To think is to pause; a mind moving in a moving body, the human being who moved so much was not apt to reflect until the day when he paused in one place and on one idea. Immobilized under that rock and by the ambient death of everything, and besieged by it, they perceived a truth, without which their race would inevitably have perished. It fell upon them with the snow: humans must not isolate themselves, under pain of death, and their resistance, as well as their strength will result uniquely from the association of their forces.
That rational idea was not suddenly inspired in them by the atrocity of the present moment; their whole existence had prepared it within them by an accumulation of examples. Furthermore, the violent influence of one soul was exercised on theirs.
Better than anyone, in fact, and a long time before the rest, the dying woman had understood; it was in her that the revelation first occurred, and she helped the others to think because she thought. In the center of the group, shaken by the horrors of a peril that she saw probable and imminent, she was the nucleus of the idea.
They’re going to leave! Ta will be ALONE!
The consequences of solitude displayed themselves to her, in precise scenes that she discerned with the lucidity of an intelligence morbidly exasperated by fear, and the entire horde, around her, thought like her, a little less clearly, but no less egotistically.
To all of them, the region which they had previously thought magnificent and benign, was revealed to be uninhabitable. They execrated it. Its very splendor had been nothing but a trap to attract prey.
The eyes of Serpents summon Birds, and that deadly country has appealed to humans with its bright Sun, shining like an eye. It has made them come, in order to eat them with its white mouth, which is closing upon them! They are going to die!
Unless someone saves them, if anyone can, if they can still be saved...
Ta senses the idea that is floating and laboring in all those beings. The conclusion is still belated in them when the dying woman is already sure
They are going to leave, and Ta will remain here all alone. They are going to leave if a Sun does not come back...
LXXVIII. The Eye of the World
From the depths of her distress she thinks about the Sun that helped her, in kindly fashion; by returning to the sky, perhaps it would retain the Nomads? She disengages her arms from the furs; with an almost intuitive gesture, she extends her arms toward the place where she saw the resplendent Benefactor.
Astonished, the others watch her do it; she sees their gazes converging on her face, and in her turn, she fixes her ardent pupils on theirs; she contemplates them avidly; she plunges into them with a frenzy. Soon, she can no longer see them, the eyes of humans! They have gone, like the One in the sky. An affinity appears to her between the eye that perceives the light and the one that pours it. She loves them together, she regrets them together, and she assimilates them.
Dzi, Eye of the World!
Better to implore it, she moves out of the shelter, her knees in the snow. She evokes it with all her might. With all her mind, which extends, she searches for a means of aiding the god Sun to return to her, of obliging it to return.
Eye that shines, great friendly Eye, you who prevent solitude and denounce dangers, you who make one less afraid at the same time as one is warmer…!
She adjures it mentally. In the desperate effort of the dying woman, who is seeking a means of exciting the protector, an idea springs forth! Ta remembers that examples are always imitated; she knows that; she has had proof of it so many times! That memory, suddenly, has leapt into her head, and her idea, which bears within it the seed of future magic, is already the embryo of the naïve hope that will dream of exciting the forces of nature by means of an example offered to them.
“Dzi...”
She murmurs the sacred name. At the same time, with the tip of her index finger, she designs in the snow the roundness of an eye; in the center, she pricks the dot of a pupil.
Over her shoulder, curious faces lean. They examine. They seek to divine. Mute gazes meet and interrogate one another. Except for the dying woman, however, no one can understand, as yet. It is too soon for those who are alive; they can look with all their soul at the snow over which the old woman’s finger has moved, but all they can see is a streak, and a hole.
They sense, however, that something strange is happening. An ambiguous anxiety oppresses them; a kind of respect intimidates them; without moving, they observe the back of the ancestor, whose two hands are now trembling toward the sky; in their turn, they raise their heads to try to follow the direction of the gaze that is scrutinizing space, fascinating a god.
LXXIX. The Accursed Land
In vain the dying woman extended her arms toward the zenith; no Sun appeared.
Suddenly, behind the veil of raw flakes, something stirred. A gray form appeared: a human, buried waist-deep in the snow, gesticulated. To test the ground, Daâh had crawled outside the shelter, and marched as far as the next rock; he had come back. He had his club in his hand, as in the forest.
Ta understood immediately why he was carrying his club.
He stopped in front of the group,
“Heûh!” he said.
His voice was irritated; his guttural exclamation was accompanied by a grimace of hatred and disgust. At the same time, he had spread out his arms, and he turned his face alternately to the right and the left to show the horror of the region, everywhere.
The human cluster, which approved, growled “Heûh!” And all the faces contracted in a grimace similar to his.
Daâh was satisfied by that assent. Immediately, he pointed his index finger in the direction of the sea, which could be heard growling very faintly, and toward it too he howled:
“Heûh!”
“Heûh!” replied the men, angrily.
“Heûh!” repeated the women.
Even the children, from the depths of their throats, uttered the cry of aversion, thin and shrill. No one wanted that region any longer!
Then, the Chief indicated, in the opposite direction, the region from which they had come; with his arms curved around his skull, he evoked the rounded form of a vault, toward which he raised a marveled gaze, and everyone, at the same time, remembered the big trees.
“Ta!” he said.
The dying woman understood full well that he was not talking about her, but the forest. That is where we must go! The Chief’s statement, this time, was as clear as an order. Everyone approved. Voices clamored:
“Ta!”
Let’s go back to the trees!
Like a brood of larvae that suddenly begin to wriggle, limbs and torsos were disengaged from the heap. In the blink of an eye, they were all on their feet. The departure had been decided.
But the children yelped fearfully when they were pushed toward that cold whiteness. With a brutal fist, Daâh seized one and threw him out of the shelter. The little naked being rolled and stood up again; then, with bewilderment, they saw that he barely sank into the layer of snow, which the previous night had hardened. Was that plan less impracticable than they thought, then? Since Daâh had been able to go from one rock to another, since the white thing had not swallowed the child, was marching not impossible?
A vast gale of laugher saluted the brat, who was capering, and the boldest rushed gaily into the snow.
LXXX. The Adieu
The ancestor contemplated them in silence. The thought of retaining them or imploring them never even occurred to her, and the idea of abandonment was not very precise in anyone. They were going away, nothing more. If someone stayed behind, at their own risk, that was no one’s business but hers. They had acquired, just now, a fugitive notion of the interest that humans had in not separating, but that notion did not implicitly entail that of familial solidarity. In any case, the memory was already distant. They were no longer thinking about anything but the forest, and that evocation was delightful; they were going to revive and march, and they were already on the move. There was no long
er any room in their souls for anything but the joy of living and moving.
They did not even perceive the efforts that the dying woman was making to resume her place in the shelter of the rock. Moving backwards, she frayed a passage, brushing their legs with hers, but no one paid any heed to her. Only when she had arrived at her destination did they notice her, because of her immobility, which contrasted with the agitation of everyone else. Leaning back against the rock, curled up, her neck between her shoulders and her chin on her knees, she drew the pelt of a horse around her, and her teeth chattered; her little eyes, in the depths of sunken orbits, had the fixity of a shiny stone; her visage expressed the distress of an animal on the lookout for an inevitable blow, waiting for it.
Before the depressed attitude of old woman, they were content simply not to envy her place. It happened, however, that some of them paraded a grave lingering glance over her, in which there was sadness, and perhaps pity. But none of her children or grandchildren thought that they might take her with them. She alone had that furtive thought, when her last-born passed in front of her. He was now a tall and solid male; she gazed at him slowly, and she remembered.
I carried you on my back when you were tiny!
That thought only lasts as long as a fleeting memory; Ta does not dwell on it. She knows full well that women carry their new-borns and men their clubs, nothing more. In the forest of gorse, they would no longer be able to drag her; they would leave her among the thorns; it is better here. She does not reason, but the images file past, and she refuses them. She accepts her fate; by virtue of having compared it momentarily with a fate that seems worse, she even feels better; she will wait. She is ready. She draws the horse-hide more narrowly around her loins, which are shivering.
The horde is about to leave.
It is at that moment that Hock comes to sit down next to her, as if to say adieu; with an abrupt surge, she arrives, and she sticks her shoulder against that of the abandoned; then, lowering her head and twisting her neck, in order to look the other in the face at close range, she looks her in the eyes, and she laughs.
For the last time, Ta feels the warmth of a human presence penetrating her body.
Daâh, standing in front of the two grandmothers, contemplated them with an attentive, almost severe, expression; while examining them, he searched for something in himself, a very distant memory...
Finally, he understood: the group of the two women reminded him of the days of their youth, when the horde did not yet exist, and when, coming back from hunting, he discovered the two companions side by side, under a tree, exactly as they presented themselves here, under the rock.
In order to remember better, he screwed up his eyelids and clenched his teeth. What he perceived in the depths of his memory was undoubtedly agreeable to rediscover, for it made him laugh.
Immediately, Hock and Ta, who were already remembering, understood what he was thinking. Hock started laughing again, vehemently, shaking her bald head in front of the dying woman’s face. The latter no longer had enough strength to imitate them, but they saw a blissful crease in her face, and two gleams of gaiety in her pupils.
Daâh was no longer laughing, however, and he remained standing, hesitant to give the order to depart; even though the gesture was decided, he delayed making it; he experienced a vague malaise, an embarrassment, difficulty that he could not explain, a sudden timidity, perhaps a shame.
He fixed his hard and anxious gaze on the old woman’s eyes; then, again, he extended his arm in the direction of the necessary forest, and in a voice that was soft, in spite of his intention, he said:
“Ta!”
The moribund nodded her head up and down, to approve the departure.
Then he turned his back and started marching.
Hock got up and followed him.
The whole horde followed, without looking back.
Then the veil of snow fell between the abandoned woman and those who were going away.
LXXXI. The Abandoned
The last silhouettes, becoming paler and paler, faded away; the last muffled voices fall silent.
Now Ta is alone.
In order still to sense a presence, she draws her folded thighs against her breast with both hands, and hunches her back in order to drive her chin deeper between her knees. She listens; there is no longer anything in the air but the distant sound of the sea, whose waves are breaking. She gazes; there is nothing around her any longer but the movement of the falling snow.
She hurls into the desert a cry for help that is prolonged and interminable, like those of little children, and her voice comes back to her, returned by a rock. She will never hear another human voice again. She will never see their eyes again...
She raises her own eyes toward the place where the Sun shone, but everything is gray. She lowers them toward the place where she drew the Eye of the World a little while ago, but footprints have erased the drawing and the snow is effacing the footprints. The flakes, one after another, are piling up and filling in the holes. The plain is becoming uniform again.
Once again, in order to hear the sound of a human voice one last time, she cries out to the echo.
The snow falls.
LXXXII. The Couple
No one remembered Ta any longer.
The horde had returned, with difficulty, to the forest. Several of its members had been left behind on the way, buried in holes in the snow. The Chief always kept going, always in the lead, but with a more evident slowness and an increasing fatigue.
He was not old, but forty-eight years of marching beneath the rain and incessant battles had brought him to the end of his tether. No white hairs glistened in his fleece, but his entire body was striped with scars and his entire face creased by wrinkles. His teeth, after having chewed for fifteen hours a day for half a century, had been worn away almost to the jaws, like those of an old horse, and his heart, at times, ceased beating in his chest. Then, he choked; sometimes, he even collapsed; as soon as he recovered consciousness, he suffered less from the pain than the humiliation, and those who tried to help him irritated him no less than the malevolent animal hidden in his chest; he pushed them away, taking responsibility for punishing it on his own, with blows of his fist.
In fact, it was prodigious that he had lasted for so long. He was even conscious of that, and took no small pride in the fact of having seen so many sons and daughters of all ages disappear while he remained standing, unscathed; he concluded that he was admirable. Candidly, he considered himself to be incomparable, and was not far from admitting for himself the benefit of an exceptional immortality; at the very least, he was proud of having remained, without having any idea of mourning those who had not.
He did not refuse to grant a portion of that esteem to the companion who had been able to resist as he had; a little more than before, that life appeared to him as his work, since it had only continued thanks to him, and it was still his own strength that he admired therein.
As for Hock, she thought exactly as he did: as she felt her weakness increasing, the need for assistance and a confidence made of accumulated memories attached her more narrowly to the protector of her youth; although he was less and less capable of defending others, she did not feel secure except in his presence. She did not readily consent to leave his side. As soon as she lost sight of him she moaned and trotted on her old legs, arms forward, in order to catch up with him. That was, at any rate, much easier than before, because he rarely went out on hunting expeditions.
Sometimes, although he was close by, she bleated his name in a soft voice, purely to remind him of her existence.
“Daâh...”
He growled, not without gentleness:
“Hock...”
He had certainly noticed that increasing assiduity. He was flattered by it, encouraged it and lent himself to it, finding therein a compensation for the negligence that was beginning to become manifest among the young females and males, who were less attentive to his person. The continued p
resence of Hock became necessary to him; more than that, he was anxious about her as never before.
Sometimes he called to her, spontaneously:
“Hock...”
Immediately, she replied:
“Daâh...”
And, like a dog, she was very proud that someone had thought of her.
Thus, they arrived together, she by virtue of humility and he by virtue of pride, at the same point: the sentiment of decrepitude on her part, and the refusal on his to believe in a diminution, led them to a common need to unite together, and they finally became a couple.
LXXXIII. Time Past
Since the epoch in which the obstacle of the Sea had obliged the Nomads to retrace their steps, the horde had been marching for three years in the forest. As before, they lived on fruits, roots and meat; as before, they slept in the trees.
But how things had changed!
Under the cover of the branches, the humidity became cold. From year to year the temperature declined. The first frissons of the glacial period were descending from the distant Alps, entering the underwood and making the leaves, the beasts and the humans shiver. Until then, they had scarcely known two seasons, an autumn and a spring, but from the fourth year onwards, a perpetual winter set in. The rain only fell rarely, but snow was daily. Thunder growled with less frequency in the clouds, but a uniformly dull sky displayed itself above the region without budging. The north-east wind dispersed that oppressive veil more often, and the daylight displayed the azure and the night the stars, but no one any longer rejoiced in that, because that thorny wind tore at the skin and the nights were glacial; sleep became impossible for naked humans isolated in a fork in the branches.
Daâh: The First Human Page 20
