PRIMEVAL MAN 241 



furnace between the hot sea and the hot sand; 

 but at the sight of the old rock cisterns, carved 

 by forgotten hands, one realizes why on that 

 coast of barren desolation every maritime peo 

 ple in turn, from the mists that shroud an im 

 memorial antiquity to our own day of fevered 

 materialistic civilization, has seized Aden Bay 

 - Egyptian, Sabean, Byzantine, Turk, Persian, 

 Portuguese, Englishman; and always, a few 

 miles distant, in the thirsty sands, the changeless 

 desert folk have waited until pride spent itself 

 and failed, and the new power passed, as each 

 old power had passed, and then the merciless 

 men of the waste once more claimed their own. 

 Gibraltar and Aden cannot mean to the un 

 imaginative what they mean to the men of 

 vision, to the men stirred by the hero tales of 

 the past, by the dim records of half -forgotten 

 peoples. These men may or may not do their 

 work as well as others, but their gifts count in 

 the joy of living. Enjoyment the same in kind 

 comes to the man who can clothe with flesh the 

 dry bones of bygone ages, and can see before 

 his eyes the great beasts, hunters and hunted, 

 the beasts so long dead, which thronged the 

 Californian land at a time when in all its phys 

 ical features it had already become essentially 

 what it still continues to be. 



