The Unexpected Universe

by Loren Eiseley

We were part of the rainbow—an unexplained projection into the natural. As I went down the beach I could feel the drawing of a circle in men’s minds, like that lowering, shifting realm of color in which the thrower labored. It was a visible model of something toward which man’s mind had striven, the circle of perfection.

  I picked and flung another star. Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung. I could feel the movement in my body. It was like a sowing—the sowing of life on an infinitely gigantic scale. I looked back across my shoulder. Small and dark against the receding rainbow, the star thrower stooped and flung once more. I never looked again. The task we had assumed was too immense for gazing. I flung and flung again while all about us roared the insatiable waters of death.

  But we, pale and alone and small in that immensity, hurled back the living stars. Somewhere far off, across bottomless abysses, I felt as though another world was flung more joyfully. I could have thrown in a frenzy of joy, but I set my shoulders and cast, as the thrower in the rainbow cast, slowly, deliberately, and well. The task was not to be assumed lightly, for it was men as well as starfish that we sought to save. For a moment, we cast on an infinite beach together beside an unknown hurler of suns. It was, unsought, the destiny of my kind since the rituals of the ice age hunters, when life in the Northern Hemisphere had come close to vanishing. We had lost our way, I thought, but we had kept, some of us, the memory of the perfect circle of compassion from life to death and back again to life—the completion of the rainbow of existence. Even the hunters in the snow, making obeisance to the souls of the hunted, had known the cycle. The legend had come down and lingered that he who gained the gratitude of animals gained help in need from the dark wood.

  I cast again with an increasingly remembered sowing motion and went my lone way up the beaches. Somewhere, I felt, in a great atavistic surge of feeling, somewhere the Thrower knew. Perhaps he smiled and cast once more into the boundless pit of darkness. Perhaps he, too, was lonely, and the end toward which he labored remained hidden—even as with ourselves.

  I picked up a star whose tube feet ventured timidly among my fingers while, like a true star, it cried soundlessly for life. I saw it with an unaccustomed clarity and cast far out. With it, I flung myself as forfeit, for the first time, into some unknown dimension of existence. From Darwin’s tangled bank of unceasing struggle, selfishness, and death, had arisen, incomprehensibly, the thrower who loved not man, but life. It was the subtle cleft in nature before which biological thinking had faltered. We had reached the last shore of an invisible island—yet, strangely, also a shore that the primitives had always known. They had sensed intuitively that man cannot exist spiritually without life, his brother, even if he slays. Somewhere, my thought persisted, there is a hurler of stars, and he walks, because he chooses, always in desolation, but not in defeat.

  In the night the gas flames under the shelling kettles would continue to glow. I set my clock accordingly. Tomorrow I would walk in the storm. I would walk against the shell collectors and the flames. I would walk remembering Bacon’s forgotten words “for the uses of life.” I would walk with the knowledge of the discontinuities of the unexpected universe. I would walk knowing of the rift revealed by the thrower, a hint that there looms, inexplicably, in nature something above the role men give her. I knew it from the man at the foot of the rainbow, the starfish thrower on the beaches of Costabel.

  FIVE

  The Angry Winter

  As to what happened next, it is possible to maintain that the hand of heaven was involved, and also possible to say that when men are desperate no one can stand up to them.

  —XENOPHON

  A TIME COMES when creatures whose destinies have crossed somewhere in the remote past are forced to appraise each other as though they were total strangers. I had been huddled beside the fire one winter night, with the wind prowling outside and shaking the windows. The big shepherd dog on the hearth before me occasionally glanced up affectionately, sighed, and slept. I was working, actually, amidst the debris of a far greater winter. On my desk lay the lance points of ice age hunters and the heavy leg bone of a fossil bison. No remnants of flesh attached to these relics. The deed lay more than ten thousand years remote. It was represented here by naked flint and by bone so mineralized it rang when struck. As I worked on in my little circle of light, I absently laid the bone beside me on the floor. The hour had crept toward midnight. A grating noise, a heavy rasping of big teeth diverted me. I looked down.

  The dog had risen. That rock-hard fragment of a vanished beast was in his jaws and he was mouthing it with a fierce intensity I had never seen exhibited by him before.

  “Wolf,” I exclaimed, and stretched out my hand. The dog backed up but did not yield. A low and steady rumbling began to rise in his chest, something out of a long-gone midnight. There was nothing in that bone to taste, but ancient shapes were moving in his mind and determining his utterance. Only fools gave up bones. He was warning me.

  “Wolf,” I chided again.

  As I advanced, his teeth showed and his mouth wrinkled to strike. The rumbling rose to a direct snarl. His flat head swayed low and wickedly as a reptile’s above the floor. I was the most loved object in his universe, but the past was fully alive in him now. Its shadows were whispering in his mind. I knew he was not bluffing. If I made another step he would strike.

  Yet his eyes were strained and desperate. “Do not,” something pleaded in the back of them, some affectionate thing that had followed at my heel all the days of his mortal life, “do not force me. I am what I am and cannot be otherwise because of the shadows. Do not reach out. You are a man, and my very god. I love you, but do not put out your hand. It is midnight. We are in another time, in the snow.”

  “The other time,” the steady rumbling continued while I paused, “the other time in the snow, the big, the final, the terrible snow, when the shape of this thing I hold spelled life. I will not give it up. I cannot. The shadows will not permit me. Do not put out your hand.”

  I stood silent, looking into his eyes, and heard his whisper through. Slowly I drew back in understanding. The snarl diminished, ceased. As I retreated, the bone slumped to the floor. He placed a paw upon it, warningly.

  And were there no shadows in my own mind, I wondered. Had I not for a moment, in the grip of that savage utterance, been about to respond, to hurl myself upon him over an invisible haunch ten thousand years removed? Even to me the shadows had whispered—to me, the scholar in his study.

  “Wolf,” I said, but this time, holding a familiar leash, I spoke from the door indifferently. “A walk in the snow.” Instantly from his eyes that other visitant receded. The bone was left lying. He came eagerly to my side, accepting the leash and taking it in his mouth as always.

  A blizzard was raging when we went out, but he paid no heed. On his thick fur the driving snow was soon clinging heavily. He frolicked a little—though usually he was a grave dog—making up to me for something still receding in his mind. I felt the snowflakes fall upon my face, and stood thinking of another time, and another time still, until I was moving from midnight to midnight under ever more remote and vaster snows. Wolf came to my side with a little whimper. It was he who was civilized now. “Come back to the fire,” he nudged gently, “or you will be lost.” Automatically I took the leash he offered. He led me safely home and into the house.

  “We have been very far away,” I told him solemnly. “I think there is something in us that we had both better try to forget.” Sprawled on the rug, Wolf made no response except to thump his tail feebly out of courtesy. Already he was mostly asleep and dreaming. By the movement of his feet I could see he was running far upon some errand in which I played no part.

  Softly I picked up his bone—our bone, rather—and replaced it high on a shelf in my cabinet. As I snapped off the light the white glow from the window seemed to augment itself and shine with a deep, glacial blue. As far as I could see, nothing moved in the long
aisles of my neighbor’s woods. There was no visible track, and certainly no sound from the living. The snow continued to fall steadily, but the wind, and the shadows it had brought, had vanished.

  II

  Vast desolation and a kind of absence in nature invite the emergence of equally strange beings or spectacular natural events. An influx of power accompanies nature’s every hesitation; each pause is succeeded by an uncanny resurrection. The evolution of a lifeless planet eventually culminates in green leaves. The altered and oxygenated air hanging above the continents presently invites the rise of animal apparitions compounded of formerly inert clay.

  Only after long observation does the sophisticated eye succeed in labeling these events as natural rather than miraculous. There frequently lingers about them a penumbral air of mystery not easily dispersed. We seem to know much, yet we frequently find ourselves baffled. Humanity itself constitutes such a mystery, for our species arose and spread in a time of great extinctions. We are the final product of the Pleistocene period’s millennial winters, whose origin is still debated. Our knowledge of this ice age is only a little over a century old, and the time of its complete acceptance even less. Illiterate man has lost the memory of that vast snowfall from whose depths he has emerged blinking.

  “Nature is a wizard,” Thoreau once said. The self-styled inspector of snowstorms stood in awe of the six-pointed perfection of a snowflake. The air, even thin air, was full of genius. The poetic naturalist to whom, in our new-found scientism, we grudgingly accord a literary name but whom we dismiss as an indifferent investigator, made a profound observation about man during a moment of shivering thought on a frozen river. “The human brain,” meditated the snowbound philosopher, “is the kernel which the winter itself matures.” The winter, he thought, tended to concentrate and extend the power of the human mind.

  “The winter,” Thoreau continued, “is thrown to us like a bone to a famishing dog, and we are expected to get the marrow out of it.” In foreshortened perspective Thoreau thus symbolically prefigured man’s passage through the four long glacial seasons, from which we have indeed painfully learned to extract the marrow. Although Thoreau had seen the scratches left by the moving ice across Mount Monadnock, even to recording their direction, he was innocent of their significance. What he felt was a sign of his intuitive powers alone. He sensed uncannily the opening of a damp door in a remote forest, and he protested that nature was too big for him, that it was, in reality, a playground of giants.

  Nor was Thoreau wrong. Man is the product of a very unusual epoch in earth’s history, a time when the claws of a vast dragon, the glacial ice, groped fumbling toward him across a third of the world’s land surface and blew upon him the breath of an enormous winter. It was a world of elemental extravagance, assigned by authorities to scarcely one per cent of earth’s history and labeled “geo-catastrophic.” For over a million years man, originally a tropical orphan, has wandered through age-long snowdrifts or been deluged by equally giant rains.

  He has been present at the birth of mountains. He has witnessed the disappearance of whole orders of life and survived the cyclonic dust clouds that blew in the glacial winds off the receding ice fronts. In the end it is no wonder that he himself has retained a modicum of that violence and unpredictability which lie sleeping in the heart of nature. Modern man, for all his developed powers and his imagined insulation in his cities, still lives at the mercy of those giant forces that created him and can equally decree his departure. These forces are revealed in man’s simplest stories—the stories in which the orphaned and abused prince evades all obstacles and, through the assistance of some benign sorcerer, slays the dragon and enters into his patrimony.

  As the ice age presents a kind of caricature or sudden concentration of those natural forces that normally govern the world, so man, in the development of that awful instrument, his brain, himself partakes of the same qualities. Both his early magic and his latest science have magnified and frequently distorted the powers of the natural world, stirring its capricious and evil qualities. The explosive force of suns, once safely locked in nature, now lies in the hand that long ago dropped from a tree limb into the upland grass.

  We have become planet changers and the decimators of life, including our own. The sorcerer’s gift of fire in a dark cave has brought us more than a simple kingdom. Like so many magical gifts it has conjured up that which cannot be subdued but henceforth demands unceasing attention lest it destroy us. We are the genuine offspring of the sleeping ice, and we have inherited its power to magnify the merely usual into the colossal. The nature we have known throughout our venture upon earth has not been the stable, drowsy summer of the slow reptilian ages. Instead, we are the final product of a seemingly returning cycle, which comes once in two hundred and fifty million years—about the time, it has been estimated, that it takes our sun to make one full circle of the galactic wheel.

  That circle and its recurrent ice have been repeated back into dim pre-Cambrian eras, whose life is lost to us. When our first tentative knowledge of the cold begins, the time is Permian. This glaciation, so far as we can determine, was, in contrast to the ice age just past, confined primarily to the southern hemisphere. Like the later Pleistocene episode, which saw the rise of man, it was an epoch of continental uplift and of a steeper temperature gradient from the poles to the equator. It produced a crisis in the evolution of life that culminated in the final invasion of the land by the reptilian vertebrates. More significantly, so far as our own future was concerned, it involved the rise of those transitional twilight creatures, the mammal-like reptiles whose remote descendants we are.

  They were moving in the direction of fur, warm blood, and controlled body temperature, which, in time, would give the true mammals the mastery of the planet. Their forerunners were the first vertebrate responses to the recurrent menace of the angry dragon. Yet so far away in the past, so dim and distant was the breath of that frosty era that the scientists of the nineteenth century, who believed in a constant heat loss from a once fiery earth, were amazed when A. C. Ramsay, in 1854, produced evidence that the last great winter, from which man is only now emerging, had been long preceded in the Permian by a period of equally formidable cold.

  Since we live on the borders of the Pleistocene, an ice age that has regressed but not surely departed, it is perhaps well to observe that the older Permian glaciation is the only one of whose real duration we can form a reasonable estimate. Uncertain traces of other such eras are lost in ancient strata or buried deep in the pre-Cambrian shadows. For the Permian glaciation, however, we can derive a rough estimate of some twenty-five to thirty million years, during which the southern continents periodically lay in the grip of glacial ice. Philip King, of the U.S. Geological Survey, has observed that in Australia the period of Permian glaciation was prolonged, and that in eastern Australia boulder beds of glacial origin are interspersed through more than ten thousand feet of geological section. The temperature gradient of that era would never again be experienced until the onset of the cold that accompanied the birth of man.

  If the cause of these glacial conditions, with the enormous intervals between them, is directed by recurrent terrestrial or cosmic conditions, then man, unknowingly, is huddling memoryless in the pale sunshine of an interstadial spring. Ice still lies upon the poles; the arctic owl, driven south on winter nights, drifts white and invisible over the muffled countryside. He is a survival from a vanished world, a denizen of the long cold of which he may yet be the returning harbinger.

  I have said that the earlier Permian glaciation appears to have fluctuated over perhaps thirty million years. Some two hundred and fifty million years later, the Pleistocene—the ice age we call our own—along with four interglacial summers (if we include the present), has persisted a scant million years.* So recent is it that its two earlier phases yield little evidence of animal adjustment to the cold. “The origin of arctic life,” remarks one authority, “is shrouded in darkness.” Only the last t
wo ice advances have given time, apparently, for the emergence of a fauna of arctic aspect—the woolly mammoths, white bears, and tundra-grazing reindeer, who shared with man the experience of the uttermost cold.

  The arctic, in general, has been the grave of life rather than the place of its primary development. Man is the survivor among many cold-adapted creatures who streamed away at last with the melting glaciers. So far, the Pleistocene, in which geologically we still exist, has been a time of great extinctions. Its single new emergent, man, has himself contributed to making it what Alfred Russel Wallace has called a “zoologically impoverished world.” Judging from the Permian record, if we were to experience thirty million more years of alternate ice and sun across a third of the earth’s surface, man’s temperate-zone cities would be ground to powder, his numbers decimated, and he himself might die in bestial savagery and want. Or, in his new-found scientific cleverness, he might survive his own unpredictable violence and live on as an archaic relic, a dropped pebble from a longer geological drama.

  Already our own kind, Homo sapiens, with the assistance of the last two ice advances, appears to have eliminated, directly or indirectly, a sizable proportion of the human family. One solitary, if fertile, species, lost in internecine conflict, confronts the future even now. Man’s survival record, for all his brains, is not impressive against the cunning patience of the unexpired Great Winter. In fact, we would do well to consider the story of man’s past and his kinship with the planetary dragon—for of this there is no doubt at all. “The association of unusual physical conditions with a crisis in evolution is not likely to be pure coincidence,” George Gaylord Simpson, a leading paleontologist, has declared. “Life and its environment are interdependent and evolve together.”

  The steps to man begin before the ice age. Just as in the case of the ancestral mammals, however, they are heralded by the oncoming cold of the late Age of Mammals, the spread of grass, the skyward swing of the continents, and the violence of mountain upheaval. The Pleistocene episode, so long unguessed and as insignificant as a pinprick on the earth’s great time scale, signifies also, as did the ice of the late Paleozoic, the rise of a new organic world. In this case it marked in polycentric waves, distorted and originally hurled back by the frost, the rise of a creature not only new, but also one whose head contained its own interior lights and shadows and who was destined to reflect the turbulence and beauty of the age in which it was born.