She did not gaze for long. Accustomed to the narrow spectacles of the forest, she experienced vertigo before the excessively vast and mobile gulf. In the semicircle of those extremely distant horizons, which seemed to her to be shifting, like the river, her head was already dizzy; her eyelids blinked.
She tried to raise her face toward the sky, but the clouds were moving too rapidly; quickly, she closed her eyes. She shook her shoulders, and her mane streamed; then, slowly, she recoiled until she sensed the tickling of twigs on her back. On making contact with them, she pivoted with an abrupt movement; flexing her legs and tilting her upper body forwards, with one arm projected to part the branches and the other leaning on the ground, head down, she plunged into the wood.
For one more moment her voluminous rump stood out clearly against the dark background of the thicket, and then the curtain of foliage closed behind her.
II. Genesis
It was the first days of the human species, long before the bitterness of the temperature obliged our ancestors to seek shelter in the depths of caverns—and yet it was yesterday, or very nearly, since it was only one or two thousand centuries ago.5
By then, our planet, after so many successive revolutions, had already taken on the form whose broad outlines were scarcely to be modified again before our day. The envelope of the earth, gradually cooled, had wrinkled like the rind of a ripe fruit, and had been punctured by volcanoes; then, as it shrank, the globe, having become tetrahedral, had pushed outwards the ridges of its quadruple fracture; those wounds had scarred into long chains of mountains, at the feet of which the continents were stacked; on the unexpected crests, the humidity of the atmosphere learned to condense, inventing the snow and ice that were previously unknown.
The Alpine creases now bristled their refrigerant summits, but at the same time as that enormous freezer had surged forth, a cauldron had been hollowed out in parallel; to the west of Europe, a broader ocean displayed its immense surfaces of evaporation under the topics. Between that nucleus of heat and that nucleus of chill, the air current carried with it a tide of clouds. Untiringly, for centuries, the swell of clouds flowed from the marine region toward the mountainous regions. Through such a thick envelope, the sun almost never shone any longer; in the year devoid of summer, autumn prolonged the spring; in the day devoid of noon, twilight lasted from dawn until dusk; but the opaque mantle of vapors that stopped the sun’s rays in passage also prevented the chilling of nights and winters, with the result that the variation in temperature of the hours and the seasons was scarcely sensible.
Centuries-long rains fell upon the plains, while snow accumulated on the heights; already, from time to time, a few excessively heavy glaciers were breaking up on the edges of the circles, and gently but formidably, dragged by their own weight, they set out in motion with an invincible slowness.
The ages of exuberance had long gone by for the earth; the last skeletons of the giant saurians were petrifying in the soil. A less furious era was inaugurated. The supreme logic from which all harmony is born, which regulates the simultaneous transformations of heavenly bodies and their parasites, had led progressively to the epoch over which the beautiful population of the Mammals would reign. With them, a more delicate life became manifest during the Tertiary age; by virtue of successive selections, forms diversified, organs were refined, senses became subtler; a more complex and better-organized nervous system tended to produce the brain...
A few millennia ago, those young conquerors had taken possession of the renovated world, but not all of them were able to tolerate the relative cooling that was beginning to shrink the atmosphere; already, races of animals were migrating or becoming extinct, while others varied in order to adapt themselves, and less cold-sensitive species appeared in the world.
The new-born humans moved discreetly among them, still rare and denuded of everything.
Here and there on the earth, variants of that naked biped were encountered; they resembled one another in their essential characteristics—for it is important to note that the climactic conditions, under the various latitudes of the globe, scarcely differed; such a production, when it became realizable at one point, became simultaneously realizable at another. On several continents, several races of humans appeared almost at the same time—which is to say, within twenty thousand years or so.6
III. Eden
Seen from Mars, which shines ruddily, the Earth probably seemed green, so abundant was the vegetation. Throughout Western Europe, an uninterrupted forest was displayed, from the double massif of the mountains to the triple gulf of the seas; it was so dense that the branches of one tree were entangled with those of the next, and the plants killed one another like animals in order to earn their places to live.
The cadavers of the vanquished fattened the moist soil; the successive layers of leaves and branches had accumulated a spongy carpet soaked by the incessant downpour; the water that fell onto that putrescence as rain rose up above it again in mists or flowed beneath it as streams. A heavy and murky air, impregnated with vapors, stagnated over that bed of fermentations, and the foliage enclosed it beneath its vault.
In that nourishing atmosphere, the vegetables swelled up with sap, and insects seethed. The latter were already old; some of them dated from the carboniferous period, and they had prospered. Myriads of wings were buzzing over every pond; under every leaf, bellies crawled, mouths ate and feet scuttled.
Exuded from that water-saturated ground, springs flowed down the slopes of every hill; cascades roared in every gorge; in all the hollows of the mountains, lakes were born and grew, awaiting the moment when they could break their dykes to race into the lower regions. With every storm, the streams, transformed into torrents, dragged away soil, sand, rocks and uprooted trees pell-mell, along with animals drowned in their thousands.
The rivers received and absorbed everything, and carried it all away; the feeble watercourses that we call the Rhine, the Seine, the Loire, the Garonne and the Rhone no longer resemble what they were then; through the forest of the Occident, that quintuple surge of brutal water plowed a passage, opening five streaks of brightness in the verdure and the shadow; those sinuous avenues radiated from the center toward the shores like the tentacles of an octopus the color of the sky. Immeasurably swollen by the abundance of the rain, no less than by the melting of snows, the rivers progressively gained all the amplitude offered to the invasion of their waves; our plains were covered by them, our hills emerging as islets; only their heights were habitable.
The inhabitants of the marsh, the hippopotamus and the rhinoceros, accommodated themselves without difficulty to that inundation, which characterized the approach of the glacial ages, but a multitude of other beasts were driven back toward the plateaux, climbing up to seek their shelter and their nourishment under the trees; they found both in plenty, for the thick vegetation multiplied lairs, and there was no lack of prey for carnivores, just as there was no shortage of foliage for the herbivores.
Among the fauna and flora of that Eden, the humans of our days would not have felt much out of place; to begin with, they would recognize the plants and animals of modern Europe, and those of Asia and northern Africa. At the second glance, they would be astonished to find species from hot lands and those from temperate climates brought together as in a zoological garden. But if they looked harder, they would be alarmed to discover that the cats on the banks of the Seine were twice as large as the lions of the Atlas; that, compared to the ancestor of the caves, the Pyrenean bear is a mere cub; and that our elephants of the Ivory Coast could shelter under the abdomen of their ancestors of the Pliocene era.
Over that world of colossi, the troops of nimbus clouds sent forth by the sea flowed incessantly through a low and angry sky; storms burst without respite. At every moment, beneath the vaults of the forest, green holes illuminated by lightning lightened the gloom; to the din of the thunder distant rumbles responded; from the height of the punctured clouds, water fell in cataracts.
/> Sometimes, however, the rain stopped and the earth saw a few shreds of azure shining through. That was when a cold wind had risen from the Alpine moraines to descend toward the Occident, driving back its clouds and tearing apart its mists. Then the Great Apes, survivors of once-numerous species, shivered in the trees and wrapped their long arms around their breasts; the felines fled, skimming the ground and mewling in distress, horrified by the mortal blast that foreshadowed for them the glacial cataclysm in which they would perish.
Every evening, at the entrances to the caves that the giant Cats disputed with the Bears, the growl of their battles filled the misty air. The malign Elephants raised their trunks and trumpeted, satisfied to hear their enemies, the flesh-eaters, killing one another on the plateau, but the Ostriches and the Horses fled fearfully in groups, while the Hyenas, the Dogs and the Foxes crouched down in the grass and licked their chops, sure of finding the carcass of the Lion tomorrow, lying with its back broken and its breast devoured by the invincible Bear.
In that immense larder of the Pleistocene forest, no creature existed save to serve the hunger of another. The human omnivores maintained their place there, naked and gluttonous, eating until they could eat no more, and having no other function.
IV. The Solitaries
I am not inventing anything; I am trying to remember. You can remember, too, but you don’t know it. Listen, in order that you might be helped. You carry in your fibers and young blood the indelible residuum of what you once were, in the person of your most distant ancestors. These are your dormant memories that I am awakening, in order to evoke in you the time when your ancestors conquered a soul for you...
They were wanderers; they lived in the woods.
Paleontology has difficulty recovering traces of those Tertiary ancestors. Evidence of a human presence was only able to subsist from the epoch when human remains were protected against the action of time, and the era had not yet come for us to conquer shelters; the caves remained in the possession of wild beasts, which scarcely lent themselves to that conquest; isolated humans were unable to claim them to capture them or to conserve them. The occupation of caves only became realizable for the already-numerous group of the clan, and it corresponded with the first social manifestations. In the meantime, the nomads fled such lairs and their vicinity, instead of seeking them out. They had neither shelters nor tombs; they lived and died outside, in the mud. Their remains, gnawed and scattered by wild beasts, excavated by insects, washed by the rain, and softened and pulverized by the centuries, have disappeared.
Like all beasts of prey, those humans lived in isolation.7
Alongside them, a few more prolific, more ancient species, notably families of insects, sketched out a commencement of society, which rendered life less precarious, but the nascent species saw those civilizations without understanding their benefit. Because of their small number, humans encountered one another rarely, and, on the other hand, because of their weakness, they retained more suspicion and had more difficulty in acquiring their subsistence, so they avoided one another instead of banding together.
The double egotism of hunger and fear kept them apart. Everyone was for themselves in a world outside of which nothing existed; the encounter of the sexes constituted a rapid accident, after which both parties went their separate ways and forgot one another.
It happened, however, that a couple was formed.
V. An Encounter
The young woman, on quitting the cliff, had moved on cautiously. Although it was not her goal, she moved in an almost straight line, only deviating in one direction or the other if the tangle of branches, creepers and brushwood blocked her path. Stopped continually by the multiplicity of obstacles, she only advanced slowly, always bent over, brushing the grass with her left hand, which she swung at knee-height, stretching out her right arm to bring it back thereafter, and then to raise it again. Her upper body obliquely angled, her neck extended and her face upright, she paddled through the verdure.
That crouching stance, which the exuberance of the vegetation rendered necessary and constant, had made her knees and heels enormous, as with all those of her race. At the same time the muscles of the hindquarters, having to lift the weight of that inclined torso incessantly, had generously developed, while those of the nape of the neck were hypertrophied by the continuous effort of holding the head up; thus, she did not carry her head on her shoulders but thrust forward, and her face went first, her eyes squinting and her nostrils wide open.
Her belly, heavy with undigested food, was bulging under its own weight; her breasts were beginning to hang down beneath her inclined chest, even though she had never given birth and was still a virgin.
At the slightest rustle in the foliage, she stood still in order to watch out; then, her narrow eyes, her wide nose and her ample ears shifted in the direction of the danger; as soon as it became precise she reached for the nearest solid branch, gripped it and hoisted herself up into the tree in order to seek refuge there. When she thought that she no longer had anything to fear, she slid down to the ground and resumed walking.
She had been alive for thirteen or fourteen years. One day, she had been born to a wandering female who had breast-fed her and carried her under her arm. Another day had come when that mother, finding herself weary, or being hunted, had thrown her into the grass—or perhaps some wild animal had devoured the mother and disdained the child. Over the centuries similar adventures had arrived, in due course, to thousands of others who had not taken long to perish, and that is why the race, so endangered and so sparsely fecund, only multiplied with extreme slowness. That daughter had succeeded in not dying, but she remained in the notion of no longer having more than a moment to endure.
Again she started; something had moved beneath the leaves; dead wood had cracked under a weight. Briskly, she launched her right hand upwards and seized a branch; with one leap she disappeared into the canopy. Only one leg still hung down, covered with coarse muddy hair. Profound wrinkles striped the sole of the foot; the big toe, separated from the others, groped in search of a branch to grip.
She howled; something had seized her foot. In vain she scrambled, around her ankle the grip of jaws or a fist tightened, and pulled her down. As she leaned over, she saw a face beneath her in which eyes were gleaming. Flatter and less hairy that those of other beasts, that mouth clenched its teeth rather than opening them toward the prey, and grimaced furiously.
The young female had never seen a being of her own race at close range, and only knew her own image vaguely, having glimpsed it in the mirror of pools, but animal intuition informed her of a lesser danger. That it was an enemy, however, she had no doubt, since everything was an enemy. Feeling that she was caught, she uttered shrill screams, trying to crush the face extended toward her with a blow of her heel—but the fist held her firmly; an increasingly furious shaking dislodged her from her tree, and she fell into the grass.
From then on, she did not cry out any more; with the hope of escape, her fear came to an end; she accepted the battle. Scarcely had she touched the ground, and before her aggressor had time to fall upon her, she rebounded and attacked with her fingernails, knees and teeth. A punch in the face stunned her without defeating her, and she returned to the attack. She sank her teeth into the shoulder of the male, who had seized her around the waist; he howled in his turn; picking up a stone, he brought it down on the top of her head, with a blow so hard that she collapsed; circles of light spun before her, and confusedly, she thought she felt a violent mass descend upon her back.
When she opened her eyes again, the victor was still holding onto her, and not devouring her. A strange dolor burned her, and a languor also retained her there, without the idea occurring to her of recommencing her self-defense. She was not even astonished to find the enemy so close and not to experience either fear or hatred. When he stood up, she did not take advantage of the moment to flee. Bewildered, she turned her head to the right and the left, as if she were searching for an exp
lanation of what was happening within her; every time, her gaze paused on the man.
Now he was standing up, two paces away, breathing heavily. She saw him stretch his limbs, stick out his chest and extend his neck; then, abruptly, he struck his ribs with both fists. He lowered his eyes toward his victim, and their gazes met for the first time.
VI. Him
Hairier than her and even more thickset, he was, like her, short in stature but redoubtable in appearance. He was, in truth, a sort of monster, very different from all the beasts one encounters in the forest. As if he were only in the world to mark a phase in the development of his species, he bore the disgrace of beings in the course of transformation, which are seeking their equilibrium and will not remain for long in their present condition.
Rather precisely, he had the appearance of what he was in reality: a colossal fetus. A child prematurely born that suddenly acquires the musculature of Hercules and gesticulates furiously might give an idea of that silhouette, simultaneously grotesque and formidable.
As in the new-born, two organs were predominant in him: the stomach and the brain, the seats of the two functions that would be prevalent, one today and the other tomorrow: for the present, an abdomen, for it was merely a matter of eating; for the future, an encephalum, since there would be a matter of thinking. But that acquired monstrosity, the brain, did not yet serve the latter function; while awaiting the future, the disproportionate skull encumbered the rest of the beast with its size, and the human embryo was curbed beneath its futile weight.
Daâh: The First Human Page 2
