The Missing Link and Other Tales of Ape-Men

by Georges T. Dodds

  CHAPTER VI

  For what seemed like minutes, centuries to Jan, D’ginna was bracing herself, howling out in her agonizing exertions, her mouth foaming over, her body twisted into a bow, held up from the bed by only the nape of the neck and the heels. She collapsed. It was immediately clear that this was but a false respite for an animal machinery at the brink of collapse, husbanding its strength for another terrible fit, the foam between her lips continuing to escape, bloody, spuming, and localized contractions sweeping like knots across the muscle mass, leaving behind furrows of hairs erect and vibrant on the skin, as if they were on the vocal cords.

  As he was leaning over her to whisper encouraging words, trying to avoid looking at her or touching her, as her fiery eyes would burn into him, and at the least contact she would throw him back with a near galvanic jolt, a cry, a thousand fold sharper than all the others, and which one might have thought to be the rending arising from the release of a soul from its bodily housing, penetrated Jan to his very bones. He had pulled her sideways, on the edge of the covers, and held her knees up and bent over her pelvis, a position he believed to be conducive to the widening of the birth canal. Suddenly he felt his thighs soaked, the amniotic sac had broken. Amongst the shapeless, tepid, pale wastes which followed and wriggled at his feet, and from which wails emerged which made him mad with both joy and terror combined, Jan, abandoning the mother fallen quiet again, untangled, not without difficulty, the new born and undertook the complete removal of the placental membranes and the ligature of the umbilical cord.

  Had he there, in his arms, simply a young gorilla, or the feverishly awaited and yet unnamed first and immortal originator of a new race? A pure ape, or an ape-man? Anthropoid or anthropopithecus?9

  Having wiped it and covered it in old rags, specially prepared, he brought it outside, not wishing to undertake under the artificial light of his lamp the examination upon which would depend his defeat or triumph, his shame or his pride. Beneath the stars, glittering so brightly in a blue so deep that they seemed diamond encrusted water-lilies undergoing the barely perceptible rocking of an infinite sea, he pushed aside the swaddling clothes. A quick look was sufficient to confirm his glory. It was indeed a little human being, his child, his son. Kneeling and shaking, suddenly drunk with joy, his chest set back and his face beaming in exaltation, he raised his son in his two hands and held him out to each of the cardinal points, as if to have him adopted and blessed by all the sky bearing witness.

  D’ginna woke with a long sigh of deliverance. He cleaned her bed, changed the wet, soiled grasses and pelts, rolled up in the opposite corner the refuse and dirty objects until they could be sorted, washed, kept or buried. She remained stretched out on her back; he put the little one down beside her, and immediately saw him extend his mouth towards her breasts, take one and begin suckling on it, his cheeks bulging at each suction, his eyelids lowered like a taster entirely wrapped up in his cup, and its tiny hands, already useful, caressing the maternal bosom and pressing upon it to facilitate the flow of the savory stream between his lips. Jan smiled, attentive to the safety in and precision of this admirable instinctive movement, and did not lay down beside the fire he wished to keep going all night, until his mate fell asleep again, exhausted but still hugging to her breast, with her single arm, the satiated infant, who nonetheless would not let go of her.

  In order to stop her from going out or even getting up, having read in an obstetrics book how much the good health of the delivered mother depended on her remaining in bed, he did not leave the cabin for several days. The provisions were abundant. Thankfully so, because the wet-nurse, without choice foods, would have been unable to satisfy the glutton whose ravenous hunger was a constant torment. He did profit by it, for he rapidly grew physically stronger, and was soon capable of hanging from his parents’ necks.

  One morning, holding him thus in one arm and giving the other to D’ginna, weak still, Jan took them to the Zondag- Zay basin, a gigantic bowl at the base of an outcropping of granite, rising in terraces into a sort of natural pyramid resting against a hillside. After each flood, the retreating river would leave behind a pond which the springs of the adjacent slope would also supply. The water remained there, between two overflows, abundant and clear, its evaporation slowed by the powerful shadows of the overhanging outcrops. Given the day he had discovered it, Jan called this place, barely a kilometer from his cabin and unknown before him to the natives, Zondag-Zay, from the two Dutch words for “Sunday” and “lake.”

  Stepping up the pace they arrived at dawn.

  Water striders skated over the lake, the circular ridges born beneath their delicate legs alone troubling, imperceptibly so, the stillness of the surface, whose cobalt hue, darker near the rocks, softened towards the edges into a soft blue. Not a reed, not a moss hung on the rocky walls. Not a sound. A ray of light slipped between the canopy of two trees extending an oval of light to the very depths, a dormer window of golden daylight opened in this huge mirror of blue. Having waded in at this location, while D’ginna was sitting on the bank resting, Jan detached the soft sleeping bundle still hanging from his neck, woke it with a kiss, held it under the armpits, and dipped it into the luminous water.

  “I baptize you Hemo,” he said.

  And extending him to all four cardinal points of the mariner’s card, like the night of his birth, and shouting out each time: “Hemo! Hemo! Hemo! Hemo!” he offered him to the Sun, which upon its first contact dried him and enveloped him in a transparent haze similar to the radiant halos with which the painters of the Adoration of the Magi surrounded the divine child’s cradle. He added:

  “Yes, as I decided, when I daren’t hope for you in my secret dreams, you will be named Hemo, for the new blood which flows in your veins. Yes, baptized by this water, free from all other contact until now, go, Hemo, grow, true savior of our worn out races, be the founder of a regenerated humanity, purified of all original sin, I mean of all unhealthy traits, through its return to the primitive womb.”

  As a king in his swaddling-clothes is not cognizant of the future splendors of his destiny and prefers his bottle to the honors bestowed upon him by the Senate and ambassadors, Hemo wailed, extending his lips and limbs, made active by the coolness of the bath, towards his motionless mother. Jan, the ceremony finished was readying himself to join her, when he stopped, one foot in the air, frozen. A real voice, and not an echo, was repeating with a dreadful clamor: “Hemo! Hemo!” Jan leapt out of the Zondag-Zay, held the infant to his chest and put it before D’ginna who was alarmed at his sudden movement, but as indifferent to the vociferations as if she were unable to hear them at all.

  Mandrills were filling in the upper tiers of the pyramid. Having his back to them, entirely wrapped up in his role as John the Baptist in the Jordan, Jan had not seen them; frightened at first, he laughed at his fear and soon understood the calm maintained by D’ginna. From where she sat she had seen them arrive, and used to their jabbering, she was not surprised. Having come down little by little, they lined themselves up on the other side; the females entering the lake would dip the curled up feet of their infants, and raising them in their fisted hands, howl to the four winds, accompanied by the males who sedately crouched on the shore waiting for them.

  At this disgraceful parody, Jan, in a fit of anger, lost the indulgence of disdain, put Hemo down on the grass, loaded his rifle which he kept across his shoulder, and fired in a rapid uncontrolled motion into the middle of them. One dead tumbled under the water; the troop, for whom it was child’s play to leap across the great crevasses and to climb the irregular terraces, disappeared as if by magic onto the other flank of the rocky outcrop. Alone, a large stout one, no doubt the leader such troops have, pretended to be brave, approaching along the shore. D’ginna, of a species akin to his own, was, generally speaking, no great surprise to him. But before the Dutchman, upright on two legs, his face pink, the poor cynocephalus, looking positively timid, embarrassingly brought to bay, after, it is true
, having assured himself that all his subjects, having fled in a cowardly manner, would have nothing to jeer at. Now, annoyed at seeing Jan redder in the face from an urge to laugh than his former disgust, he wished to show that he too bore other colors than the hideous blue off his wrinkled cheeks, and turning his back, he went off slowly trumpeting in a deep baritone, and raising the stump of his rudimentary tail, so as to allow one to long admire, between the violet calluses of his flaming red rump, the bright crimson of his scrotal sac.

  Jan and D’ginna took other walks, but the Zondag-Zay remained their favorite.

  In the afternoon, the nocturnal mists having dissipated, they traveled in the forest, undisturbed. They were at ease among the palm trees, their terminal limbs ending at such great heights, impenetrable to rains and to light, so that all other plants were choked out beneath and that the smooth trunks, propylaea opening upon the infinite, framed to all sides vistas of bare colonnades. They were crushed by the low ceiling of the colossal baobabs, whose branches, fallen back to earth, formed, under the most blinding of light, dark labyrinths seemingly dug out amidst the mysterious greenery. They were caressed by the swinging of the lianas in the undergrowth or about each tree-trunk, with countless morning-glories, orchids, bignonias, vines, and passion-flowers springing forth, climbing, twisting, disheveled and taking on every shape, every color, every aroma. Here Jan would harvest large quantities of a type of mango whose seed crushed into a paste was as good as cacao; excellent oils which could be made to pour down from the least incision into a wide variety of trees; kola nuts which bound so tightly to the lingual papillae that they become insensitive to unpleasant flavors and made one think brackish water was fresh; ginger, nutmeg, vanilla, cardamom seeds so aromatic that they were termed seeds of paradise, gamboge, elimi resin, rubber. He avoided the terrible ranks of the venomous plants, some misleading by the smiling hypocrisy of their pale nuances and suave aromas, but most on the contrary marked in such a manner as to warn the traveler ahead of time, with their succulent, hairless, verdigris-colored stems, sweating death into ampullae, tumors pock marking them like the back of a toad, with eczema and dartre eating away at them like chancres of some secret disease, and with their huge flowers, calices yawning scarlet maws with poorly excised fangs, adhering like the lips of a lurid pus-filled wound, swelling out into muzzles ready to spit out their venom, their phlegm a tainted mucus, their skin peeling off like that of lepers. A mere atom drowned among the triumph of rising sap, before virtually identical sister species of Apocynum, one secreting a delightful honey, the other a narcotic milky latex beneath the eternal indifference of a Sun which cooked to a tee poisons and balms, incubated and hatched crocodile eggs in the mud and those in the 50 bird nests suspended in the radiant sky on the midrib of a single banana leaf, Jan understood the disheartening triteness of human endeavors before Nature personified, and tired, intoxicated, ashamed of working, he would mold himself a bed with grasses and would loll in it, curled up in a ball, as if frightened of dissolving into the enormity of ambient life.

  D’ginna, languorous after her childbirth, usually left him to go back into the cabin. Even when she accompanied him all the way, he continued to take care of Hemo alone, since the time when he had entrusted her with him to pick some grapes, and she had moved away, forcing him to search for an hour before finding them. Having climbed up into a clump of fig trees, baby at her breast, she had not responded to his repeated calls either by signal or by noise. When, attracted by the happy drone of the suckling infant, he had found her motionless and silent in the middle of the freshening dusk spread over them by the abundant silvery foliage, she had purposefully hidden herself with all the care of a hunted creature. Had she wished to escape? From the ill-tempered manner in which she received his harmless scolding once upon the ground, to her stealing longing looks into the far distance, he believed so. Overcome by a great sadness at this discovery, he vowed to keep an eye on her and never again leave her alone in charge of Hemo.

  Inside, outside, on the matting, on the mosses, she seemed quiet, eyes half-closed, finding no fun in games, in the amusing, noisy boisterousness with which Hemo would regale the cabin and neighboring area from morning ‘til night. Those first babbling words which resonate like ineffable music in the heart of a mother, the first gesture in begging to be given a toy which a mother senses intuitively, the first steps she encourages, backing up little by little, luring the child with the promises of refreshment at her breast and a warm bosom between her arms, all of these left D’ginna indifferent and in no way altered her sleepiness or her boredom. She only moved to scratch her own itches, and the little one was only deloused and washed by Jan, who was quite capable of all these tasks, father from head to toe, and even so much so that he was only that.

  Haarlem’s incorrigible dreamer, the fanatical theoretician of progressive evolution, the discoverer of Eden, the rejuvenator of humanity, the Adamite ancestor were all dead, and D’ginna’s mate no less so. He no longer took care of her and would in good faith have denied their lovemaking had she suddenly been gifted with the power of speech and had spoken of it. Forgetful of the past to the extent that today, prolonging their midday nap because of an impending storm, he rejected her from the bed where she came to brush against him, perhaps tempt him, asking her with some impatience what sort of bee was in her bonnet. Like those old men, who at the happy age of lost virility wish to get rid of their mistress in order to devote themselves to the adoration of the son she bore them, adopting him as sole heir to name and fortune, so Jan, even if ensured himself of never being unpleasant with her, to never deviate from the strictest propriety, his attitude belied his words, and nervous yawns would complete a smile with which he attempted to correct the inflexibility of his resistance to her nonetheless frequent flirting. Completely separated from her, he even secured himself against the recurrence of any such desires by building himself, near the crown of the roof, a kind of small loft, with a hammock from which he could draw up the ladder and so completely isolate himself. Every night he went up alone; during the day he played with Hemo.

  One such day, when they had capered about a great deal and the little one, thirsty, held onto the hammock with one hand and waved the other towards his mother crouched below, Jan brought him down, and a little tired, went back up for a nap.

  The slamming of the door woke him. He bent over the side of the hammock.

  The cabin was empty.

  Leaping to the threshold at the risk of breaking a leg, he saw D’ginna with Hemo, already two thirds of the way across the clearing. Five minutes later and they would have been in the forest, and most likely lost to him. For there was no mistake: turning every ten paces, and tearing off at great speed as soon as she saw herself being pursued, she was trying to escape.

  She was nearing the woods, leaping from side to side to keep from being observed. Was she frightened by some snake, the terror of all apes, or did she reflect upon the fact that her lone functional arm, beside the burden of Hemo at her neck, would make the climbing of trees too difficult, and the lianas would only tangle her up and lessen her chances of escape? She now seemed to no longer hesitate and headed straight for a point where the cover gradually thinned, giving way to open country. Jan had never explored the limits of this blind alley of the clearing, which D’ginna knew full well from their walks together. Hoping to better lose him there, she boldly moved forward.

  They arrived somewhere in that open country which was unknown, at least to Jan. The terrain was broken by a series of bare knolls and grassy slopes. Behind the ridge a steep slope, then, as far as the eye could see, a swamp, a veritable forest of reeds.

  The water, not having the necessary depth to support crocodiles or hippotami, slept in thousands of irregular puddles, the remains of a huge lake sunburned away. Spread out in soft curves were marshes so large that the ripples upon them seemed to form the beginnings of currents, which took on, beneath the undulating vegetation, the appearance of slow sinuous rivers, disap
pearing into dark places edged in peat beneath the magnificent spherical umbels of the papyrus, marvelous reeds, genuine little trees whose sharp-edged triangular stem was adorned, three meters up, with great downy white feathers.

  Standing on the ridge momentarily before further pursuing D’ginna into the marshes, Jan made one last appeal to her, promising to forgive her. When she ignored him he cried out in despair and regret for not having his rifle on hand, for he would have fired. He then moved forward, stepping on the mat of roots so as not to sink into the mud, hanging on to the gigantic gladioli, whose sharp lanceolate leaves cut like barbarian blades. The innumerable flocks of water birds were barely disturbed and upon seeing the fearlessness of the creatures Jan, notwithstanding his fevered condition, recalled that Darwin once observed a similar setting on his voyage to the Galapagos, a countryside not heretofore visited by man. Rank upon rank of ibis stood up like pickets on their spindly legs, their heads scarlet, softly fading rose on wings and neck, twisting eel-like into hieroglyphic contortions. They aligned themselves along the shore with the black ducks of the golden brown wing-quills, and the kingfishers with their metallic green-bronze reflections. Above, pelicans, their goitered mandibles above the swan-like crop, perched at rest upon trees burned by their guano and whose dead branches bore the empty skins of snakes left behind at their time of molting, now floating like mummy wrappings shaking their ruby dust and old gold scales. Higher still, bald vultures flew about hovering in the yellow patches of mist.