I, a young man, had seen my vision, dreamed my dream; Selpa, the woman, had held me from that far desire; but Othar, the seed of us to live after, glimpsed my vision and won to it, so that our tribe became wealthy in the gains of the chase.

There was a woman—­on the great drift down out of Europe, a weary drift of many generations, when we brought into India the shorthorn cattle and the planting of barley.  But this woman was long before we reached India.  We were still in the mid-most of that centuries-long drift, and no shrewdness of geography can now place for me that ancient valley.

The woman was Nuhila.  The valley was narrow, not long, and the swift slope of its floor and the steep walls of its rim were terraced for the growing of rice and of millet—­the first rice and millet we Sons of the Mountain had known.  They were a meek people in that valley.  They had become soft with the farming of fat land made fatter by water.  Theirs was the first irrigation we had seen, although we had little time to mark their ditches and channels by which all the hill waters flowed to the fields they had builded.  We had little time to mark, for we Sons of the Mountain, who were few, were in flight before the Sons of the Snub-Nose, who were many.  We called them the Noseless, and they called themselves the Sons of the Eagle.  But they were many, and we fled before them with our shorthorn cattle, our goats, and our barleyseed, our women and children.

While the Snub-Noses slew our youths at the rear, we slew at our fore the folk of the valley who opposed us and were weak.  The village was mud-built and grass-thatched; the encircling wall was of mud, but quite tall.  And when we had slain the people who had built the wall, and sheltered within it our herds and our women and children, we stood on the wall and shouted insult to the Snub-Noses.  For we had found the mud granaries filled with rice and millet.  Our cattle could eat the thatches.  And the time of the rains was at hand, so that we should not want for water.

It was a long siege.  Near to the beginning, we gathered together the women, and elders, and children we had not slain, and forced them out through the wall they had builded.  But the Snub-Noses slew them to the last one, so that there was more food in the village for us, more food in the valley for the Snub-Noses.

It was a weary long siege.  Sickness smote us, and we died of the plague that arose from our buried ones.  We emptied the mud-granaries of their rice and millet.  Our goats and shorthorns ate the thatch of the houses, and we, ere the end, ate the goats and the shorthorns.

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.