Siddo, the land mass in the southern hemisphere, was about the size, though not the shape, of Africa and was separated from the other by ten thousand miles of ocean. If the wog geologists were correct, it had once been part of a Gondwanaland, but then it had drifted away. Evolution had then taken a somewhat different path from that on the other continent. Whereas the other continent had been dominated by insects and their distant cousins, the endoskeletal pseudoarthropods, this land mass had been very hospitable to mammals. Though, Sigmen knew, there was an abundance of insect life on it.

The sentient species on Abaka'a'tu, the northern land mass, had been, until five hundred years ago, the wogglebug. On Siddo it had been a remarkably human-looking animal. There Homo ozagen had developed a culture at a stage analogous to that of ancient Egypt or Babylon. And then almost all the humans, civilized or savage, had perished.

This had happened only a thousand years before the first wogglebug Columbus had landed on their great continent. At the time of the discovery and for two centuries after, the wogs had presumed that the indigenes were extinct. But, as the wog colonists began penetrating the jungles and mountains of the interior, they encountered a few small groups of humanoids. These had retreated into the wilderness, where they could hide as successfully as the African pygmies had hidden before the great rain forests were cut down. It was estimated that there might be a thousand, maybe two thousand, scattered over an area of 100,000 square kilometers.

A few specimens, all males, had been captured by the wogs.