 What do the Kar-Rah have in common with 20th century humans?
A scream of brakes, the splash into icy waters, a long descent into alkaline depths ... His car hit the white-painted wooden rail sideways, crashed through, tumbled down a steep slope, struck a huge boulder, bounced up a little, and arced outward, falling as gracefully as a swan-diver toward the inky waters of the Pit, fifty feet beneath.... Movement was slower now, as he began to sink, trapped inside his wrecked car. The edges of that almost bottomless pool were caked with a rim of white—for the water, on which dead birds so often floated, was surcharged with alkali. The ripples that had ruffled the surface waters in the Pit, quieted again to glassy smoothness. Time, the Brother of Death, and the Father of Change, seemed to wait.... Kaalleee!..." Lacking qualities identifiable as human, the disturbance was still like the babble of a group of workmen who have discovered something remarkable. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. A launching catapult for the last space ships built by the gods in exodus, perhaps it was—half a million years ago. Glacial ages, war, decadence, disease, and a final scattering of those ultimate superhumans to newer worlds in other solar systems, had done that. Man, it seemed, had a successor, as ruler of the Earth. Loy Chuk had flown his geological expedition out from the far lowlands to the east, out from the city of Kar-Rah. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ancient Twentieth Century. Loy Chuk and his fellow workers were gathered, tense and gleeful, around the things their digging had exposed to the daylight. The dry mud that had encased it like an airtight coffin, had by now been chipped away by the tiny investigators; but soiled clothing still clung to it, after perhaps a million years. A mineral saturation that had held time and change in stasis. A perfect preservative for organic tissue, aided probably during most of those passing eras by desert dryness. Not the star-conquering demi-gods, but the ancestral stock that had built the first machines on Earth, and in the early Twenty-first Century, the first interplanetary rockets. A strange accident, happening in a legendary antiquity, had aided them in their quest for knowledge. The final instrument he used to test the mummy, looked like a miniature stereoscope, with complicated details.
 Large crania
 An erect posture  General height  Language  Large crania