Daâh: The First Human

by Edmond Haraucourt

  They rarely encountered other humans, and such encounters were awkward, never failing to cause them a complex emotion in which irritation and dread were mingled with a sympathetic interest. Daâh did not detest them deeply; on the contrary, he esteemed his own image in them, and approved of them for being similar to him—but by virtue of that very fact, he feared them, and their appearance constituted a provocation in itself.

  No other animal excited him to conflict so much; he could not perceive one without experiencing a surge of anger, a very special need for violence and a desire to attack; at the sight of one of his peers, a warrior frenzy agitated his muscles and tensed his nerves; an instinctive jealousy and an appetite for triumph drove him to attack, for no reason other than for the love of battle and victory.

  In confrontation with other enemies, he gathered himself compactly for the contest; in the presence of that rival, by contrast, he stood up straight, gripped his club and ground his teeth. The other did the same, and more often than not, they passed by, like two mastiffs that know they have nothing to gain and everything to lose if they come into conflict. But they only passed by slowly and reluctantly, and the temptation of bestial heroism sometimes dragged them back to fight.

  More than anything else, Hock was apprehensive of those encounters, always furious, whose outcome was uncertain. As soon as she saw one becoming imminent, she became alarmed and gave evidence of it; with a fearful bleating, she raised supplicant eyes to her master, grabbing him by the elbow or the wrist, and pulled his hips with all her strength in order to drag him out of sight.

  She did not always succeed in that; her very presence was the reason for more than one battle. Daâh was all the more reluctant to retreat because Hock was there to see it; as proud as a stag, he experienced an obscure sensation of being diminished by not fighting, and of diminishing in his female an admiration of which he was jealous, much more than of her possession. At the risk of his life, he wanted to be the strongest—and above all, to prove it.

  XXII. Reversibility

  He aspired to nothing more, for those duels were devoid of profit; he had known that for a long time, having observed many times, not without astonishment, the singular repugnance he experienced in eating the vanquished individual. He had often tried, habituated to nourish himself on whatever he killed, but as soon as he began to crush a fragment of that flesh between his jaws, however savory, the water of disgust sprang forth in his mouth; no other meat caused him a similar aversion, not even that of the hyena, which stank. He chewed the morsel for a long time without being able to swallow it, and ended up spitting it out between his feet. Then he looked at it on the grass, frowning in order to help himself to understand, and turned toward the dead man, whom he sniffed at a distance, with an interrogative expression.

  No matter how brief the time was that he spent in that contemplation, it rarely failed to cut off his appetite entirely, and to engender a kind of malaise, or even anguish; two paces away from that body, too similar to his own, lying there at full length, he thought vaguely that he might end up like that; in that image he saw himself; before that ruin of his fellow, a sentiment of a broader egotism disturbed him. In sum, he was subject to the specific horror that is consecutive to the fear of death, which the superior animals feel in the presence of the cadaver of one of their own kind.

  The human being, racked by a more active imagination, is doubtless one of those who find it hardest to escape the reflexes of that impression; he only succeeds in vanquishing them, his voracity triumphing over his repugnance, when he has been too long deprived of carnal nourishment. If that privation is perpetuated over a long enough period for several generations to suffer therefrom, anthropophagy can result, and end up being incorporated into mores or even rituals, but it is only produced as a result of education, and when a race has contrived, by hereditary custom, to forget the native horror and substitute an inveterate taste for it.

  Those times had not yet come; there was a long and difficult road to travel toward the ages in which the animal kingdom, impoverished in places, would cease to finish a sufficiency to the carnivorous appetites of humans; cannibalism, not being a necessity, was not a temptation. The nomad hunter, whose jaws worked relentlessly, only found himself exceptionally in the stimulating state of famine that he would have needed to eat his fellow.

  Not only did he no longer dig into it, but at the moment of abandoning the corpse, a kind of saddened sympathy retained him in proximity to the cadaver that would soon be shared between the Wolves and the Hyenas; a resentment took hold of him at having worked on behalf of stinking beasts; dully, he raged against them, and growled as he looked around for them. Finally, he went away, rolling his quarrelsome eyes, and always with regret.

  Thus was denounced already, by a reversibility of animal egotism, the preliminary symptoms of a sensation that would be able in time to become a sentiment, and which would constitute human solidarity.

  XXIII. The Dance and the Song

  Once, in fact, the contest had been exceedingly fierce. Daâh stood next to the vanquished man and looked at him without hatred, for longer than usual. Finally, he went away.

  Suddenly, he heard behind him, too close for his liking, suspect cracking sounds. He ran back. The carrion-eaters were, indeed, forming a circle, and their muzzles were already searching the belly and drawing out the warm entrails. Without worrying about their number, Daâh fell upon them; he had never rushed to an attack with so much fury; his agile club split skulls, broke ribs and smashed jaws, and the band dispersed.

  He found himself alone again with that large naked body lying on its back. The dead man seemed immense, with his two arms widespread and his two legs outstretched; under the downpour, his belly was filling up with pink water which was running out of him, but his hand was clenched on his club in a supreme challenge, and his wide open eyes were still threatening empty space.

  Daâh marveled at that attitude, bellicose even in death; he recognized himself in it; he sensed that the anger in question was not turned against him but against the filthy beasts, and clearly discerned that the cadaver had adopted a defensive stance against their bites. It was the rage of seeing them reach out for him with impunity and the horror of not being able to move under the insult of their contact that gave the defeated man that furious expression! And Daâh approved of it; with his familiar gesture, he struck his torso, to show the immobile man that he had dispersed the common enemy in his stead. In order that the other would admire him more, he leaned over his face.

  A blue mist was floating in the circles of the fixed irises, and that mist was plaintive. Daâh gazed at it so intently that, little by little, it began to move, and he saw the dead man’s thought; just as he had divined it, albeit indistinctly, in the blue mist, he perceived the silhouettes of the carnivores: the entire horde of cowards, coming back as dusk fell, and also a heavy Bear that was passing by, turning a thrust of its nose toward the body, and a disdainful Lion that scarcely stopped in order to sniff...

  At the sequence of insults, Daâh frowned. His instinct of pride rebelled against the assault on the species; the insults that his fellow was suffering offended him in his own flesh, and a vague regret, which was not pity but rather egotism, informed him of their solidarity in the struggle.

  Suddenly, he stood up; twigs cracked behind him; eyes, almost at ground level, shone in the covert of foliage; the flesh-eaters returned to the charge.

  To frighten them, he uttered his battle cry: “Haâh! Heûh!”

  Hock ran to the rescue. With the tip of his club he pointed to the fallen hunter, and with his left arm, he indicated the circle of flesh-eaters hidden in the undergrowth. Then, once again, he pointed at the man with the gaping belly and cried, with disgust:

  “Mâh! Heûh!”

  His mouth, opening and closing by turns, simulated the effort of chewing beasts. The woman understood that he did not want to abandon the other to the tribe of the scavengers.

  To shelter the dead
man, she proposed the earth, with the gesture of scratching; but the work would take too long and the claws of the quadrupeds would soon have undone what human fingernails had contrived with so much difficulty. Daâh proposed the tree, his ordinary refuge, and Hock, at that idea, opened her eyes wide, which brightened. Daâh, having made a decision, grabbed the corpse by the neck.

  He threw the body onto his back; the head was tilted back, resting on his shoulder, and the bushy hair was near his mouth. He made a top-knot of it, which he gripped with his teeth, then opened his arms to embrace the trunk of an oak and started climbing.

  Through the leafy branches, Hock could no longer see him, but she heard him breathing; broken twigs fell upon her along with the rain. He reappeared; she saw him wedge the dead man into the fork of a branch. He came back down, and with his nose in the air he searched the thickets for branches. Hock pointed her finger at the black, hairy head, like a large fruit, in its nest of damp leaves.

  “Ta! Ta!”

  He eventually discovered it, and immediately burst out laughing. The cadaver was truly inaccessible and the wild beasts could come back. He saw their disappointment in advance, their prowling around the oak, their mouths straining toward the prey and their futile leaps. To explain their disappointment and anger to Hock, he pranced like them, trotted in a circle, crouched down and leapt up, coming down again on all fours, stood up, shook his head, and projected his arms and legs. Soon, infected by the joyful humor, the woman also became demented; each in front of the other, to imitate the beasts, they danced.

  When they were tired and covered in sweat, they stopped. Then, the same idea occurred to them both at the same time. They extended their necks toward the heights, and, standing at the foot of the tree in the fading twilight, still out of breath, both of them, with one lugubrious voice, started to parody the howling of the disappointed hyenas: they sang.

  XXIV. The First Burden

  Flouc... Flouf... Flou...

  On the carpet of dead leaves heaped up for centuries by the luxuriant Pliocene vegetation, soaked with rainwater, their bare feet adhered to a warm mud.

  Flouc... Flouf... Flou...

  Always the same noise of a hole in the mud drawing in air like a mouth when the foot is removed; always the same sucker sticking to the soles of their feet, to their ankles, to their calves; always the same serpent of mud spurting up between their toes. Since they started walking, since they were born, they have been walking in the putrid and viscous mud. While they struggle with their arms against the beasts or the branches, they struggle with their legs against the living earth that pulls them down in order to eat them, aspire them, suck them in, as voracious as everything else that surrounds them.

  Floc… Flac!

  When the clay soil refuses to absorb the downpour that never ends, puddles are hidden under the leaves, and they sometimes sink into them hip-deep.

  Flouhou…

  They help one another to get out of the trap, and set off again. The indefatigable rain streams over their bodies, and claps of thunder burst without respite in a sky that they can only perceive at intervals through the bushy dome of the immense virgin forest.

  They do not always go completely naked. Often, thrown over their shoulders and covering their backs, they wear an animal skin, from which the paws, tendons and muscle fibers still hang, in order to protect them from the rain more than from the cold. But at every moment it slips, irritating them, and they usually do not keep it for long; it is sufficient for them to be harassed on two or three occasions, or for it to hinder a necessary gesture, for it to be immediately thrown against a tree trunk or into the mud; it is even sufficient for it to fall off, and it remains on the ground unless it is of immediate utility.

  If it happens that the hazards of the hunt have procured a large prey, they only take the trouble to remove the skin if the cold or the violence of the inundation invites them to cover themselves temporarily; if, on the contrary, the weather is warm or the tree under which they find themselves provides good shelter, neither hide nor fleece interests them.

  Hock never thinks, any more than Daâh does, about exchanging her shred of stinking and ragged pelt for a better fur. That ingenuity would require preliminary reasoning, a comparison, foresight—which is to say, an intellectual labor that is too complicated, and also a material labor that is not imperative. They only have vigor for fatigues that impose themselves ferociously on their brutal strength; Daâh, who uses energy to the point of valor when it is a matter of marching or fighting, remains sluggish and idle before tranquil work; he turns away from it. Industrious toil would not tempt him and would put him to sleep. He only knows how to take trouble when enraged; he can only conceive of effort in violence.

  They do not even carry a flint with them to strip the skin off felled beasts and cut the flesh; they make use of a stone they find nearby, or a branch that they plunge into the carcass and manipulate like a lever; they dislocate the joints, break the ribs, devour on the spot; then they sleep and digest, wake up, recommence consumption until they can swallow no more, and go away, leaving what remains behind, without taking a piece of meat for the following day. Concern for provisions assumes foresight; their ineptitude in presuming future moments results, for the best of reasons, in the incapability of providing for them.

  If such an idea occurred to them, they would reject it without hesitation; having only two needs, their nourishment and their defense, they no longer count the first as soon as it is satisfied, and only the second exists; sated, they become incapable of evoking tomorrow’s hunger, whereas the charge of a burden is an immediate and obvious inconvenience. The future cannot prevail against the present; the present has instinct in its favor, the future only has reasoning; a brute cannot resign himself to sacrifice his present ease to the imagination of needs to come.

  Will the meat that one has left because one can no longer eat, or the fur that one discards because one is warm, soon be lacking when one is hungry or cold again? It does not matter: they will not be regretted because they will no longer be remembered.

  Thus, no baggage; hands free for battle! The only object that the man consents to carry is his club, of which he makes use continually.

  And they go on.

  They had been going on for months, when Hock had a second son, whose birth halted them for an entire day.

  Daâh received this event with less surprise than on the preceding occasion, and most of all with less fear. He knew now that the screeching animal was not to be feared, that one could touch it without peril. He ventured to do so more deliberately, and Hock let him do it; he weighed the child in the hollows of his large palms, turning it over and sniffing it; he lifted it up by one foot, and his hilarity was immense on seeing it head down, opening a toothless mouth. This time, he thought that it resembled a frog, but also Hock, like the first one. He tried to stand it upright, like Hock, but the new-born collapsed into the grass, on its back, and struggled, waving its arms in the air, like Hock.

  Daâh burst out laughing, for that was his custom when he had understood something, and he understood, now.

  Yes, it’s a little human. Humans have young, like Lions, like Deer; they grow them like Apples, like Walnuts, and then they fall, and then they go. The other went; this one will go.

  And one day, perhaps he might grow a little man, too. Daâh was pleased to suppose so; it was impossible for him to conceive, as a first hypothesis, that such fruitfulness could be appropriate to his protégée and forbidden to himself. His irascible pride would have been offended to have to discover such a manifest inferiority in himself; he did not have to reject the supposition, because it did not occur to him.

  Hock was tired; he consented to sleep there. As soon as morning came, however, he set off again and the mother followed; she carried her child under one arm, and then under the other, and on her shoulder and on her back, holding him by the wrists.

  And that was the first burden: the human creature had just learned to charge hers
elf with something; the mother invented the function that would later become incumbent on women in the nomadic horde; she was initiated into the role of bearer of burdens, behind the man who bears arms.

  XXV. The Conquests of Mime

  Although it was true that Daâh was proud to be, among all the animals, The-One-Who-Stands-Upright, the arrogance that he obtained from that privilege did not go as far as making him scornful of other animals. Between them and himself he perceived no essential difference, and did not reckon himself to be a singular animal, since he saw, indistinctly, the two primordial necessities of eating and self-defense imposed upon all of them, including him. Under the double urgency of that common law, he sensed naively that a bond of narrow kinship attached him to the rest of the animal kingdom, and he simply divided creatures into two groups: those that ate, and those that were eaten. On that scale of strength, he placed himself around the middle; he detested few species and did not love any, except as food, and his hatred of the strong was not exempt from an admiration that incorporated a certain deference, and even more envy.

  However, he possessed a sort of faculty, or instinct, which served him greatly, and which would, by virtue of an imperceptible progress, day after day, serve him increasingly to remedy the indigence of his natural weaponry: he recorded. Involuntarily, but constantly, he received impressions of the external world through all his senses, and although is memory was short, those furtive and perpetually-renewed impressions ended up aggregating within him automatically and almost without his being aware of it, to the extent of constituting, in the mists of his mind, an entire little world of concrete images that resembled notions.

  Forms, colors, sounds and odors repeatedly recorded cerebral imprints in him, which were classified as to their signification. He knew that Lions roar, that Vipers crawl, that Thunder rumbles and that Bears prance; he recognized the danger denounced by some glimpsed pelt, some perceived rustle under the leaves, or some whiff in the air; of each one he noticed the habits, the appearances, the tactics.