CHAPTER 3Before man created gods, Ardath was. In his space ship, swinging silently around the world, he slept as the ages went past.
Sometimes he woke and searched, always in vain, for intelligent life in the land below. The road of evolution was long and bloody.
Dark weariness shrouded Ardath as he saw the vast, mindless, terrible behemoths of the oceans. Monsters wallowed into the swamps. The ground shook beneath the tread of tyrant lizards. Brontosaurs and pterodactyls lived and fed and died.
There were mammals—eohippus the fleet and three-toed, and a tiny marsupial in which the flame of intelligence glowed feebly. But the Titan reptiles ruled. Mammals could not survive in this savage, thundering world.
Forests of weeds and bamboo towered in a tropical zone that stretched almost to
