylonians, and Ea, too, was ours, supreme in the Under World, who

enabled Ishtar to conquer death. Mitra, likewise, was a good old
Aryan god, ere he was filched from us or we discarded him. And I

remember, on a time, long after the drift when we brought the barley
into India, that I came down into India, a horse-trader, with many

servants and a long caravan at my back, and that at that time they
were worshipping Bodhisatwa.

Truly, the worships of the Mystery wandered as did men, and between
filchings and borrowings the gods had as vagabond a time of it as

did we. As the Sumerians took the loan of Shamashnapishtin from us,
so did the Sons of Shem take him from the Sumerians and call him

Noah.
Why, I smile me to-day, Darrell Standing, in Murderers' Row, in that

I was found guilty and awarded death by twelve jurymen staunch and
true. Twelve has ever been a magic number of the Mystery. Nor did

it originate with the twelve tribes of Israel. Star-gazers before
them had placed the twelve signs of the Zodiac in the sky. And I

remember me, when I was of the Assir, and of the Vanir, that Odin
sat in judgment over men in the court of the twelve gods, and that

their names were Thor, Baldur, Niord, Frey, Tyr, Bregi, Heimdal,
Hoder, Vidar, Ull, Forseti, and Loki.

Even our Valkyries were stolen from us and made into angels, and the
wings of the Valkyries' horses became attached to the shoulders of

the angels. And our Helheim of that day of ice and frost has become
the hell of to-day, which is so hot an abode that the blood boils in

one's veins, while with us, in our Helheim, the place was so cold as
to freeze the marrow inside the bones. And the very sky, that we

dreamed enduring, eternal, has drifted and veered, so that we find
to-day the scorpion in the place where of old we knew the goat, and

the archer in the place of the crab.
Worships and worships! Ever the pursuit of the Mystery! I remember

the lame god of the Greeks, the master-smith. But their vulcan was
the Germanic Wieland, the master-smith captured and hamstrung lame

of a leg by Nidung, the kind of the Nids. But before that he was
our master-smith, our forger and hammerer, whom we named Il-marinen.

And him we begat of our fancy, giving him the bearded sun-god for
father, and nursing him by the stars of the bear. For, he, Vulcan,

or Wieland, or Il-marinen, was born under the pine tree, from the
hair of the wolf, and was called also the bear-father ere ever the

Germans and Greeks purloined and worshipped him. In that day we
called ourselves the Sons of the Bear and the Sons of the Wolf, and

the bear and the wolf were our totems. That was before our drift
south on which we joined with the Sons of the Tree-Grove and taught

them our totems and tales.
Yes, and who was Kashyapa, who was Pururavas, but our lame master-

smith, our iron-worker, carried by us in our drifts and re-named and
worshipped by the south-dwellers and the east-dwellers, the Sons of

the Pole and of the Fire Drill and Fire Socket.
But the tale is too long, though I should like to tell of the three-

leaved Herb of Life by which Sigmund made Sinfioti alive again. For
this is the very soma-plant of India, the holy grail of King Arthur,

the--but enough! enough!
And yet, as I calmly consider it all, I conclude that the greatest

thing in life, in all lives, to me and to all men, has been woman,
is woman, and will be woman so long as the stars drift in the sky

and the heavens flux eternal change. Greater than our toil and
endeavour, the play of invention and fancy, battle and star-gazing

and mystery--greatest of all has been woman.
Even though she has sung false music to me, and kept my feet solid

on the ground, and drawn my star-roving eyes ever back to gaze upon
her, she, the conserver of life, the earth-mother, has given me my

great days and nights and fulness of years. Even mystery have I
imaged in the form of her, and in my star-charting have I placed her

figure in the sky.
All my toils and devices led to her; all my far visions saw her at

the end. When I made the fire-drill and fire-socket, it was for
her. It was for her, although I did not know it, that I put the

stake in the pit for old Sabre-Tooth, tamed the horse, slew the
mammoth, and herded my reindeer south in advance of the ice-sheet.

For her I harvested the wild rice, tamed the barley, the wheat, and
the corn.

For her, and the seed to come after whose image she bore, I have
died in tree-tops and stood long sieges in cave-mouths and on mud-

walls. For her I put the twelve signs in the sky. It was she I
worshipped when I bowed before the ten stones of jade and adored

them as the moons of gestation.
Always has woman crouched close to earth like a partridge hen

mothering her young; always has my wantonness of roving led me out
on the shining ways; and always have my star-paths returned me to

her, the figure everlasting, the woman, the one woman, for whose
arms I had such need that clasped in them I have forgotten the

stars.
For her I accomplished Odysseys, scaled mountains, crossed deserts;

for her I led the hunt and was forward in battle; and for her and to
her I sang my songs of the things I had done. All ecstasies of life

and rhapsodies of delight have been mine because of her. And here,
at the end, I can say that I have known no sweeter, deeper madness

of being than to drown in the fragrant glory and forgetfulness of
her hair.

One word more. I remember me Dorothy, just the other day, when I
still lectured on agronomy to farmer-boy students. She was eleven

years old. Her father was dean of the college. She was a woman-
child, and a woman, and she conceived that she loved me. And I

smiled to myself, for my heart was untouched and lay elsewhere.
Yet was the smile tender, for in the child's eyes I saw the woman

eternal, the woman of all times and appearances. In her eyes I saw
the eyes of my mate of the jungle and tree-top, of the cave and the

squatting-place. In her eyes I saw the eyes of Igar when I was Ushu
the archer, the eyes of Arunga when I was the rice-harvester, the

eyes of Selpa when I dreamed of bestriding the stallion, the eyes of
Nuhila who leaned to the thrust of my sword. Yes, there was that in

her eyes that made them the eyes of Lei-Lei whom I left with a laugh
on my lips, the eyes of the Lady Om for forty years my beggar-mate

on highway and byway, the eyes of Philippa for whom I was slain on
the grass in old France, the eyes of my mother when I was the lad

Jesse at the Mountain Meadows in the circle of our forty great
wagons.

She was a woman-child, but she was daughter of all women, as her
mother before her, and she was the mother of all women to come after

her. She was Sar, the corn-goddess. She was Isthar who conquered
death. She was Sheba and Cleopatra; she was Esther and Herodias.

She was Mary the Madonna, and Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the
sister of Martha, also she was Martha. And she was Brunnhilde and

Guinevere, Iseult and Juliet, Heloise and Nicolette. Yes, and she
was Eve, she was Lilith, she was Astarte. She was eleven years old,

and she was all women that had been, all women to be.
I sit in my cell now, while the flies hum in the drowsy summer

afternoon, and I know that my time is short. Soon they will apparel
me in the shirt without a collar. . . . But hush, my heart. The

spirit is immortal. After the dark I shall live again, and there
will be women. The future holds the little women for me in the

lives I am yet to live. And though the stars drift, and the heavens
lie, ever remains woman, resplendent, eternal, the one woman, as I,

under all my masquerades and misadventures, am the one man, her
mate.

CHAPTER XXII
My time grows very short. All the manuscript I have written is

safely smuggled out of the prison. There is a man I can trust who
will see that it is published. No longer am I in Murderers Row. I

am writing these lines in the death cell, and the death-watch is set
on me. Night and day is this death-watch on me, and its paradoxical

function is to see that I do not die. I must be kept alive for the
hanging, or else will the public be cheated, the law blackened, and

a mark of demerit placed against the time-serving warden who runs
this prison and one of whose duties is to see that his condemned

ones are duly and properly hanged. Often I marvel at the strange
way some men make their livings.

This shall be my last writing. To-morrow morning the hour is set.
The governor has declined to pardon or reprieve, despite the fact

that the Anti-Capital-Punishment League has raised quite a stir in
California. The reporters are gathered like so many buzzards. I

have seen them all. They are queer young fellows, most of them, and
most queer is it that they will thus earn bread and butter,

cocktails and tobacco, room-rent, and, if they are married, shoes
and schoolbooks for their children, by witnessing the execution of

Professor Darrell Standing, and by describing for the public how
Professor Darrell Standing died at the end of a rope. Ah, well,

they will be sicker than I at the end of the affair.
As I sit here and muse on it all, the footfalls of the death-watch



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