Daâh: The First Human

by Edmond Haraucourt

  “Beûh...”

  There is no response. Then, her plaint becomes a plea; breath against breath, she appeals to him:

  “Daâh...”

  He does not hear her; he does not see her; he remains stuck in the mud of his darkness. She resigns herself to it; she sits down to his left, and side by side, staring straight ahead, they both watch the rain falling; they can no longer even see it.

  But they will always—still, in a hundred thousand years—remember the Deluge.

  XXX. The Widow

  As they moved further westwards they encountered humans with increasing frequency. Undoubtedly, guided by the same instinct, the others had been following the same direction, but some obstacle, perhaps insurmountable, stopping them one by one, had confined them in the same area. What the reason might be, Daâh did not care; he observed the fact, which was unwelcome. He had ended up becoming so accustomed to his companion that he was now apprehensive of losing her, and every approach by a male seemed to him to be that of an abductor.

  He tried not to let that show, but he avoided his fellows even more carefully than predators; he took great care in examining their trails when he discovered them; then he changed his own, and tried to erase his tracks in order not to be followed. Hock helped him in that, with more subtle ruses, of which he knew her to be capable, and she applied herself loyally to that prudent work without any afterthought of sexual curiosity, dreading above all else the loss of her protector. Those precautions did not prevent alerts from becoming increasingly frequent.

  One day, toward the end of summer, on emerging into a clearing, they saw a couple at the foot of a beech tree.

  The man and the woman, crouching in the grass, were eating and looking straight ahead. An eviscerated ibex was lying in the grass. Instantly, they were on their feet, and the male took three steps forward.

  His higher forehead, his less compacted face and his less massive body indicated another race, frailer and more delicate; his stance was straighter. Immediately, he was odious to Daâh, by virtue of his form and his bearing, by virtue of his eyes, the audacity of his gesture and the pretention of showing himself to women in a provocative attitude.

  The man had taken three steps; Daâh took six, to affirm that he was the braver.

  His valor had never had so many spectators; his appetite for glory was multiplied tenfold by that. He did not pause until he was in the middle of the clearing, where he planted himself, stiffly, his jaw raised and his weapon in his fist. Immediately, the other advanced.

  The two women, on the edge of the wood, bleated like deer, calling back their men. But the latter could no longer hear them; one last bound brought them face to face and their clubs collided.

  “Haâh!”

  “Han!”

  The duel was brief: a skull caved in, a double roar of pain and triumph; and a single shrill scream—the distant voice of the fearful woman.

  Daâh, standing over his victim, finished crushing his face with thrusts of his heel. Then he bent down and plunged his hand into the pulp of blood and brain; he smeared his breast with it, and in the crimson of his victim he danced around the body, whirling around him the circles of his club.

  Finally, he placed a foot on the torso of the vanquished man, turned toward the widow, and emitted a long howl.

  She had remained under the beech, collapsed and devoid of strength; she was waiting for death. But when she saw the man start marching in her direction, fear lashed her and she tried to run away; head down, she sought an exit in order to plunge into the forest; always driven back by the tangle of brushwood, she ran one way and then the other, like a beast at bay. When he was able to catch her, she moaned plaintively. He grabbed her by the hair, knocked her to the ground, and took her there and then in order to attest his victory.

  On the far side of the clearing, Hock watched them complacently. Tranquilized now, she deloused her child. She, too, had thought, a little while before, that the dead man’s companion was about to be killed; when she was able to observe that the victor did not appear to have that intention, she became disinterested in the rest; while running her fingers through the infant’s bushy hair, she waited.

  Suddenly, she remembered that at the moment of the encounter, the other couple had been eating under the beech tree. She tucked her son under her armpit and ran toward the tree. Having arrived at the foot of the trunk she checked the grass with her foot before setting the brat down; then she crouched down and, without paying any more attention to the couple, whose swoon left her free to choose the best morsels, she attacked the remains of the meal, chuckling greedily.

  After a time, she saw the master coming back. He was walking slowly, with the air of serene majesty that he ordinarily adopted when returning from the most difficult battles; he thought that gait indispensable to the combatant returning victorious, as a conclusive testimony of his power and the minimum of effort that his victory had cost him.

  He arrived. He was hungry. His face was rubicund, his thorax illuminated by blood, as was his right foot, up to the ankle and his right arm half way up to the elbow. Without crouching down he extended the ample gesture of his red hand along the ibex, took hold of the beast and broke its back over his knee. With a flick of his wrist, he tore away three ribs and, still dignified, waving that scarlet fragment in the air, he turned to the widow in order to give her a sign to approach. In an almost gentle voice, he invited her to come and eat with him.

  “Mâh! Mâh!”

  She hesitated, in the distance. Already impatient, be barked an order:

  “Ta!”

  His imperious finger designated a place beside him in the grass, where he threw the piece of meat.

  She came then, tentatively; her breast, too, was stained with the blood that contact with the victor had imprinted on her; she bent her back as a sign of obedience, and her hands extended their palms at the level of her temples. She had not been hasty enough, however; the man reiterated his order.

  “Ta!”

  This time, Hock was discontented, because of the sharing of the food; her facial muscles swelled, hollowing out wrinkles in front of her hair. At the same time, with her arm and her head, she made the violent gesture to the right and the left of sweeping away something unwelcome, which, later, was to signify refusal.

  No!

  The male did not admit protests against his will. He growled, and tranquilly put the rebellion down with a blow of his fist. For the third time he repeated the injunction:

  “Ta!”

  The widow came closer, and when she had arrived before her new master, she bowed her head, moving it up and down, slightly more with each repetition, in the gesture of submission that offers the nape of the neck to a blow, and which was later to signify acquiescence.

  Yes!

  She took the place indicated. Then Daâh, with his bloody right hand, took hold of her by the hair in order to indicate that he had her. Then all three of them, in silence, a bone in hand, bit into the raw flesh.

  When they had eaten, the nomadic hunter, faithful to his custom, perched the dead man in an oak. That done, he picked up his club, while Hock picked up her child. With a shove on the shoulder, he commanded his captive to start walking behind him and to follow.

  “Ta!”

  The trio went back into the forest, the man in the lead.

  From that day forward, Daâh had two women.

  XXXI. Bigamy

  Daâh only knew one number: unity. The fleeting quality of his sensations prevented him from pausing on one thing long enough for it to leave a clear and permanent image in his memory; every object became as if dead as soon as he was no longer looking at it; the vision of the second effaced that of the first, and Daâh was incapable of counting as far as two. For him, every individual existed in isolation, being one Oak next to one Oak, one Bear and one Bear, and each one was designated by the location it occupied.

  “Ta... Ta...”

  It would, however, be unjust to say that the candida
te for humanity was utterly deprived of any faculty of abstraction. By virtue of finding identical appearances endlessly and everywhere, he reached the point of storing in his depths vague but analogous images, whose analogy ended up becoming obvious; he thus succeeded, without any process of classification, in conceiving the idea of a resemblance between forms notoriously recorded in his brain. While continuing to be unaware that one oak and one oak make a pair, he knew that they were similar. In the same way, he learned that his companions resembled one another in certain particulars, and, without calculating that he had two women, he was pertinently aware that he had one and one.

  “Ta... Ta...”

  The newcomer was, at first, merely a “Ta” like everything else in the world: “Ta,” the thing that is there; “Ta,” which designated her place during the march or the halt; “Ta,” which formulated the order to approach, to crouch down, to follow, to run or to stop.

  “Ta,” which prescribed immediate obedience, in all its forms, gradually became the exclamation to which the captive responded; and, just as had happened to the first woman, the frequency of appeals ended up constituting a personality and a name for the second:

  “Ta!”

  Sometimes, too, the master called her Hock, like the other, not in error but deliberately, because of their sexual analogy, and he only called her that in special circumstances, precisely when he substituted the second in the role that had until then been played by the first. When hunger did not oblige him to launch himself into the woods to search for food, when a location appeared to offer him a temporary security, when he had eaten and he was in a good mood, he played with one or the other, at the hazard of proximity, and according to the caprice of the moment:

  “Hock!”

  During the early days of that common life, it appeared that a whim attracted him toward the stranger more frequently than toward his former companion; doubtless the charm of novelty seduced him, and that possession flattered his pride, revivifying on each occasion the proof of his victory. But that memory of battle did not take long to attenuate, and he soon lost it completely in the mists of the past; nothing any longer remained of it. The widow, however, persisted in retaining a prestige of which she took no account, and to which Daâh himself was subject without being aware of it.

  That physical preference was not based on a keener admiration. The male did not say to himself that one of the females was more beautiful than the other; his faculties of analysis were still far from permitting him any conception of beauty; he did not perceive any notable difference between the two creatures, distinguishing them simply as one distinguishes two animals of the same species whose pelts are dissimilar.

  “Hock... Ta...”

  It remained the case, nonetheless, that he experienced quite different sentiments in their regard: a more profound affinity attached him more sympathetically to Hock, because of their common past and similar tastes, whereas a more vibrant charm attracted him to Ta; he felt a strange pleasure in looking at her or touching her.

  That diversity of impressions and appetites would appear to indicate that the instinct of the male, more alert than his intellect, had differentiated the women perfectly: one of the two was of his own race and the other of foreign stock. What his mind did not know, his flesh had divined: the flesh went toward the unfamiliar, and Daâh was perhaps obeying a law of his sex, if it is true that nature wishes the crossing of races, and obtains some advantage therefrom for the improvement of the species.10

  XXXII. The Two Races

  Daâh’s two companions bore little resemblance to one another. Hock was, like him, short in stature and thickset; Ta was noticeably taller, with a slimmer torso and more ample hips on sleeker legs. It was, above all, in the construction of the skull and the face that the contrast between the two races was affirmed. Both were dolicocephalic, but instead of a crushed mask with a low forehead, a short nose, a receding chin and profound orbits hollowed out like grottos beneath the double arch of a bony brow-ridge, the latecomer presented a high and bulging forehead, a longer, less turned-up nose, and eyes almost on the surface of the head with more prominent cheekbones. No trace of the simian prognathism that gave Hock and Daâh such a bestial character appeared in her; her mouth, less distant from the nostrils, was much less vast, edged with less fleshy lips; not only was the chin not receding but, on the contrary, it projected slightly. That species of elegance was further accentuated by the slenderness of the neck, which detached the head from the shoulders and displayed it more.

  When she walked, Hock held her upper body forward, letting her heavy hands swing in front of her thighs; Ta’s stance was more upright.

  They also differed in their instincts and their tastes. Having originated in another climate, and perhaps endowed with a more ancient heredity, the second spouse already showed a few refinements: she liked bright colors. One day, Hock and Daâh saw her, with amazement, pick a red flower, which she placed in her hair at the top of her head; they immediately set out in quest of similar flowers and did likewise. She appreciated scents, and occasionally plunged her nose between petals; when the odor was to her taste, she laughed; but if she presented the calyx to Hock or Daâh, they turned away indifferently, almost with displeasure.

  No less irritable than her companion, but less valiant, she was more subject to nervous frights; her dreams, the memories of the day, made her jump every night with a strident cry; even more than Hock she was afraid of the dark, snakes, silence and solitude. She liked caresses. When they perched in a tree in the evening, Ta climbed up higher, in order to be better protected or to have more warning in case of an alarm. When the fortune of the route caused her to encounter the relatively dry layer of a shelter beneath a rock, she rejoiced in being able to huddle in the warmth against Daâh or against Hock, gurgling with pleasure.

  At any rate, the two spouses lived on good terms; they were ignorant of jealousy, since they were ignorant of love, and when the master coupled with one of them, the other took no more umbrage than in watching them crack nuts. The only rivalry they knew was produced by the division of meat. When the hunter had brought down some item of prey, he kept the best part for himself; impatiently, their eyes gleaming with covetousness, they waited until he had exercised his right of choice; immediately after him, they disputed the rest with angry yelps.

  They searched for their nourishment together, calling to one another for help when aid was necessary, or even inviting one another to participate in a windfall when the provender was sufficient for two.

  Similarly, they became afraid together; they assisted one another in that instead of reassuring one another mutually. Since Ta’s arrival, Hock had suffered the contagion of a more unhealthy impressionability than her own; by virtue of reciprocal reactions they exasperated their nervousness. Ta’s reached its paroxysm at the approach of violent storms; then the young female, intractable and furious, could not bear any approach; the slightest contact triggered the gesture of beating, and Hock responded with the gesture of biting.

  The autumn went by; the stranger became even more nervous than usual; soon she could only walk laboriously, racked as she was by the preliminary symptoms of her first childbirth. She had only been living with Daâh for three months, but neither she nor the others were aware of the conclusions that might appropriately be drawn from that short duration, since the appreciation of time escaped them, as well as the laws of generation.

  It remained the case nonetheless that the pregnancy was about to import around Daâh the elements of an exotic race; by mingling the two progenitures and their disparate tendencies, it introduced a redoubtable factor into the first human group, the scourge of the future. To see it appear so soon is like a symbol of the evil to which all human societies are subject without suspecting its cause, for the complexity of origins would perpetuate, in peoples and even in families, a difference of heredity thanks to which the violence would be exasperated of two passions that were to make history bloody: sexual attraction and intellectu
al dissent; love and discord.

  XXXIII. The Fruit of the Woman

  The trio wandered for about four months, and winter became more evident, not so much by virtue of cold as famine. The animals disappeared, some dead and others in hiding; between the branches stripped of their leaves, the prey perceived the hunter at a greater distance, and the barer wood facilitated its flight. They knew hunger.

  They rarely found anything but the occasional marmot asleep in its bifurcated hole. Even the roots were rotten, the leaves ligneous. The cadaver of a bison, disemboweled and putrefying on the bank of a stream procured them an abundant harvest of small crustaceans, with which they stuffed themselves during an entire day of idleness, but then the hunger recommenced.

  The stranger appeared to suffer more than the others; she lamented in the rear, like Hock before. Suddenly, in the same manner as Hock, she brought a daughter into the world.

  The prodigy of childbirth was occurring before Daâh for the third time; it no longer provoked any but a mild astonishment. The man was accustomed to the phenomenon, and if he still experienced some surprise, it was due less to the creature itself than its appearance from Ta.

  He thought, quite distinctly:

  Well! That one, too!

  The resemblance between the two women was confirmed by a further detail; one more strangeness was added to the multiple differences already observed between himself and his protégées. By one distinction more they were separated from him, to constitute a group external to him, confronting him.