And this tale, too, I believe, for the old
Shell Men who told me what their grandfathers had seen were not of the
foolish sort."
"But of another sort of story they have told me," Mok continued, "I think
little. The old men tell of a time when those who went down the river to
the greater river and followed it down to the sea, which seems to have no
end, saw what no man can see to-day. But they do not say that their
grandfathers saw these things. They only say that their grandfathers told
of what had been told them by their grandfathers farther back, of a story
which had come down to them, so old that it was older than the great trees
were, of monstrous things which swam along the shores and which were not
serpents, though they had long necks and serpent heads, because they had
great bodies which were driven by flippers through the water as the beaver
goes with his broad feet. And at the same time, the old story goes, were
great birds, far taller than a man, who fed where now the bustards and the
capercailzie are. And these tales I do not believe, though I have seen
bones washed from the riversides and hillsides by the rains which must
have come from creatures different from those we meet now in the forests
or the waters. They are wonderful story-tellers, the old men of the Shell
People.
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