may suspect, leads him to construct what is more like the symbol of
something thought than the portrait of something seen. And so we wander
farther and farther into the gloomy depths, adding ever new specimens
to our pre-historic menagerie, including the rare find of a bird that
looks uncommonly like the penguin. Mind, by the way, that you do not
fall into that round hole in the floor. It is enormously deep; and
more than forty cave-bears have left their skeletons at the bottom,
amongst which your skeleton would be a little out of place.

Next day let us move off eastwards to the Little Pyrenees to see another
cave, Niaux, high up in a valley scarred nearly up to the top by former
glaciers. This cave is about a mile deep; and it will take you half
a mile of awkward groping amongst boulders and stalactites, not to
mention a choke in one part of the passage such as must puzzle a fat
man, before the cavern becomes spacious, and you find yourself in the
vast underground cathedral that pre-historic man has chosen for his
picture-gallery. This was a later stock, that had in the meantime
learnt how to draw to perfection. Consider the bold black and white
of that portrait of a wild pony, with flowing mane and tail, glossy
barrel, and jolly snub-nosed face. It is four or five feet across,
and not an inch of the work is out of scale. The same is true of nearly
every one of the other fifty or more figures of game-animals. These
artists could paint what they saw.

Yet they could paint up on the walls what they thought, too. There
are likewise whole screeds of symbols waiting, perhaps waiting for
ever, to be interpreted. The dots and lines and pothooks clearly belong
to a system of picture-writing. Can we make out their meaning at all?
Once in a way, perhaps. Note these marks looking like two different
kinds of throwing-club; at any rate, there are Australian weapons not