Esau Cairn gives a narrative of some months spent in a valley on the savage planet, in which he evolves from the lifestyle of the skittish, tree-clinging primate to the defiant man who looks with disdain upon his rival animals, foremost among them, a type of large baboon.

Howard uses two terms common to his era: nutriment and physical culture. Nutriment is an old Latin term used by Galen in discussing a gladiator’s diet. The physical culture movement was part of the eugenics ideal and was a reaction to a sedentary life and the wasting of the masculine form. Famous boxers and wrestlers would pose for illustrations and photographs. Physical fitness and boxing manuals proliferated, and boxers were measured extensively with 17-21 values taken with a tape measure of the fighter’s body. There was an obsession with the ideal masculine form, even as the actual physical form deteriorated under modern living conditions. This movement grew directly into modern body building.

Howard’s attention to horrific atmosphere is brought forth in the following passage:

“It passed away up the valley, and with its going, it was as if the night audibly expelled a gusty sigh of relief. The nocturnal noises started up again, and I lay back to sleep once more with a vague feeling that some grizzly horror had passed me in the night.”

The body of this section of Chapter One, which was set aside by Howard in his manuscript with scene breaks, essentially served Howard as a platform for his discussion of civilized living as deleterious to a human being in such statements as exemplified below:

“What drove me forth at last was the same reason that has always driven forth the human race, from the first apeman down to the last European colonist—the search for food.”

“I who had been among the strongest on my own planet, found myself a weakling on primordial Almuric.”

“A short time before I had been transported from my native planet, a noted physical culture expert had pronounced me the most perfectly developed man on earth. As I hardened with my fierce life on Almuric, I realized that the expert honestly had not known what physical development was.”

“…as Nature is prone to heal the hurts of such as live close to her.”

“According to the cultured viewpoint, I should have been most miserable. I was not. I reveled in my existence. My being grew and expanded. I tell you, the natural life of mankind is a grim battle for existence against the forces of nature, and any other form of life is artificial and without realistic meaning… I was fully alive.”

“…I dwelt altogether in the present. My life on Earth already seemed like a dream, dim and far away.”

Having expanded as a human being in his own estimation only after months of life in the absence of “anything remotely resembling humanity,” Esau Cairn leaves his savage valley to see what the wider world of Almuric has in store for him.