Daâh: The First Human

by Edmond Haraucourt

  With a cheerful voice he summoned his women to share the meat; they came running and opened up the beast. When they plunged their arms into the warm breast and tore away strips of muscle in order to stuff them gluttonously into their mouths, the hunter let them do it without claiming his share. Suddenly, impetuous laughter burst forth above them. Raising their blood-splashed faces toward the master, they thought that he was proud of his victory, but he was no longer thinking about the Bear. He was thinking:

  Daâh has hidden his life in a safe place; no one will any longer be able to kill Daâh. Daâh, the invulnerable, will always be the victor...

  Weeks passed; then, at the first ray of sunlight he saw his Shadow beside him again.

  “Heûh!”

  Had it escaped, then? Did it not want Daâh to be invulnerable? Daâh had ceased to be immortal. Someone, someday, would kill him, and no prudence could prevent that day from coming!

  In his anguish, he felt something like a dolorous beast twisting under his skull; it was trying to get out; by means of an urgent contention of all his might, he helped it—and a thought nearly emerged from the man.

  Confusedly, for a second, he glimpsed that a fatality weighed upon all beings: to die, and to struggle for life until one died in the struggle.

  XXXVIII. The Fear of the Void

  To die? What idea of nothingness could Daâh have? No instinct, no ancestral experience, informs him of it; among the cells that compose him, none remembers its death; in the innumerable host of beings of which he is the issue, all have marched toward death but not a single part of him has entered into death before giving him life; his flesh cannot recall anything and his mind cannot conceive anything.

  It is, however, the second time that an evocation of death has traversed the Human mind. Already it has revealed itself to him one morning, under the aspect of Hock half-lost in a mist; today it has gained a more precise, more troubling quality: Not to feel the teeth that will devour me...

  That almost savant conception has surged forth and disappeared so rapidly that he has scarcely glimpsed it, and has retained nothing of it. But between that minute and the preceding one, fugitive as they might have been, an impression will remain within him, and it will be combined with all those that he has inherited from his race: anguish has become human; in the animal fear that a beast has before dying, intelligence has mingled and nothingness is beginning to become a mystery.

  Daâh is prepared to conceive of the void. He has a fear of gulfs; the phobia of the hole is inherent within him; he has that from his most distant ancestors, for it goes back to the earliest ages when the first life forms were struggling against the chaos of the planet.

  He remembers that: on the edge of a precipice above running water, vertigo makes him dizzy and he trembles like a child; one might think that his soul were fleeing through the holes of his pupils and going to drown in space; his empty head pivots slowly on his neck, his gaze seeks around him for some obstacle on which to rest and from which to draw support; the asperities reassure him; he suspends his eyes therefrom.

  On the edge of a vast and excessively bare plain he suffers an analogous malaise; as closely as he can, he moves along the edge of the forest, after the fashion of our dogs, which hug the walls of a square; when circumstances oblige him to risk himself in the middle of those amplitudes, he beats his breast in order to give himself courage, and he only goes forward crawling, his head down, his eyes on the ground, not so much to hide himself as to forget the formidable space.

  His body has a fear of the void, by virtue of heredity; he will instruct his soul with the same fear.

  XXXIX. The Voice of the World

  “Brouhouhou...”

  That is Daâh amusing himself while marching, by imitating the gross voice of the thunder.

  Once again, the man and his women have emerged onto the edge of the cliff; they can see the endless file-past of the cumulus and nimbus clouds that pursue one another behind the striated curtain of the rain. Sometimes, a patch of blue appears, a sunbeam trickles through, a sun sparkles, ephemeral and furtive, between the backs and bellies of the clouds, suddenly bleached, only to become black, brown and green-tinted again immediately; they growl as they go by, with a frightful voice; they threaten one another, they beat one another, and in order to kill one another they have a weapon that shines so forcefully! They are malevolent; they detest everything that is large. Daâh has seen them strike in passing a rock that rises toward them or an oak that surpassed all the others, and which they struck down with a bolt of their ardent club.

  Daâh does not fear them overmuch, because he is small, and they will scarcely be able to discover him beneath the forest, but he prefers not to risk exposing himself to their sight when they are angry, and his women are even more afraid of them than he is. They throw themselves flat on the ground in order to make themselves even less visible, and quickly close their eyes when the club-of-light penetrates the underwood and strikes with a din that makes the earth tremble, the tree-trunks whimper and the mountains and their ravines bark.

  “Brouhouhou…! Hôh!”

  When the battle of the clouds becomes too furious, Daâh only imitates them discreetly; he is slightly fearful of exciting them against him, but in spite of everything, he feels a need to be proud and to affirm it; in order to prove that he is brave, and to prove it to his women, he rumbles a timid thunder in the depths of his throat, respectfully, and yet provocatively.

  “Brouhou...”

  Hock and Ta do not like that imprudent game; in order to make the male shut up, the nearer one taps him; he immediately ripostes with a slap, and immediately recommences more loudly:

  “Hôhôh! Hôh... Brouh...”

  Then his thunder dies away; Daâh’s throat practices the nuances:

  “Brou.… Hou…”

  For his favorite game is to imitate all the clamors of the forest: the cries, the calls, the threats, the plaints, the growls of anger, the stridor of fears, the gasps of agony, the hoots of the wind and the hiss of the rain. To the tumult of furious or terrified life, every animal brings its voice; he, Daâh, has them all; at least, he wants them all. He has stored sounds along with images, and, just as he applies himself to miming what he has seen, he tries to repeat, with the instrument that he possesses, the vibrations of space.

  In that parody of sounds, he finds even more pleasure than that of his gestures; it is more numerous and more various, and it satisfies not only his need to imitate the world but also a singular taste that he has for translating his emotions phonetically. As soon as he ceases temporarily to chew and his mouth is empty, he howls, yaps, sings, bays, bellows, whistles, mewls. The notes, generally baritone, are nevertheless modulated; they rise and fall, scraping the walls of his cheeks; they rasp the enormous vault of the palate and collide with the long teeth; his uvula quivers; his tongue dances in the red cavern, softening the air that passes through it. By means of that gymnastics he makes the organ more supple, without being aware of it, while enjoying himself.

  His large mouth, his profound palate and his broad throat give him a powerful, sonorous and raucous voice, in which the As and Os snore and the diphthongs are rounded out, with the support of the Rs that rumble or the Hs that hiss. Vowels are accentuated, monosyllables become more pronounced; the animals earn their names, which are parodies of their cries: the Dog is called Ouah; the Bison Meûh; the Bear Rêh; the Thunder Brouhou...

  Speech germinates, the floating images are able to hook onto words, and, fixed henceforth, the images become ideas.

  XL. The Blade

  One day, he witnessed the superb spectacle of a combat between the Tiger and the Elephant; his heart beat forcefully and he expressed wishes on behalf of the eater of grass; he saw the feline crouch down as it circled the colossus, which pivoted to confront it; three times the pachyderm had the fangs in its throat; then, suddenly, Daâh perceived that the Tiger, pierced through in the middle of its belly, was hanging from the ivory branch like a hug
e fruit. He admired that greatly and was very satisfied, to such an extent that, in order to testify to his joy, he danced in imitation of the thrust of the head that had skewered a Tiger.

  With a shake of its head, the Elephant got rid of the feline, which was gasping; then it set about trampling it with its voluminous feet, and then it went away. The man saw that tranquil back drawing away through the long grass, and the big Cat that was no longer moving. Opportunities to taste that kind of game were rare; he wanted to have his share. He went down onto the battleground. His women ran behind him.

  The wild beast was butchered; the ribs were broken; everyone had their own and when the man was drunk on flesh, he started to stamp his feet in the bloody mud, on the very site of the duel. He parodied its phases, alternately playing the part of the Tiger crawling and bounding, and the Elephant chasing it with its head.

  For the sake of more resemblance he picked up two fragments of rib stripped of flesh and, holding them in the corners of his mouth with his fists, he became the trumpeting victor. He ran at the women, who ran away, laughing, and pricked them in the lower back. He fell upon a cork-oak and sank the tip of the bone into the bark.

  “Haâh! Han!”

  Then, weary of bending his back and extending his head, he straightened up; a simulacrum of the battle was beginning to be no longer sufficient for him; he was overtaken by fury, he grabbed hold of one of the fragments of rib by the blunt end and violently, with all the strength of his arm, he stabbed the cork-oak with such a rude thrust of the point that the blade remained planted in the tree.

  “Heuh!”

  He had just invented the dagger, the sword, the blade—and, streaming with sweat, his eyes rounded in surprise, he contemplated that masterpiece.

  XLI. The Pick and the Pike

  He made use of his new weapon, initially against a Marmot that he transpierced in its burrow; the beast emerged skewered; hilarious and triumphant, he displayed it at arm’s length; the women danced in admiration, and the jerks of their leaps made their breasts bounce.

  Another day, he saw a Wild Boar digging the ground with its tusks at the foot of an oak and immediately began employing his bone to unearth tubers and roots; the pick was announced.

  He made so much use of the rib that it snapped in two; at first bewildered, then indignant at that abrupt decision no longer to serve him, he insulted the thing, trampled it underfoot and forgot about it.

  To replace it, he seized his club and made it into a lever; and the club broke in the ground in its turn. The big baby was already getting ready to punish it when he noticed the oblique break and the sharp point that the piece of wood had acquired; he understood that the weapon wanted to imitate the bone, as Daâh imitated the beasts; that aptitude for parody and the intention to serve him did not astonish him in the least in his faithful friend; in order to congratulate it for that he caressed it as he did after a battle.

  While his heavy palm was passing over the wood, he perceived the broken end; he growled at it, and in order to prove to it that he did not regret it he came to it with a severe expression, his eyes charged with criticism, and leaned over it. Point by point, he put the old weapon and the new weapon in contact, as one brings two rivals into confrontation in order to excite them against one another. For he already had a propensity in his puerile soul for solemn gestures, and his habit of thinking in images rendered him an inclination toward symbols; very confusedly, the idea was in him of a rite that he was performing; he was officiating, and he almost had the sensation, if not the sentiment, of accomplishing an act of magic. At least, he had that to a much greater extent than the intelligent notion of progress, and, at that moment, he scarcely suspected that he had just enlarged the domain of his strength and simultaneously acquired the stake, the pike and the spear...

  He learned that a few weeks later, and truly, it was a very considerable day, being the one on which he killed the second Bear.

  Backed up against a rock and incapable of fleeing, he thought that he was doomed, but before the invincible paws were able to seize him, he sank his stake into the monster’s belly, as the Elephant had done.

  “Haâh!”

  Leaving the weapon in the wound, he skipped sideways with a bound; then, slowly, he moved to the left, step by step, facing the adversary with his back to the rock. The Bear was no longer paying any heed to him; uniquely occupied with the unknown enemy that had just entered into its flesh, the giant of the caves lowered its nose toward its wound, from which a flood of blood was escaping, and tried with impotent gesticulations to tear out the death that was plunged into it.

  “Haâh! Heûh!”

  The victor, henceforth out of range and almost offended that he was being excessively neglected, struck his breast to show off the author of the blow and claim his glory.

  The Bear understood and came after him, but the tree hanging down from his belly stopped him in his tracks, and Daâh, who jumped for joy while miming the comical gestures of the wounded animal, was eventually obliged to stop, his hands splayed over his belly, so much was he laughing, from safety, at watching death work at a distance, of its own accord, on behalf of a Human Being.

  XLII. The First Stone

  A great racket amid the branches! Above the human family, the dome of foliage agitates, shaken by an interior tempest, and shrill howls spring forth.

  Daâh has unleashed that hurricane of wrath. Having perceived a Macaque in a walnut tree suckling its young, and seeing that it was inconvenienced by its burden, he had decided to pursue it. Having succeeded in catching up with it, he snatched its baby away, breaking its back over his thigh with a twist of his wrists. With the prey in his teeth he descended to the ground again. At the foot of the tree he tore the animal apart, ripped the skin, dislocated the limbs, and bit into the teaming flesh. The mother, who had followed him, leapt from branch to branch above him, abusing him with piercing cries; in response to her voice, a band of Monkeys had gathered to form a chorus; nuts were raining down on Daâh, but he took no notice; he was chewing.

  Hock and Ta, crouching a few paces away from him, are watching him eat, waiting for him to deign to grant them a bone or a fragment of lung. To pass the time, they pick up the nuts that the furious Macaques are throwing and tranquilly extract the fruits from their shells, which they break between two stones. But their impatience to bite in their turn into the good meat that they can see bleeding, and the strident racket that is going on over their heads are beginning to make them nervous; the rain of projectiles is inconveniencing them. They respond to the clamors of the Monkeys with similar vociferations, and to the hurled nuts with nuts that they also attempt to hurl. The anger in the trees turns against them, and a battle is engaged.

  They figure in it without honor; they do not have the skill of their adversaries, which they require. They succeed well enough in parodying the swing of the arm folded over the shoulder, but they do not open their hands at the opportune movement, with the result that the projectiles sometimes crash down at their feet and sometimes go straight up in the air to fall on their backs.

  Daâh, who is still chewing, observes the combat and the incapacity of the females; he is scornful of them. Surely he can do better! He does not stop at thinking it; the temptation to demonstrate his superiority once again and to offer a model, labors his mind. He forgets to savor the warm and tender meat whose juices are in his mouth.

  Eventually, he can no longer resist. He stretches out his arm, and with his vast hand he picks up a nut from the ground, with a fistful of mud and grass, which he kneads; the paste oozes through his fingers. With all his strength he hurls that magma at a Macaque, and Ta utters a cry of pain, because the vigorous object has struck her in the temple.

  Daâh is satisfied. That is how to throw! The women will know better from now on, thanks to him. However, he is only half-proud, because his vanity obliges him to be; he knows full well that he had no intention of wounding Ta. She is, however, bleeding, and that is a fact; he has obtained tha
t result by means of the new procedure, and that is also a fact that merits being recorded. He records it. If he has struck her without meaning to, it was simply his will that was missing; on the next occasion, he will only have to do it deliberately.

  He does precisely that, picking up a gnawed femur and throwing it, aiming at the woman.

  The bone falls into a puddle half way to its target. The Monkeys do better than that, and the Human cannot account for it, but he cannot admit that anyone can do better than him; his disappointment turns to anger. He leaps to his feet, and quickly picks up nuts with both hands, furiously. Perhaps to help him to do as well as the Macaques, he imitates their whining and their grimaces. Now he is pummeling his women, albeit at point-blank range.

  They retaliate; on either side, everyone grabs whatever they encounter in order to hurl it in the face; for want of fruits they pick up stones.

  The game becomes crazy, blood flows, bumps bulge; the women flee, and the quadrumanes in the tree watch, stupefied. Abruptly, they fall silent, and immobilize themselves at the same time; their eyes wide, they lean through the foliage to admire beneath them the human family whose members have invented ballistics while enjoying aping the Apes.

  XLIII. The-One-Who-Sees-a-Long-Way

  The hunter only improved slowly in that simian art. His boasting was the reason for that; he wanted to do better than the Macaques right away, and that presumption slowed his progress. Because he was taller and stronger than his teacher, he thought that he ought to apply himself to blocks of stone that the latter could not move; and since, on the other hand, he possessed two hands, the thought it appropriate to use them both to launch larger stones. In spite of these mistakes, the opportunity to learn what a valuable weapon he had just acquired was not long delayed.