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“‘One o’ them bloomin’ pre-hadymite cows!’ he muttered; ‘caught in the cold nip, by thunder! and some unfortnit crept into her for warmth.’

“I believed the creature’s rude intuition had flown true.

“‘Cannot you get at it?’ I gasped.

“He stared at me. All in an instant a little paltry demon of avarice blinked out of his eye-holes.

“‘Why,’ he said slowly, ‘who knows but it mayn’t be a gal a-jingling from top to toe with gold curtain rings!’

“He was a furious dare-devil immediately, and quick, and savage, and peremptory. His spirit entered into his men. They went over the side with pikes and axes, and, scrambling for any foothold, set to work on the ice like maniacs. In the lust of cupidity they did not even think how they wrought against their own safety and that of the ship.

“The point of the uppermost tusk came to within a foot of the ice-surface. This they soon reached, and, prising frantically with crowbars, flaked off and rolled away half-ton blocks of the superincumbent mass. I need not detail the fierce process. In half an hour they had laid bare a great segment of that part of the trunk whence the hand protruded, and then they paused, and at a word flung down their tools.

“I was leaning over the bulwarks watching them. I could contain my excitement no longer.

“‘Come,’ I said to my friend, ‘help me down, for I must go.’

“He climbed over, trembling, and assisted me to a standing on the ice. We scrambled along the track of debris left by the crew. At the moment half a dozen of the latter were rolling back a broad flap of the hide, in which they had found a long L-shaped rent revealed. Then a hoarse cry broke from them, and I stumbled forward and looked down, and saw.

“They lay beneath the mighty ribs as in a cage, of which the intercostal spaces were a foot in width, and the bars of a strength to maintain the enormous pressure of that which had surrounded and entombed them; they lay in one close group, their naked limbs smeared with the stain of their prison–a man, a woman, and a tiny child. From their faces, and their unfallen flesh, they might have been sleeping; but they were not; they were come down to us, a transfixture of death–prehistoric people in a prehistoric brute, and their eyes–their eyes!”

Dinah’s voice trailed off into silence. Some expression that I could not interpret was on her face. There was regret in it, but nothing of pathos or mysticism. Suddenly she breathed out a great sigh and resumed her narrative.

“You will want to know how they looked, these lifeless survivors of a remote race from a remote time? I will try to tell you. The men hacked away the ribs with their axes, and laid bare the group lying in the hollow scooped out of the fallen beast. They were little people, and the man, according to your modern canons of taste, was by far the most beautiful of the three. He sat erect, with one uplifted arm projected through the ribs; as if, surprised by the frost-stroke, he had started to escape, and had been petrified in the act. His face, wondering and delicate as a baby’s, was hairless; and his head only a pretty infantile down covered–a curling floss as radiant as spun glass. His wide-open eyes glinted yet with a hyacinth blue, and it was difficult to realize that they were dead and vacant.

“The woman was of coarser mould, ruddy, vigorous, brown-haired and eyed. She looked the very hamadryad of some blossoming tree, a sweet capricious daughter of the blameless earth. Everything luxuriated in her–colour, hair, and lusty flesh; and the child she held to her bosom with a manner that indescribably commingled contempt, and resentment, and a passion of proprietorship.

“This baby–joining the prominent characteristics of the two–was the oddest little mortal I have ever seen. What did its expression convey to me? ‘I am fairly caught, and must brazen out the situation!’ There! that was what it was; I cannot put it more lucidly. Only the thing’s wee face was animal conscious for the first time of itself, and inclined to rejoice in that primitive energy of knowledge.