Thea had a superstitious¹ feeling about the potsherds, and liked better to leave them in the dwellings² where she found them. If she took a few bits back to her own lodge³ and hid them under the blankets, she did it guiltily, as if she were being watched. She was a guest in these houses, and ought to behave as such. Nearly every afternoon she went to the chambers⁴ which contained the most interesting fragments of pottery⁵, sat and looked at them for a while. Some of them were beautifully decorated. This care, expended⁶ upon vessels⁷ that could not hold food or water any better for the additional labor⁸ put upon them, made her heart go out to those ancient potters. They had not only expressed their desire, but they had expressed it as beautifully as they could. Food, fire, water, and something else—even here, in this crack in the world, so far back in the night of the past! Down here at the beginning that painful thing was already stirring; the seed of sorrow, and of so much delight.  
There were jars done in a delicate overlay, like pine cones⁹; and there were many patterns in a low relief, like basket-work. Some of the pottery was decorated in color, red and brown, black and white, in graceful¹⁰ geometrical patterns. One day, on a fragment of a shallow bowl, she found a crested¹¹ serpent’s head, painted in red on terra-cotta. Again she found half a bowl with a broad band of white cliff-houses painted on a black ground. They were scarcely conventionalized at all; there they were in the black border, just as they stood in the rock before her. It brought her centuries nearer to these people to find that they saw their houses exactly as she saw them.
 
Yes, Ray Kennedy was right. All these things made one feel that one ought to do one’s best, and help to fulfill¹² some desire of the dust that slept there. A dream had been dreamed there long ago, in the night of ages, and the wind had whispered some promise to the sadness of the savage¹³. In their own way, those people had felt the beginnings of what was to come. These potsherds were like fetters¹⁴ that bound one to a long chain of human endeavor.
 
Not only did the world seem older and richer to Thea now, but she herself seemed older. She had never been alone for so long before, or thought so much. Nothing had ever engrossed¹⁵ her so deeply as the daily contemplation of that line of pale-yellow houses tucked into the wrinkle of the cliff. Moonstone and Chicago had become vague. Here everything was simple and definite, as things had been in childhood. Her mind was like a ragbag into which she had been frantically¹⁶ thrusting whatever she could grab. And here she must throw this lumber¹⁷ away. The things that were really hers separated themselves from the rest. Her ideas were simplified, became sharper and clearer. She felt united and strong.
 
When Thea had been at the O............