7. A Very Old Master

The work of art which lies before me is old, unquestionably old; a good
deal older, in fact, than Archbishop Ussher (who invented all out of his
own archiepiscopal head the date commonly assigned for the creation of
the world) would by any means have been ready to admit. It is a
bas-relief by an old master, considerably more antique in origin than
the most archaic gem or intaglio in the Museo Borbonico at Naples, the
mildly decorous Louvre in Paris, or the eminently respectable British
Museum, which is the glory of our own smoky London in the spectacled
eyes of German professors, all put together. When Assyrian sculptors
carved in fresh white alabaster the flowing curls of Sennacherib's hair,
just like a modern coachman's wig, this work of primæval art was already
hoary with the rime of ages. When Memphian artists were busy in the
morning twilight of time with the towering coiffure of Ramses or
Sesostris, this far more ancient relic of plastic handicraft was lying,
already fossil and forgotten, beneath the concreted floor of a cave in
the Dordogne. If we were to divide the period for which we possess
authentic records of man's abode upon this oblate spheroid into ten
epochs--an epoch being a good high-sounding word which doesn't commit
one to any definite chronology in particular--then it is probable that
all known art, from the Egyptian onward, would fall into the tenth of
the epochs thus loosely demarcated, while my old French bas-relief
would fall into the first. To put the date quite succinctly, I should
say it was most likely about 244,000 years before the creation of Adam
according to Ussher.

The work of the old master is lightly incised on reindeer horn, and
represents two horses, of a very early and heavy type, following one
another, with heads stretched forward, as if sniffing the air
suspiciously in search of enemies. The horses would certainly excite
unfavourable comment at Newmarket. Their 'points' are undoubtedly coarse
and clumsy: their heads are big, thick, stupid, and ungainly; their
manes are bushy and ill-defined; their legs are distinctly feeble and
spindle-shaped; their tails more closely resemble the tail of the
domestic pig than that of the noble animal beloved with a love passing
the love of women by the English aristocracy. Nevertheless there is
little (if any) reason to doubt that my very old master did, on the
whole, accurately represent the ancestral steed of his own exceedingly
remote period. There were once horses even as is the horse of the
prehistoric Dordonian artist. Such clumsy, big-headed brutes, dun in hue
and striped down the back like modern donkeys, did actually once roam
over the low plains where Paris now stands, and browse off lush grass
and tall