The Lost Continent
consideration. He points out that it is quite beyond the pale of human
instinct to desert little children as my theory suggests the ancient
English must have done. He is more inclined to believe that the
expulsion of the foe from England was synchronous with widespread
victories by the allies upon the continent, and that the people of
England merely emigrated from their ruined cities and their devastated,
blood-drenched fields to the mainland, in the hope of finding, in the
domain of the conquered enemy, cities and farms which would replace
those they had lost.
The learned professor assumes that while a long-continued war had
strengthened rather than weakened the instinct of paternal devotion, it
had also dulled other humanitarian instincts, and raised to the first
magnitude the law of the survival of the fittest, with the result that
when the exodus took place the strong, the intelligent, and the
cunning, together with their offspring, crossed the waters of the
Channel or the North Sea to the continent, leaving in unhappy England
only the helpless inmates of asylums for the feebleminded and insane.
My objections to this, that the present inhabitants of England are
mentally fit, and could therefore not have descended from an ancestry
of undiluted lunacy he brushes aside with the assertion that insanity
is not necessarily hereditary; and that even though it was, in many
cases a return to natural conditions from the state of high
civilization, which is thought to have induced mental disease in the
ancient world, would, after several generations, have thoroughly
expunged every trace of the affliction from the brains and nerves of
the descendants of the original maniacs.
Personally, I do not place much stock in Professor Cortoranl’s theory,
though I admit that I am prejudiced. Naturally one does not care to
believe that the object of his greatest affection is descended from a
gibbering idiot and a raving maniac.
But I am forgetting the continuity of my narrative—a continuity which I
desire to maintain, though I fear that I shall often be led astray, so
numerous and varied are the bypaths of speculation which lead from the
present day story of the Grabritins into the mysterious past of their
forbears.
As I stood talking with the girl I presently recollected that she still
was bound, and with a word of apology, I drew my knife and cut the
rawhide thongs which confined her wrists at her back.
She thanked me, and with such a sweet smile that I should have been
amply repaid by it for a much more arduous service.
“And now,” I said, “let me accompany you to your home and see you
safely again under the protection of your friends.”
“No,” she said, with a hint of alarm in her voice; “you must not come
with me—Buckingham will kill you.”
Buckingham. The name was famous in ancient English history. Its
survival, with many other illustrious names, is one of the strongest
arguments in refutal of Professor Cortoranl’s theory; yet it opens no
new doors to the past, and, on the whole, rather adds to than
dissipates the mystery.
“And who is Buckingham,” I asked, “and why should he wish to kill me?”
“He would think that you had stolen me,” she replied, “and as he wishes
me for himself, he will kill any other whom he thinks desires me. He
killed Wettin a few days ago. My mother told me once that Wettin was my
father. He was king. Now Buckingham is king.”
Here, evidently, were a people slightly superior to those of the Isle
of Wight. These must have at least the rudiments of civilized
government since they recognized one among them as ruler, with the
title, king. Also, they retained the word father. The girl’s
pronunciation, while far from identical with ours, was much closer than
the tortured dialect of the Eastenders of the Isle of Wight. The longer
I talked with her the more hopeful I became of finding here, among her
people, some records, or traditions, which might assist in clearing up
the historic enigma of the past two centuries. I asked her if we were
far from the city of London, but she did not know what I meant. When I
tried to explain, describing mighty buildings of stone and brick, broad
avenues, parks, palaces, and countless people, she but shook her head
sadly.
“There is no such place near by,” she said. “Only the Camp of the Lions
has places of stone where the beasts lair, but there are no people in
the Camp of the Lions. Who would dare go there!” And she shuddered.
“The Camp of the Lions,” I repeated. “And where is that, and what?”
“It is there,” she said, pointing up the river toward the west. “I have
seen it from a great distance, but I have never been there. We are much
afraid of the lions, for this is their country, and they are angry that
man has come to live here.
“Far away there,” and she pointed toward the south-west, “is the land
of tigers, which is even worse than this, the land of the lions, for
the tigers are more numerous than the lions and hungrier for human
flesh. There were tigers here long ago, but both the lions and the men
set upon them and drove them off.”
“Where did these savage beasts come from?” I asked.
“Oh,” she replied, “they have been here always. It is their country.”
“Do they not kill and eat your people?” I asked.
“Often, when we meet them by accident, and we are too few to slay them,
or when one goes too close to their camp. But seldom do they hunt us,
for they find what food they need among the deer and wild cattle, and,
too, we make them gifts, for are we not intruders in their country?
Really we live upon good terms with them, though I should not care to
meet one were there not many spears in my party.”
“I should like to visit this Camp of the Lions,” I said.
“Oh, no, you must not!” cried the girl. “That would be terrible. They
would eat you.” For a moment, then, she seemed lost in thought, but
presently she turned upon me with: “You must go now, for any minute
Buckingham may come in search of me. Long since should they have
learned that I am gone from the camp—they watch over me very
closely—and they will set out after me. Go! I shall wait here until
they come in search of me.”
“No,” I told her. “I’ll not leave you alone in a land infested by lions
and other wild beasts. If you won’t let me go as far as your camp with
you, then I’ll wait here until they come in search of you.”
“Please go!” she begged. “You have saved me, and I would save you, but
nothing will save you if Buckingham gets his hands on you. He is a bad
man. He wishes to have me for his woman so that he may be king. He
would kill anyone who befriended me, for fear that I might become
anotherl’s.”
“Didn’t you say that Buckingham is already the king?” I asked.
“He is. He took my mother for his woman after he had killed Wettin. But
my mother will die soon—she is very old—and then the man to whom I
belong will become king.”
Finally, after much questioning, I got the thing through my head. It
appears that the line of descent is through the women. A man is merely
head of his wife’s family—that is all. If she chances to be the oldest
female member of the “royal” house, he is king. Very naively the girl
explained that there was seldom any doubt as to whom a childl’s mother
was.
This accounted for the girl’s importance in the community and for
Buckinghaml’s anxiety to claim her, though she told me that she did not
wish to become his woman, for he was a bad man and would make a bad
king. But he was powerful, and there was no other man who dared dispute
his wishes.
“Why not come with me,” I suggested, “if you do not wish to become
Buckinghaml’s?”
“Where would you take me?” she asked.
Where, indeed! I had not thought of that. But before I could reply to
her question she shook her head and said, “No, I cannot leave my
people. I must stay and do my best, even if Buckingham gets me, but you
must go at once. Do not wait until it is too late. The lions have had
no offering for a long time, and Buckingham would seize upon the first
stranger as a gift to them.”
I did not perfectly understand what she meant, and was about to ask her
when a heavy body leaped upon me from behind, and great arms encircled
my neck. I struggled to free myself and turn upon my antagonist, but in
another instant I was overwhelmed by a half dozen powerful, half-naked
men, while a score of others surrounded me, a couple of whom seized the
girl.
I fought as best I could for my liberty and for hers, but the weight of
numbers was too great, though I had the satisfaction at least of giving
them a good fight.
When they had overpowered me, and I stood, my hands bound behind me, at
the girl’s side, she gazed commiseratingly at me.
“It is too bad that you did not do as I bid you,” she said, “for now it
has happened just as I feared—Buckingham has you.”
“Which is Buckingham?” I asked.
“I am Buckingham,” growled a burly, unwashed brute, swaggering
truculently before me. “And who are you who would have stolen my
woman?”
The girl spoke up then and tried to explain that I had not stolen her;
but on the contrary I had saved her from the men from the “Elephant
Country” who were carrying her away.
Buckingham only sneered at her explanation, and a moment later gave the
command that started us all off toward the west. We marched for a
matter of an hour or so, coming at last to a collection of rude huts,
fashioned from branches of trees covered with skins and grasses and
sometimes plastered with mud. All about the camp they had erected a
wall of saplings pointed at the tops and fire hardened.
This palisade was a protection against both man and beasts, and within
it dwelt upward of two thousand persons, the shelters being built very
close together, and sometimes partially underground, like deep
trenches, with the poles and hides above merely as protection from the
sun and rain.
The older part of the camp consisted almost wholly of trenches, as
though this had been the original form of dwellings which was slowly
giving way to the drier and airier surface domiciles. In these trench
habitations I saw a survival of the military trenches which formed so
famous a part of the operation of the warring nations during the
twentieth century.
The women wore a single light deerskin about their hips, for it was
summer, and quite warm. The men, too, were clothed in a single garment,
usually the pelt of some beast of prey. The hair of both men and women
was confined by a rawhide thong passing about the forehead and tied
behind. In this leathern band were stuck feathers, flowers, or the
tails of small mammals. All wore necklaces of the teeth or claws of
wild beasts, and there were numerous metal wristlets and anklets among
them.
They wore, in fact, every indication of a most primitive people—a race
which had not yet risen to the heights of agriculture or even the
possession of domestic animals. They were hunters—the lowest plane in
the evolution of the human race of which science takes cognizance.
And yet as I looked at their well shaped heads, their handsome
features, and their intelligent eyes, it was difficult to believe that
I was not among my own. It was only when I took into consideration
their mode of living, their scant apparel, the lack of every least
luxury among them, that I was forced to admit that they were, in truth,
but ignorant savages.
Buckingham had relieved me of my weapons, though he had not the
slightest idea of their purpose or uses, and when we reached the camp
he exhibited both me and my arms with every indication of pride in this
great capture.
The inhabitants flocked around me, examining my clothing, and
exclaiming in wonderment at each new discovery of button, buckle,
pocket, and flap. It seemed incredible that such a thing could be,