deputation cooperated completely, confirmed and widened this impression.
For all their intelligence, the natives had no technology. They had no
shelters except flimsy temporary ones against rain and sun; they had almost
no tools, and those that they did make were those expectable, at best, from
the most refined and sophisticated era of a late Stone Age, they were
nomadic hunters, dependent about equally upon fleetness of foot and fire-
hardened thorn daggers. The closest thing to a missile weapon that anyone
could find among them was a sling, used only against game they could not
outrun.
Except for the stuffed tigers, whose fatal secret they knew with surgical
precision, they had no natural enemies. They used neither thom nor sling
against each other, and seemed completely shocked at the Idea after it was
conveyed to them, with much linguistic difficulty. It was in fact so
unthinkable that their codes contained no prohibition against it. In all
other respects their social and religious structures were elaborate in the
extreme, and both were buttressed by a long and equally elaborate literary
tradition, mostly oral, but with key works preserved upon fine parchment in
a written language which was the despair of everyone on board the favelim
And yet, trimmed of all these riches, the central tenet of their religion
seemed to be that of utter resignation to anything that a completely
malignant Fate might bring.
“Which is a peculiarly anomolous notion in such a paradise as this planet
seems to be,” Ertak said, when he was appraised of it ‘And yet I don’t see