Edgar Rice Burroughs

“ So-ta said that she would enter alone; I must not be seen if I did not intend to remain, as it was forbidden that one should return and live after having advanced this far. So she left me. She was a dear girl and a stanch and true comrade--more like a man than a woman. In her simple barbaric way she was both refined and chaste. She had been the wife of To-jo. ”

“ And yet it may have been pure coincidence; my better judgment tells me that it is coincidence that in Caspak the term for speechless man is Alus, and in the outer world of our own day it is Alalus.
The comely woman of whom I spoke was called So-ta, and she took such a lively interest in me that To-jo finally objected to her attentions, emphasizing his displeasure by knocking her down and kicking her into a corner of the cavern. I leaped between them while he was still kicking her, and obtaining a quick hold upon him, dragged him screaming with pain from the cave. ”

“ I don't like to appear conceited, but I may as well admit that I am proud of my strength and the science that I have acquired and developed in the directing of it--that and my horsemanship I always have been proud of. ”

“ The two dead men they left where they had fallen, nor gave them a second glance--thus cheap is life upon Caspak.
These people also were cave-dwellers, but their caves showed the result of a higher intelligence that brought them a step nearer to civilized man than the tribe next "toward the beginning." ”

“ Here again was a new type of man--a higher type than the primitive tribe I had just quitted. They were a taller people, too, with better-shaped skulls and more intelligent faces. There were less of the ape characteristics about their features, and less of the negroid, too. They carried weapons, stone-shod spears, stone knives, and hatchets-- and they wore ornaments and breech-cloths--the former of feathers worn in their hair and the latter made of a single snake-skin cured with the head on, the head depending to their knees. ”

“ I must have lain there bound and uncomfortable for two or three hours when at last So-ta entered the cave. She carried a sharp knife--mine, in fact, and with it she cut my bonds.
"Come!" she said. "So-ta will go with you back to the Galus. It is time that So-ta left the Band-lu. Together we will go to the Kro-lu, and after that the Galus. To-jo will kill you tonight. He will kill So-ta if he knows that So-ta aided you. We will go together." ”