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with a neck so short and large in circumference, although the feet
    and hands were not large. His frame was extraordinarily solid; being
    not more than five feet seven inches in height and by no means fat,
    yet he must have weighed quite fifteen stone, if not more. His dark
    hair was long and parted in the middle; it hung down to his shoulders.
    He turned his head, looking behind him as though to make sure that he
    was alone, or that no wild beast stalked him, and I saw his face. The
    forehead was wide and not high, for the hair grew low upon it; his
    eyebrows were beetling and the eyes beneath them deep set. They were
    remarkable eyes, large and gray, quick-glancing also, yet when at rest
    somewhat sombre and very thoughtful. The nose was straight with wide
    and sensitive nostrils, suggesting that its owner used them as a dog
    or a deer does, to scent with. The mouth was thick-lipped but not
    large, and within it were splendid and regular white teeth, broader
    than those we have; the chin was very massive, and on it grew two
    little tufts of beard, though the cheeks were bare.
    For the rest, this man was long armed, for the tip of his middle
    finger came down almost to the kneecap. He had a sort of kilt about
    his middle and a heavy fur robe upon his shoulder which looked as
    though it were made of bearskin. In his left hand he held a short
    spear, the blade of which seemed to be fashioned of chipped flint, or
    some other hard and shining stone, and in the girdle of his kilt was
    thrust a wooden-handled instrument or ax, made by setting a great,
    sharp-edged stone that must have weighed two pounds or so into the
    cleft end of the handle which was lashed with sinews both above and
    below the axhead.
    I, Allan, the man of to-day, looked upon this mighty savage, for
    mighty I could see he was—both in his body and, after a fashion, in
    his mind also—and in my trance knew that the spirit which had dwelt
    in him hundreds of thousands of years ago, mayhap, or at least in the
    far, far, past, was the same that animated me, the living creature
    whose body for aught I knew descended from his, thus linking us in
    flesh as well as soul. Indeed, the thought came to me—I know not
    whence—that here stood my remote forefather whose forgotten existence
    was my cause of life, without whom my body could not have been.
    Now, I, Allan Quatermain, fade from the story. No longer am I he. I am
    Wi the Hunter, the future chief of a little tribe which had no name,
    since, believing itself to be the only people on the earth, it needed
    none. Yet remember that my modern intelligence and individuality never
    went to sleep, that always it was able to watch this prototype, this
    primeval one, to enter into his thoughts, to appreciate his motives,
    hopes, and fears, and to compare them with those that actuate us
    to-day. Therefore, the tale I tell is the substance of that which the
    heart of Wi told to my heart, set out in my own modern tongue and
    interpreted by my modern intellect.

CHAPTER III
WI SEEKS A SIGN
    Wi, being already endowed with a spiritual sense, was praying to such
    gods as he knew, the Ice-gods that his tribe had always worshipped. He
    did not know for how long it had worshipped them, any more than he
    knew the beginnings of that tribe, save for a legend that once its
    forefathers had come here from behind the mountains, driven sunward
    and southward by the cold. These gods of theirs lived in the blue-black ice of the mightiest of the glaciers which moved down from the
    crests of the high snow mountains. The breast of this glacier was in
    the central valley, but most of the ice moved down smaller valleys to
    the east and west and so came to the sea, where in springtime the
    children of the Ice-gods that had been begotten in the heart of the
    snowy hills were born, coming forth in great bergs from the dark wombs
    of the valleys and sailing away southward. Thus it was that the vast
    central glacier, the house of the gods, moved but