Daâh: The First Human

by Edmond Haraucourt

  The matter only became troubling in tragic circumstances. When a Hyena or a Wolf carried off an infant, when a Lion or a Bear took possession of a woman or a man, a great cry rose up, propagated from mouth to mouth.

  “Heûh!”

  Everyone understood, dispersing instantaneously in all directions, backs fleeing under the thickets, climbing trees, and anxious heads hanging down from the branches; by a reversibility of egotism, each one sensed that misfortune, because each one might have been the victim of it, and the little frisson of death ran from the nape of the neck to the loins.

  For they know pertinently, like Daâh, that the peril of being devoured is the condition of every living creature; everyone is conscious of being, in the forest, a meal defending itself temporarily, a nutritious and coveted fragment of flesh; there is no other destiny than to fall, sooner or later, into the teeth of something stronger.

  Death, therefore, is only constituted by the definitive accident of being ingurgitated by another; the sick and the debilitated are simply prey of less resilience, which were designated thereby for imminent sacrifice. Natural death does not exist; violent death is the only kind that anyone knows. The purely nominal distinction that we make between the two is prohibited, and rightly so, since violent death is no less natural than the other, and since it is, in this epoch, the only necessary one that there is in nature.

  Everyone ends up in the tomb of a stomach. Everyone knows that, and no one is indignant about it.

  XLVII. Comestible Death

  Toward the middle of winter, the horde suddenly emerged on to a bare plateau. The vast plain extended, limited at the horizon by a dark blue line that indicated the recommencement of forests; in the interval, a short vegetation undulated in the colder wind; the keener air pricked the nostrils. The Chief stopped. Dazzled by a light no longer filtered by the vault of branches, and troubled by the horror of open space, he hesitated.

  He opened his large hand above his eyes in order to examine the distance; a long way away, patches the color of chestnuts were moving placidly over the slope of a hill; he recognized Horses. His heart beat with joy and his mouth filled with water, for he had the winter hunger, having not killed anything for days; the Horse was a succulent but rapid prey, which hardly ever allowed one to get close, which could hear all sounds, and could scent the hunter...

  Perhaps, though, if he crept through the grass, Daâh could hide long enough to reach the prey? A blow of the club would break a leg...

  “Ta!”

  With his finger, he traced a great circle in the air behind him: a gesture signifying an order to stay still, to gather the children together and hide in the undergrowth. Then he struck his chest and pointed at the herd.

  “Mâh!”

  By means of that new sign he expressed his desire to depart alone on the conquest of that nourishment. At the same moment, however, his joyful face became plaintive and irritated. An alert had just been produced in the equine band. One of them had leapt up.

  All together, the brown patches took off at a run, gathering in a compact group, flank to flank, and, as if carrying one another, the galloping solipeds flew through the grass that came up to their withers.

  Now, that unique patch was growing from one moment to the next; instead of drawing away, it was coming closer. It was, therefore, not Daâh that the Horses feared. Another danger was driving the herd from behind, and it was bringing that danger with it. A Lion? A Tiger? From the hunter that he had been a moment before, the Human became prey.

  “Heûh!”

  Daâh uttered that alarm call and cocked an ear. The flight of the herd, having gone around a hillock, was directed straight toward him. Almost immediately, barking rang out.

  Dogs! More terrible than the Lion because of their number, and irresistible because they fought as a pack, the courageous and voracious Dogs, inventors of armies, enemies of Humans and Bears, did not hesitate before anyone. They would cling on without distinction to the bellies of Bison or Tigers, and, when they did likewise to the great Deer of the peat-bogs, with its great horns, they made it resemble a tree laden with monstrous clusters of fruits!

  “Ouah, ouah! Heûh!”

  The terrified horde disperses toward the forest; the infants cry; rosy bodies worm their way through the red-tinted grass; trees are climbed.

  The Horses draw nearer. The rhythmic impact of their hooves makes the soft soil rumble—but the barking bursts forth more forcefully, much closer.

  Daâh brings up the rear, and does not deign to duck down as he walks; he knows that a Dog has no need to see its prey to know where it is and track it. He makes haste, however, and looks around.

  He sees a Horse pass by that is in the lead; the herd follows; the ground trembles; in the place where Daâh was standing a little while ago there is a russet undulation of spines, extended necks and oblong heads, rushing like a muddy torrent under its foam of manes. A brief interval, and the Dogs emerge; erect tails stripe the landscape and volleys of barking rip through the air.

  The bulk of the pack has passed by, but the laggards have caught the scent of the human and abandoned the pursuit of the Horses; noses down, they run toward the edge of the forest where the family has sought refuge. A child is howling at the foot of an oak.

  Daâh extends his left arm toward the Dogs; they are less numerous than the fingers of his hand; it is possible to fight. The human prey becomes the hunter again; he launches himself forward. When he reaches the foot of the tree, one of the canines already has its fangs in the child’s throat; another has seized its groin, the third has grabbed an ankle, and all three are growling, pulling in three directions, tails stiff and mouths streaming with blood.

  Twice the club has whirled; one of the Dogs runs away, limping, but two others have rolled in the mud. The battle is won, since the horde will eat.

  Human groups fall from the trees and run forward. Next to the little cadaver, the wounded Dogs are still moving; they are finished off by hammering their skulls with lumps of stone.

  “Ouah! Ouah!”

  But they are too hungry, today, to dance for long; they have been fasting for too many days. Two Ouah-ouahs for so many hungry mouths is very few; the Ouah-ouahs of winter are meager.

  Everyone crowds around; they are opened up, frantic hands tear away the red strips; whoever is not the most agile risks having nothing.

  However, the Chief is not there to take out the first share, as he is accustomed to do...

  Daâh is, in fact, some distance away. Since the mothers have always refused to let him kill their offspring, even when food is in short supply, and since, this time, the Dogs have taken charge of that task, he has finally found an opportunity to realize his curious desire.

  Squatting all alone against the trunk of a beech tree, Daâh is calmly eating his grandson.

  XLVIII. The Climber Who Walks

  By the mere fact of living in a group, the new generations are already indicating tastes and practicing customs that no longer resemble Daâh’s, and which sometimes astonish him. While the Chief, in spite of the crowd that escorts him, remains fundamentally solitary, as in the time of his youth, and maintains his inveterate mannerisms of a beast of prey, the children he draws in his wake testify to a marked inclination for all forms of assembly; with the exception of the rare deserters driven away by an impulse, the members of the horde do not stray far from the others. During the march they advance in small groups; at every moment, the laggards run to rejoin the main body; at the halts they hasten to come together, and when dusk comes, they jostle at the foot of a trunk, because they all want to climb the same tree.

  When, by chance, they encounter a shelter under a rock into which they can pile, the sons and daughters precipitate themselves into it avidly, and lie down pell-mell, pushing, growling, nudging with their elbows and knees, insinuating themselves into the heap and squeezing together, hugging one another in order to go to sleep. Then, like a nest of woodlice, the heap gradually immobilizes, and in th
e moisture that bathes them, the faces take on an expression of bestial bliss...

  When they are heaped up like that, their mutual contact, their common warmth, and also their door, procures for those beings an impression of security and confidence. One might think that they remembered having lived in troops long ago, and that ancient heredities are resuscitating within them; the promptitude and facility with which they adapt to mores unknown to their father seems to indicate that they are simply recuperating ancestral habits; in solitude, the wandering individual had forgotten those customs, but as soon as the group was reconstituted, the race recollected its past and hung onto it without hesitation.

  Might it not be the case that the condition of the solitary animal has only been, for the precursors of the species, a transient state imposed by circumstance, which occurred between the age when the inferior apes live in bands and the one when the human horde was formed? Might it not be the case that the branch from which humankind was about to emerge presented, at the outset, an abnormal particularity that induced or even obliged it to adopt unusual mores?

  While all the simians, in spite of their canine teeth, remained frugivores, why did the members of that particular species begin to eat flesh? Did they adopt the habit because they encountered on the ground more numerous and more varied game, or, on the contrary, did they descend from the trees in order to find that fodder which they coveted in greater profusion? What motive led them to prefer a sojourn on the ground to that of the branches? What singularity of their anatomy: arms too short for aerial gymnastics; the form of dimension of the digestive canal; the nature of the gastric juices? Was one thing the cause of another, or vice versa?

  Perhaps, some day, science will speak, if it discovers the remains of the Primate in the ice of the Austral Pole.

  At any rate, in an era when its four limbs still presented the specific characteristics of a Climber, that hominid had become a Walker, and became increasingly accommodated to that new way of life. Its appetite for flesh, by making it a hunter, made it solitary; simultaneously, its nervous inquietude made it a nomad.

  On the ground, however, a more complex existence excited its ingenuity; by virtue of multiple opportunities, it discovered latent resources within itself, and utilized them; its hand became more flexible along with its brain; it improved itself; gradually, the progressive development of its intelligence and the needs that were engendered in consequence, brought it a taste for sociability, into which it threw itself with the joy of a return.

  Then, in a group, it talked, and from articulate speech, Humanity emerged.

  XLIX. The Distant Brother

  “Heûh!”

  In the twilight, the cry of horror reverberates; the voice of the Chief is recognized. He has climbed into a tree to search for a shelter for the night, but has jumped down to the ground abruptly. To his sons, who have come running, he indicates a moving brown mass among the branches.

  “Ta!”

  They all look up. Amazement immobilizes them. Between two long hands that part the branches, there is an enormous head, which leans toward them, with angry grimaces. Beneath a pyramidal skull, the face has a large, flattened nose and almost human eyes, which are blinking. Its jowls are moving, as if to speak...

  A Human? No. A Bear? Even less. A Monkey? Do any exist of such formidable size?

  Suddenly, a thunderous growl emerges from the mouth, which opens; the brown mass laps down into the grass and raises itself to a semi-erect pose. Assuming a fighting stance, the colossus strikes its ribs with its left hand, like Daâh; in its right hand it holds a club, like Daâh—but the length of its arms is alarming, they hang down almost to the ground.

  Before the frightened horde has had time to react, two sons roll on the ground, their skulls split. A daughter, seized, is already under the monster’s arm, which is carrying her away. She howls. The women flee, yelping, and the men follow them; all their courage is paralyzed in confrontation with that disconcerting abduction, and the club of the abductor, who is not human.

  Like his sons, Daâh beats a retreat, but is the last to do so, facing the enemy, continuing to extend his cudgel toward the Orangutan—and they growl at one another as they recoil from one another.

  For Daâh recognizes it, although his children do not; he has not seen one for a long time, but he encountered one once, in his adolescence. The species is rare now; the climate has gradually decimated it, and it has disappeared from the region: a great good fortune, truly. Daâh execrates it.

  The hatred he feels for the animal in question is very particular; it has nothing in common with the respectful fear that the large wild beasts inspire in him. It participates somewhat in the irritation that he feels at the sight of other humans; it is troubling, anxious, as sharp as a family discord, and also complicated by the sentiment of an insult.

  Daâh, who imitates everything, resents the fact that he and that anthropoid both have the same gestures, almost the same appearance. He tolerates the small Monkeys, but not the big ones, which resemble him too much; he feels that they are too similar to him and is rancorous in consequence. He perceives an affinity that offends him, that lowers him: he is the parvenu that the return of a lower-class relative humiliates in his own eyes.

  He cannot tolerate anyone being so similar to him! His nascent pride will not admit that insult. He loves himself; he admires himself. For what reason? He does not know yet, but he has the instinct of being alone, different from everything else, and the intelligence that he senses in advance gives him vanity before giving him reason. That appetite of pride will be of service to him, moreover, by inciting him to be better than others.

  In the meantime, he recoils and he growls; he goes away to seek another tree. He is vexed; his entire race will remember that.

  L. One After Another

  In anger, they do not go pale, they go red. A corner of the skin turns crimson, between their little eyes and the hair on their cheeks. All are bearded, even the young; the fully-grown are protected by a more abundant fleece. Their pilous system is, however, less dense than it will become during the chill of the glacial period. The hairs, of unequal length on different parts of the body, are also not uniform in color; those on the face are not a dark as those of the chest and the abdomen; the mane is often tinted with red and brown.

  The large knees, buttocks and the underside of the thighs are depilated by friction and by the frequency of the squatting posture. The back of the hand is hairy, but the palm is bare, callused and striated by profound wrinkles by the labor of the long brachial march through the forest. The fingers, which broaden out in spatulate fashion, bear short, flat nails, rough and horny, the color of stone; the toenails are even more eroded, especially on the big toe; its mission of searching incessantly in muddy ground or among foliage, for a solid point of support, that it must recognize, choose and grip, persists in making that adjudicator an active and reliable organ, as intelligent as a finger; it is so habituated to labor that it amuses itself by continuing to dance in moments of repose; one delights in watching it play by itself, and takes hold of it in the hand.

  The mobility that pesters them is manifest throughout their person; their heads move without respite, rising, dipping, plunging; their arms dig in, their hands rummage. They take a keen interest in everything: a blade of grass, a leaf, a pebble, an insect, any shiny object, anything that moves or makes a noise.

  That perpetual tension maintains them in a state of expectation that is eminently favorable to all kinds of receptivity; influences take effect on them abruptly and violently; any external agitation, when it is echoed within them, obtains its full effect of nervous commotion. A surprise frightens them; the unexpected makes them jump; a cry of alarm sprung from below, in the horde, the agony of a beast lamenting in the distance, and the funnel of their ear immediately swivels toward the sound, along with their eyes.

  Their skin is perpetually itchy. A dead leaf or a twig disturbs them; in response to the tickle of an insect that is not an
ordinary vermin, they bristle. When a beast of prey is stalking them, they sense its gaze entering into their flesh, and they are gripped by unease until they have discovered the hidden eye. At the slightest contact with a neighbor, believing themselves to be under attack, they lash out; radically incapable of overcoming their reflexes, they do not even suspect that one could succeed in that, or that it might be appropriate to try.

  To that native incapacity is added the tyranny of atmospheric influences, which dominate them at all times and transform them without them being aware of it; alternately depressed beneath the weight of an invisible load or racked by quivering forces, they drag themselves along or are exasperated. They are automata of the weather, hyperesthetic barometers; and like the pressures of space in that period of age-old storms, varying continually, their poor souls rise and fall.

  The influence of location acts upon them like all the others, sometimes to depress them further, sometimes to enable them to blossom; the place where they are suggests vague sadness to them, or energetic vigor, self-confidence, the desire for audacity, the need for intimacy or the discouragement of an irremediable impotence.

  Thus manipulated by everything that surrounds them, they pass without transition from one sentiment to another, from alarm to joy, from anger to fear; none of them knows what kind of individual he will be in the next minute: furious, cheerful, lubricious, cowardly, valiant; all are latent possibilities that any action might release. They never premeditate anything; everything in them is brusque and unexpected; everything arrives in fits and everything is manifest to excess.

  Their laughter, sudden and violent, is merely a manifestation of their psychological state, a spasm. The smile is unknown; when they are not laughing in bursts, they frown. Their faces only have four expressions: vague bewilderment, savage hilarity, fear and threat. Their most ordinary actions and simplest movements are jerky, just as their volitions are sudden. Man, woman or child, everyone decides and acts at the same moment, without contest or examination, with the abruptness of a released spring; they learn their intentions by observing their results, and when a hazard prevents them from realizing them immediately, they renounce them more often than not, unable to recall what they wanted.