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.