The conclusion of Chapter One begins on a note of brutal adventure:

“With a scream, it lurched off its victim, slashing murderously, and then it began rolling and tumbling over the grass, roaring hideously and ripping up the earth with its frantic talons, in a ghastly welter of blood and streaming entrails.”

Such are good deeds on Almuric as Esau Cairn plays a butchering good Samaritan to an apeman battling a gigantic cat. The apeman’s friends are not appreciative of the effort and try to kill him, so he flees into the hills. In these hills Esau considers the preposterous nature of his predicament, having heard the apeman speak in a language identical to his own. The glimpse of the distant savanna and this sight of men, if strange and alien, drove him in search of human companionship down out of the hills, even shaving his face to make himself more presentable in earth terms.

In the savannah, Esau finally gets to laugh when he sees a creature that looks like a potbellied pig with the back legs of a kangaroo. Finding himself vulnerable in open terrain, Esau finally discovers a way to produce fire on Almuric, enabling us to enjoy a vision of primitive man’s fire-lit night as “the stealthy pad of great paws, and the glimmer of wicked eyes,” threatened his fire-lit precinct. Esau spends his last night on the plain within sight of a monolithic city, proportions that he judged could not have been raised by the apemen he had thus far encountered:

“Then the moon rose behind the city, etching its massive outlines in the weird golden glow. It looked black and somber in the moonlight; there was something distinctly brutish and forbidding about its contours. As I sank into slumber I reflected that if apemen could build a city, it would surely resemble the colossus in the moon.”

The golden glow was put off by the colossal moon of Almuric, the city framed before it.