The Source

by James A. Michener

  Wore, as Cullinane used the word, implied a whole scale of social judgments and was the end result of many moral decisions. Why did men decide to wear anything? How much of that decision sprang from cold or from a desire to inherit the power of animals by wearing their skins; how much from a need for sexual propriety, as suggested in Genesis? When some men began to wear something, what kind of pressure did they apply against others to make them do the same? At what point did women discover that they were more functional as women if they wore some ornament to differentiate themselves from men? This last was more significant than the layman would like to think, for beads had been found in Israel dating as far back as 40,000 B.C.E. and evidences of intentionally prepared perfume were common before the invention of writing. The businessman in Chicago who objects to his wife’s expenditures on jewelry should visit a prehistoric cave, he thought. There he’d find that his wife is in the grand tradition. A woman requires jewelry as a man requires food. Still, he thought, it was remarkable and a mystery not yet explained why contemporary men, who could watch the birds and animals and see that it was the male who was gaudy in decoration, had decided that among human beings this fundamental law should be reversed. He supposed that this could be one of the essential differences between man and animals: the former beautify their females. As to the components of utility, ritual and taboo that went into the formulation of a concept like wear, he preferred not to speculate. When enough sites had been excavated and enough research completed, some scholar would be able to specify how those concepts had developed; meanwhile he didn’t know, but almost every word symbolizing a value judgment had a unique history dating back some hundred thousand years before the age when man first learned to speak. To be specific, he still pondered what force had given the categorical imperative, “Wear clothes,” its social effectiveness. Vaguely he remembered that as an officer in the hottest and most humid parts of the Solomon Islands he had commented on the fact that all men and women had worn some kind of clothing, “and it certainly wasn’t because they needed to keep warm!”

  Skins, the last word in the exacting sentence, pitched the reader into the imprecise origins of technology. At what age of man’s development did some technician discover that the skin of an animal could be scraped clean of fleshy particles, dried in the sun, rubbed with fat and the juice of oak galls, and crudely tanned into a pliable substance adaptable to the human form? Really, Cullinane reflected, so many problems are raised in that sentence that only a super-mechanic like Thomas Edison could find a place to begin. It probably took about fifty thousand years of step-by-step accumulation of experience until the complicated process was mastered. He repeated the phrase: fifty thousand years. It was an incomprehensible amount of time, ten times as long as man’s entire written history, and it was but a fragment of the total time that men had grappled with the problem skins. All Cullinane knew for sure was that sometime around 40,000 B.C.E. the men of the Mount Carmel caves had produced flint stones with serrated edges that could be used for scraping skins, so it was likely that they had at least begun the tanning process. But the word skins conjured up related technical problems that were even more fascinating. It’s probable, Cullinane reasoned, that our people at Makor in 9000 B.C.E. wore skins that fitted the body. Sewn together, if you like. Now where did they get the needles? The thread? And most important of all, the concept? It was the latter that was crucial, for once a group of people had the intelligence to say, “Let’s sew our skins,” ways would surely be found to do the sewing. But who had first proposed, “Let’s sew”? He guessed that it had been some woman watching a bird build its nest, sewing the strands of straw back and forth and tucking the ends in place with her sharp bill. Once this process was understood it was relatively simple—Say it took fifty thousand years, Cullinane mused—for the woman’s husband to cut a flint so that it could be used as an awl. Or some man had found a deer’s bone that could be sharpened, or a fragment of human shin that would serve nicely as a needle. In any case, over a period of time staggering to imagine, men had acquired their trial-and-error technology, and if today one could visualize the persistent will required to bring such a thing as a skin to the point of utility he would be made humble by the years, the toil of awkward fingers, the blockades of mind, and the yearning for accomplishment that underlay even the simplest process.

  He wore skins. “What an infinity of comprehension is required,” Cullinane wrote in his report, “to appreciate this simple sentence in which I have compressed so much.” The first word implied a philosophical system, the second a social order, and the third an attitude toward technology; and he concluded that in each category his reader must grasp three fundamental developments. In philosophy: speech, the idea of self, the idea of god. In the social order: the domestication of grains and animals, group observance of accepted norms, the concept of a community. In technology: fire, flint tools, the principle of the fulcrum. He looked at his four pieces of flint, each a minute work of art, and wondered how a man’s hand, eleven thousand years ago, could have created these simple, lovely tools, and he found himself back where he had started: “How can I convey the thousands of centuries it took to bring man to the place where he could control flint so precisely?” And then the larger question: “How was he able to conceive of a sickle in the first place?”

  • • •

  When the young hunter retreated from the rock, the enraged girl followed him, still clubbing at him with her fists, and she would have used stones could she have got them, but in time her father and her brother managed to bring her under control. With anguish she broke away from them and ran to the fallen dog and threw herself on his bold, dead form, embracing the head that had sought her friendship. He was dead, this wonderful wild creature, and she sensed that she would never be able to find another like him. In later millennia at Makor other girls with her sensitivity would find other dogs willing to risk the tremendous step from forest to house, but she would not then be living. “Oh! Oh!” she sobbed, beating the rock with her fists, for she knew that something superior had been stolen from her.

  The hunter was bewildered by the girl’s behavior. He was from the lands north of the well and loved to roam the deep wadis and the forested hills. As the accuracy of his spear had shown, he was a skilled hunter and at seventeen a rugged young man with visibly powerful legs for the chase. Ur, looking at him, was reminded of his own youth, and as the hunter stood at the edge of the rock, perplexed as to what he had done to arouse this grief, Ur said, “Stay with us for a while,” and the men left the rock where the girl lay burdened with sorrow.

  Later the young hunter discovered that in killing the dog he had broken the point of his spear and he asked Ur if there were any sharpened flints that he might tie to the shaft. But Ur merely pointed toward his son, saying with some condescension, “He works the flint.” After the hunter had shown the boy what was required, the latter went to work on a nodule of flint which he had found imbedded in a white stone. There was nothing then in existence hard enough to cut flint, and most of the metals to be discovered later would not suffice; the artisan had to visualize the inner structure of the flint or he could accomplish nothing, so Ur’s son carefully chipped away the whitish outer coating of limestone until he could see the brown hidden core. He worked patiently on the fat end of the core, chipping it down until he had a level platform from which he could inspect the flint and decide how best to attack it. After some moments of study, during which he seemed to penetrate the secrets of the stone, he placed the small end of the core against a piece of wood, holding it with his left fingers so that he could feel the ridges and the lines of strain. He then took a pointed rock and held it exactly so against the platform, and with a smaller stone in his right hand delivered a slight tap, barely strong enough to kill a wasp. A large segment of the flint broke away exactly as he had intended, exposing a clear and shimmering face that narrowed to a point. Deftly he turned the core, tapped lightly again to strike off another face. For some t
ime he continued this process, chipping away one fragment after another until at last he had a long, slender point powerful enough to penetrate any hide. The watching hunter was impressed, but then the boy did something not known in areas where the hunter came from. He laid the finished spearhead flat, and with a saw that he had made of flint he cut two deep notches in the flank, flint etching flint, and these would provide a means for securing the head to the shaft.

  “He’s the best flint worker I’ve seen,” the hunter said admiringly.

  “He’s not much of a hunter,” Ur replied.

  “Could you make two or three more points?”

  “In this wadi there isn’t much flint,” the boy explained.

  “You need flint?” the hunter cried, and this was the beginning of the deep friendship that developed between Ur and the young stranger, for he told the family of a white cliff rising out of the Roaring Sea two days’ journey to the west where flints were so numerous that in a few hours a man could gather enough for a lifetime.

  “Do you know how to get there?” Ur asked.

  “Of course! I’m a hunter!” And he led Ur and his son through the dark glades to the west, and on the second day they came to the Roaring Sea, which the boy had not known before, and it glistened in the sun. The hunter took them to the white cliffs of which he had foretold, and there the boy found something he could scarcely believe: towering walls of chalk from which, at intervals laid down millions of years ago, layers of flint nodules protruded. With one hand Ur’s son could reach fifty, a hundred, a thousand perfect flint cores, waiting to be knocked loose from the easily broken chalk. The boy’s eyes gleamed, and he directed his father and the hunter as to what kind of flints he wanted: “The ones that are longer than they are wide through the middle.” And in a few hours the three men had all that they could carry.

  They had come upon one of the surprises of nature, a bed of flint, whose nodules if properly worked could provide tools that would not be surpassed until other men along this great sea discovered copper-bronze. Ages upon ages ago, when the shores of this sea were being formed by the deposits of tiny animal skeletons that would later be transmuted into chalk, enormous colonies of alien sea animals congregated in special currents and died. Their bodies contained peculiar chemicals, and when billions of the little creatures deposited their corpses in one spot a kind of pocket was formed in the future chalk, so that later, when great pressures were applied from above, these dead bodies coagulated into knots which formed nodules of flint scattered through the more ordinary substance. Man had discovered the nodules, how long ago?—at least a million years, surely—and from them had fashioned the instruments whereby he lived, for flint could be worked into axes, arrowheads, spears, needles, saws or almost any tool that man could envisage; of equal importance, two pieces of flint when struck together produced fire. And now the son of Ur had unlimited quantities of this vital substance.

  He made the hunter his extra spearheads, and for his sister he shaped three needles with which she consoled herself by sewing skins for the family; and one day Ur suggested to her, “You ought to sew a new skin for the hunter,” and somewhat against her will—for her lamentation for the dead dog had not ceased—she did so, and in time the hunter built a round house for her and she was pregnant with her first child; but the wild dog, that trusting beast who had sat with her on the rock, was never forgotten.

  Ur’s son worked on his flints and one day asked the hunter, who was now his brother-in-law, to find him a curved bone of a certain dimension; and when this was provided, the boy went into seclusion for some time, after which he handed his mother an implement of new design. It was a sickle, a curved knife whose flints were wedged into the bone and tied with tiny thongs and secured with a substance made of resin from the cypress trees and honey. The beauty of this new device was that its curved tip sought out the stalks of wheat and brought them to the cutting edge, as if a man’s arm had been extended enormously. Entire families from the cave came to stand and watch enviously as the boy’s mother swung her arm in extensive circles, gathering the wheat to her and cutting it with an unbroken motion. It was miraculous.

  Then came the great days at the well, the kind of days that men in all societies know occasionally, the few days that make the many years endurable. Ur’s wife and son worked the fields and found new ways to make the earth produce; the sun shone upon them approvingly and enough rain came, but no more. The others in the cave thought it significant that these two were growing enough grain to feed almost the entire cave, and husbands began to ask difficult questions of their wives: “Why can’t you do what his wife did?” Ur’s daughter cared for her first-born and wished that another bird would fall to her care, but none did; the lovely bee eaters flashed through the wadi and crested larks followed the reapers gathering grains. Sometimes a deer would dart across the fields beyond the rock and owls would call from the cypresses. How good the days were.

  For Ur and his son-in-law these golden days were a continuous dream. Inspired by the young man, Ur returned to the hunt, setting forth each morning to probe the far ends of the wadi or the edges of the swamp. It was amusing to watch them go, the young man striding ahead with stocky Ur chugging along behind, pumping his bandy legs and calling instructions, trying to teach the hunter all the secrets of the land. Sometimes, when they got on to the track of a boar, the young man would leave Ur to mark the spot while he loped easily back to summon others from the cave, and often there would be a mass chase. But usually it was Ur and the young man going it alone in the companionship of the hunt that was so treasured by the old man.

  At intervals Ur felt the intimations of death. Some of his teeth had broken off, and after running uphill for two or three hours he felt a shortness of breath. He sensed that he must be going, and although he felt a kind of animal fear of death, he found much joy in the fact that his son-in-law was such a stalwart hunter. The boy was swift and daring, as brave as Ur had hoped his own son would be. He could use a spear better than Ur himself, and when Ur had time to teach him the tricks of fighting close to the tusks of the wild boar he might possibly excel the old warrior. “He’s a great hunter,” Ur reported proudly as the men sat about the fire. “I think he’s better than my father was.” The young men of the cave nodded but the old ones said nothing, for they remembered Ur’s father.

  Then, as so often happens when the seasons have been too cooperative and the sun too gentle, the forces that surrounded the well and the wadi struck back to remind the men of the kind of world they lived in. Out of a cloudless sky, on a day when babies could play in the sun, lightning struck the wadi and set the grain on fire. By concerted effort the people of the cave were able to subdue the flames, but half the crop was burned away, and suddenly the food situation facing the people of the well was radically changed. Instead of an abundance, there was now only just enough, and the Family of Ur began to speculate on what might have caused the lightning to strike at that time; and no matter what rationalizations Ur offered, his wife became convinced that the aggrandizement of the family, its disregard for the immanent rights of nature, had brought this rebuke. “The hunter killed the dog,” she pointed out, “and we rejoiced that his first child was a boy, and we gave none of the grain to the waters of the wadi …” She went on and on, reviewing the arrogant actions of her family. She concluded that the forces which shared the wadi with her people were properly angry, and she felt that she must erect some sign of contrition to let them know that neither she nor her husband intended ever again to usurp their rights. In this reasoning her son supported her, but old Ur said he didn’t know.

  The monolith was her idea. She said, “If we erect on the highest part of the rock a tall stone, the storm and the wind and the wild boar will see it and will know that we wish them well.” Ur asked how they would know any such thing, but his son assured him, “They will know.” And so all the men of the cave went with Ur’s son to a part of the wadi where stones grew, and there, with flint cutters and wedg
es and heavy stones dropped as hammers, they broke away a monolith much taller than a man and rounded on one end. They shoved and hauled it onto the highest point of the rock, where after two months of sweating and building of earthen ramps, they upended it into a socket that the boy had hacked into the solid rock. Securing it with stones wedged under the corners they left it standing upright, a thing without a name, but a thing from which they nevertheless took much consolation. It was their spokesman to the storm.

  On the third night after its institution as guardian of the well, a wild boar—the symbol of implacable hatred—came rampaging out of the wadi and tore up a good two thirds of the remaining wheat fields. When dawn broke and the cave people saw the devastation, and realized how much food they had lost—crested larks were already feasting on the fallen grain—they became panicky and tried to push over the monolith, but Ur’s wife and son prevented this, reasoning, “If they have come at us even though they can see our sign, what might they have done otherwise?” Ur and his son-in-law followed a simpler reasoning. The wild boar had ravaged their fields. They would kill him. So they gathered their spears and set upon the chase that would long be recounted in that wadi.

  In the dawn they went down to the swamps, where his trail lay, and among the waters and the flying birds they probed until they found his ugly foot marks leading deeper into the areas where the biting bugs hid. For a day they splashed their way through green water up to their knees, and at night they slept among the dreadful bugs. They could hear the great boar and knew that he was beginning to feel panic, and in the morning they were after him. He led them on a long chase away from the swamp and through the glades of lovely forests thick with oak and pine. He hurried up hills and toward caves, breathing harder as the persistent hunters clung to his muddy trail. The huge beast gathered strength and ran far down the valleys until the men could see before them the bright Whispering Sea which Ur had known of old but which his new son had not encountered. They followed the boar to the southern end of the sea, where hot waters bubbled from the ground, and there in a thicket of pistachio and thorn they finally cornered him.