He watches the play of the feet that extend swiftly toward the prey and retire prudently; he observes the result of the maneuvers; he conceives the idea of a trap, which he thinks convenient and enviable; he is jealous of the hunter’s shrewd ingenuity, which permits it to wait for its prey without danger, instead of pursuing endlessly, forever...
He thinks about himself: the teeming envy germinates within him. To envy is almost to seek. Does the imitator of the world perceive in the depths of his understanding a possibility of one day doing as well as the arachnid?
The Wasp is dead. The Spider with the large belly has sucked out its entrails. Now it is repairing its web, and Ta leans over the work. She has never before examined in that fashion the light thing that oscillates and trembles, the threads that radiate and the threads that intersect. She sees the network reform, and before the agility of the little creature that can weave a veil, she laughs in her turn. Her laughter is already an admiration—but her eyes, soon fatigued, are lifted toward the trees again; the vines that are interlaced from branch to branch above her head resemble the threads of the web. She tears one away, and another, and a third; she stretches them gravely; very attentively, she begins to connect them, like the spider.
She does not know how to tie a knot; her fingers become entangled in the sticky stems that slide and twist. She soon becomes impatient; she is already clenching her jaws...
It is over. She growls with anger; she screws up the vines in the hollows of her palms and throws them into the mud.
Meanwhile, the spider has completed its task; the web is restored; the holes have disappeared. But Ta is no longer admiring anything; she looks with a malevolent eye at the work accomplished; she does not know that the Spider has been exercising its art for thousands of centuries; she is only aware of her own impotence; she rages. Her arm extends, she breaks the web, and everything has disappeared, the creature along with its work.
The woman resumes her pose and her immobility, her arms wrapped around her knees. Her vengeful gesture has calmed her down, but her languor persists; again, her gaze rises up toward the foliage, where it loses itself, along with her vague thought. The memory of her failure returns at the sight of the vines. Then she lowers her head toward her hand, which she examines for a long time. She waggles the stout fingers. She thinks.
Daâh understands her, and immediately commences the same gestures; he opens his right hand and his left; he closes them, turns them over, displaying the back and the palm, folds the articulations, straightens out the phalanges.
Stupidly and sadly, he contemplates that tool, which will be the instrument of his genius.
LXVIII. Pathology
Humans are, to a greater extent than any other, adaptable animals; they have proved that by succeeding in living in a world in which everything cooperates in their annihilation: their nudity, their small number; the weakness of their natural weapons, the multiplicity of beasts that eat them, the variation of tropical and glacial climates that they have been able to traverse by turns, while other species, seemingly more solidly endowed, have been obliged to emigrate or perish.
Of maladies, in particular, they have no shortage. The extreme humidity of the climate, the constant rain that falls by day and night, the lack of shelter, garments and fire, fatally determine an early rheumatic diathesis. The abundance of marshes and the profusion of insects also propagate paludal fevers.
Perpetual mastication having inflamed the gums, they are red. In many cases, the teeth have become detached. Bellies dilate. The most frequent troubles afflict the digestive tract; a total absence of foresight ensures that, by turns, they eat too much, or no longer eat, or eat no matter what, in accordance with the seasons. A carnal alimentation of strong meat, swallowed raw and in excess, alternates with long fasts, and periods of famine in which they fall back on the fungi that abound in the drenched forest, tempting hunger and provoking stomach aches and poisonings.
From these accidents they never obtain any practical education; they only receive an impression of mystery. When a livid individual with contracted features, naked under the rain, writhes in the mud, they form a circle around him; no other circumstance of life can fix their attention for such a long time. Rendered stable for once, they move internally; emotion, the distant generator of thought, labors them; thus apparently stopped, they are almost thinking.
They assist one another by the simple fact if remaining side by side and extending their souls toward a single goal; mute but unanimous, they are already a crowd, and all together, with a common certainty, they imagine the absurd; like Daâh: no one doubts that the patient is the prey of an invisible animal. That imagination was the first acquisition of their genius, and, puerile as it seems to us, it is not so stupid, since the progress of science has tended to bring it back; furthermore, it was the only one permitted to them.
The overburdening of their nerves also exposes them to troubles that are especially manifest in the children and the women. Convulsions are frequent among the former; as for the latter, overwhelmed by fear, fatigued from puberty by successive pregnancies of whose cause they are ignorant, they die young, or at least younger than the males. For old age was then a condition that did not have time to appear, since any decrepitude of the individual immediately made the invalid a laggard, vanquished and comestible.
LXIX. Patriarchy
Daâh was not yet decrepit, but a singular fatigue was beginning to weigh upon him, and astonished him. His limbs, less supple, refused certain gestures, which made him cry out in pain. Sometimes, he had difficulty drawing himself up to his full height. Several of his sons were more upright than him, stronger, and especially more agile.
He remained convinced nevertheless that all of them, big and small, had only survived because of him, and continued to owe everything to him; their birth was virtually the only thing with which he thought he had no connection, but if he had no inkling that a line parentage attached him, as a man, to the produce of the women, he was, on the contrary, perfectly well aware of the link of dependency that attached that crowd of protégés to their protector. His ignorance of his paternity did not, therefore, diminish the sentiment that he conceived of his paternal authority.
Of that he was jealous. He did not permit anyone the attitudes of a chief, and no one had any pretention to them; even the males were only rarely reluctant to obey him or to imitate him, having been subject since their earliest infancy to a training whose habits were prolonged into their maturity.
In spite of that deference, he only tolerated those fully-grown sons impatiently, and their valor or vigor displeased him increasingly as he felt his own strength diminishing. When one of them had felled some large item of prey, he abstained from taking part in their dances, but he pretended only to be standing aside out of disdain. Wedged against a tree trunk, he watched the horde caper around the beast, and he would not have admitted either to anyone else or to himself that any physical reason compelled him to adopt that noble attitude.
For analogous reasons, Hock and Ta, less proudly dissimulated, also dispensed with gamboling; they came to crouch at his feet in their lassitude, one to the right and the other to the left, and the trio waited impassively for the feast, with the result that he gradually deluded himself as to the initial causes of his abstention and ended up believing in the necessity of his contemplative role. He was presiding; he was officiating.
At the same time as he took on a quasi-sacerdotal role, the ceremony that was accomplished before his eyes increasingly took on a ritual character, and the future patriarch was prophesied in the father.
LXX. The Rights of the Chief
One day, Hock’s eighteenth grandson, who was then in his fifteenth year, killed his first Bear. He was proud; he struck his torso, showing his club to his brothers and sisters, and they all quivered with joy. But Daâh did not experience any. Standing a few paces away, his brows furrowed over his narrow eyes, and he gazed without moving.
The brown beast was lying o
n its side and its mouth was bleeding onto the grass. The adolescent, one foot posed upon it, was laughing; all around, the naked family was pressing; the smallest were wriggling in between the longer legs in order to get a closer look. Backs were bent and raised, waving arms extended from the mass, and heads rolled; that swarm of russet or rosy flesh moved its living brightness in the green shadow of a fig tree, and the beaming face of the victor dominated them all.
At that moment, Daâh felt a strange languor in his chest and more heaviness in his limbs, more fatigue than he had ever had after expending himself in a rude combat. Still without pleasure, he watched the contortions and mimes of the round-dance; by their gestures, the dancers announced its defeat and death to the Bear, as if it were unaware of them, and as if it were still capable of hearing their mockery and suffering in consequence.
You won’t prance anymore! You won’t eat any more little humans!
Some mimed trampling the children and young women beneath their feet and chewing the backs of their necks; others threw themselves on the ground in the prop of the cadaver, in order to be trampled, and let their tongues hang out.
That’s what you look like now!
The triumphant victor urinated on the Bear’s head, in the midst of laughter, and again, he made his chest resonate with blows of his fist, to affirm his prowess.
Daâh could no longer stand it. He came forward. A disdainful moue inflated his large mouth. Shaking his head, he pointed an index finger at the dead beast, and with the other hand, whose palm was spread at the height of his nipples, he indicated that the prey belonged to a small species. Then, in his turn, he hammered his torso, and, hoisting himself up on tiptoe, he raised his right hand as he could, expressing in that fashion that he had killed a colossal monster, a true King of the Caverns, and he showed his right hand: “Ta!” and showed his left: “Ta!” because he had known that victory twice.
After which he returned majestically to the trunk of the fig tree, satisfied that he had humiliated his rival.
The latter growled because someone wanted to diminish his merit; until the end of the dance, he sulked; at times he turned a rancorous gaze toward the Chief and shook his fists. With one bound he hurled himself upon the beast and tore out the eye.
“Mâh!”
He showed it to everyone, and burst out laughing, and held it high above his open mouth, in his fingertips, preparing to swallow it. Before that assault on the privilege of the master, faces gaped in fear.
Daâh, lashed by the insult, had roared; already, he was in the center of the group. He seized the insulter by the midriff, and the bear’s eye rolled in the mud. With a vigor multiplied tenfold by rage, the father shook his grandson as he would have shaken a tree in order to uproot it; the other gasped and bit the skin of his scalp through the thicket of hair.
They collapsed together, the younger underneath, crushed by the mass of his adversary and stunned by the impact. Daâh took advantage of that to get hold of his neck with both hands. As he got to his feet he lifted him off the ground and whirled him at arm’s length; then, relaxing his grip, he launched him into the distance, above the heads of the admiring horde.
The young man got to his feet. Without even looking at his relatives, he departed, forever.
In the middle of the circle, Daâh was panting; his torso swelled with pride. Slowly, he turned his head to the right and the left to show himself to everyone. Serene henceforth, because he had just proved that he was still the strongest, he picked up the muddy eye and swallowed it.
LXXI. The Edge of the World
It is now more than thirty years, and perhaps forty, that Daâh and his women have always moved forward, in the direction of the Suns. They have no notion of time; they only know day and night. They have vaguely observed the alternation of the seasons, which alternately render existence a little more or less hard, but those variations have not been sufficiently sensible to strike their minds; all days are alike under the indefinitely veiled sky; from one end of the year to the other, the thunder beats time for the moments. When the leaves fall from the branches, they know that they will soon be getting more fearful and hungrier, since the nights will be longer and prey rarer; they know that beyond the trees there are other trees, which are similar, with similar costumes of green and brown, which they will shed and put on again; everything recommences; they know the endless monotony of a march whose goal is always receding.
They have nothing more to learn about the world; they have recorded all its resemblances, and that interminable renewal of the same forms: Oak and Beech, Oak and Birch, and more Birch and Oak, one Cloud followed by another Cloud; the water flowing in the river, and the Hippopotamuses on the bank, the pools with the Damsel-flies, and the Oak with the Birch...
They know what it is important to know about all of them: the Fig tree is good; the Walnut and the Chestnut are also sympathetic to humans and prove it by the fruits that they offer and the shelter they provide. The Fir-tree, by contrast, is treacherous, unwilling to tolerate anyone climbing it and vengeful; when one asks it for shelter in case of pursuit it breaks a limb for the pleasure of throwing prey to the predator circling its trunk. The best of all is the Oak; it is the ideal friend, providing acorns, the most solid clubs and the most reliable shelter; one sleeps better in its black branches than in those of any other tree, confidently; places to lie down are broad and numerous; the entire horde can take refuge there; thanks to the Oak they are close to one another, and less fearful by night; the Oak has understood that and gives a benevolent welcome to the fright of poor humans; as strong as the Elephant, it is tutelary and familial; they love it and venerate it.
Several weeks ago, however, the forest they know so well changed its character; the species of trees, less varied and less densely crowned, provided less obstructed paths; between the rigid trunks of Pines and Firs the ferns bent down in docile fashion as the humans pass by, caressing their torsos. That amenity of the vegetal world pleased the humans, who were not accustomed to being so well received. An odor of resin pricked their nostrils cheerfully; the sandy soil no longer stuck to the feet; herbivores became rare, but also predators; pinecones were abundant and squirrels scattered. There were days of relative quietude.
Ultimately, the forest ended.
The soft Ferns have been succeeded by an inextricable thicket of gorse; that is a kind of forest, too, a wretched forest only a little taller than a man, but dense and spiteful, the leaves of which bear thorns, and which does not want anyone to go through it. It claws furiously at everything that passes, and does not let go of its prey. No game lives there, except for mocking birds that fly away as one approaches; the only nourishment to be found consists of pods of tiny black seeds. But the Chief will not consent to turn back; breaking a passage with his club, he goes forward. The horde follows, coarse hides bloodied by grazes. The children do not even cry any more.
That march lasted two days.
Then, there was a carpet of brown heather underfoot, with innumerable mounds under which they killed moles, which they ate without skinning them, they were so hungry. On the whole of that plain, they could no longer perceive a single tree. Nothing but Clouds! The humans had arrived in the land of Clouds; high up, in front, behind, all around, they were hastening toward the region from which the Suns and the Humans come. Their flight passed overhead like an advice to retrace their steps, and over that land devoid of shelter the wind blew with a vehemence that they had never known under the trees of the forest.
The Chief has understood that this region defends itself, like all the others; the land does not want humans any more than any other; it, too, repels them, with all the weapons and all the strength it has; after having starved them it lacerated them yesterday in order to eat them, and today it has them chased by the Wind. But Daâh will not give in! Upon the invisible adversary that seizes him by the torso and shoves him backwards he rains blows of his club, and rages at being unable to see his enemy. In order to prove that he is not af
raid of it, he imitates it:
“Vouh! Vouh!”
He is obliged to lower his head, like a buffalo, in order to advance. The women and children follow on all fours, disheveled and blinded by the tempest that stings their eyes; when they pass their tongues over their lips they taste salt, which astonishes them.
Daâh raises his head and stands there, amazed. Facing him, the horizon is extended beneath the sky with a rigidity that has been seen nowhere else. To the right and the left, enormous rocks loom up, and between them, in a kind of hole, there is something vast, uniform and bare, which seems to be moving without changing its location, and which extends...
Daâh tries to comprehend. Anguish grips his throat. The immensity of the expanse weighs upon his loins. Too much space, too much sky, emptiness, the hectically racing clouds, that flat desert in which everything is astir, and the pitiless band that stripes the unknown, fill him with a fear that fixes him in place. Predators frighten him less; they are perils of his own size. The vaults of the forest are not there for him; he has never been so small and so alone.
However, a raucous sound of quarreling voices reaches him, and he divines a battle in the hollow at the foot of the rocks. Mouths are barking and howling there: are they biting one another, tearing one another apart? Who? He does not know those voices. He will go find out, but alone.
“Ta!”
He stops the horde behind him; lying face down, he moves to the edge of the heath; he crawls into the shelter of a rock and then, abruptly, stands up again.
Daâh is confronted by the Sea.
A sacred horror penetrates him. All his strength has melted away at a stroke. Daâh feels that he is like the dead. He no longer exists. Troubled and rapid, his entire past goes through his head. For as long as he has been marching, he has been marching in vain! The impenetrable has stopped him; nothingness has appeared to him. The great soul of mystery takes hold of his little nascent soul and stifles it.
Daâh: The First Human Page 18
