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A   HERMIT   IN   THE   HIMALAYAS

as to whether it will attack a man or not. It has a reputation for
being utterly vicious, spiteful and destructive.

A curious story one hears in these parts is of a young hunter who
had seen a bear in a forest-clothed slope above him. He fired his
gun and wounded the beast slightly. Growling with rage and pain,
it rushed down the mountain-side at incredible speed, seized the
unfortunate man and flung him down a precipice into the chasm
below. He was killed.

Life, in its primal attributes, did not bring such terrors as these
savage beasts have brought with them for the agonizing of two
kingdoms of man and creature. I know that the materialistic
evolutionists tell us of a time when man lived a bestial cave-dwelling
existence and when gigantic animals roamed the planet with
ferocious intent. That something of the kind did prevail one need
not go further than the nearest museum to discover, for the fossil
remains speak eloquently. But our theorists unfortunately do not
go back far enough. Having retraced man's history and this globe's
fortunes to such a distant epoch, they become exhausted and stop.
Yet the long tale did not begin there. It is like a reporter from
another planet arriving here in the midst of the last war, and then
returning to his own people to tell them that the inhabitants of this
earth are exclusively devoted to mutual destruction. Had he come
a couple of years earlier his report would have been differently
fashioned.

I cannot produce any fossils to support my contention and I
cannot find any appurtenances left by the earliest men as their
testamentary remains. I can take no one for a walk upon the solid
ground of tangible evidence. The planet of today is not the planet
of yesterday and the tremendous shifts of its surface and the vast
changes in its structure which time has brought about have swept
away the trifling records of aeons which are now so distant that they
really do not matter. Mother Earth is not concerned with preserving
every testimony of her ancient history in order to provide a few
scientists with materials over which their intellects may churn
away in fresh theorizing. She. herself is well aware of what she has
done, and if puny men think otherwise that is their affair and not
hers.

But if I come with arms empty of fact when I come forward
with my declaration that Nature's first intent was not to begin
the universe by a reign of terror, of which the spider who lusts after
the fly is an apt symbol, but rather the reverse, I possess sufficient
intimations of her original benevolence to satisfy my own criticisms,
which at one time were perhaps more devastating than those of
the scientists whose guesses I had absorbed in my innocence. Those