Dusk had surprised him on a rocky plateau; there was not a tree in sight in which to seek refuge for the night, only meager brushwood here and there trapped between the stones: no shelter. A few rocky outcrops jutted from the desert; Daâh chose the highest and steepest; for want of any protection against the wind and rain that had polished the granite ridges, or the lightning that had scored the summit, they would at least find security there against prowlers.
The ascent was difficult, especially for the mothers, because of the children, but finally, the group established themselves as best they could on a bed of pebbles.
The odor of humans, however, attracted Wolves in the middle of the night; their pack came to howl beneath the fortress; in bright intervals they could be seen circling it and attempting to scale it, but they slid down its smooth walls. From the height of their terrace, Daâh and the two women pelted the most audacious, pounding skulls and spines with boulders. Howls of pain rose up from the blue shadow; the man replied to them with his war cry. All those agonized voices encouraged him to murder; the odor of blood intoxicated his strength. He lifted blocks of stone in both hands which he raised above his head, and cheerfully sent death into the mob of wild beasts.
“Han!”
The battle lasted until morning; in the light of dawn the Wolves gave up and fled. The daylight rose on a carnage of crushed beasts. The man admired his work; never had he killed so many.
“Haâh!”
The spectacle of such success has immediately dispelled his fatigue. He stands up, and while the weary mothers crouch at his feet with their nurslings he contemplates the rout of the running Wolves; their brown patches diminish in the distance as they plunge into the rain and disappear. In order to affirm their defeat more fully, Daâh launches another stone; then he extends his large callused hand toward the plateau; with the great circle that his outstretched arm designs in the air, he indicates the void that he has been able to create around him, and his burst of vibrant laughter trumpets his victory.
He believes that he has only dispersed the Wolves; he does not suspect that he has just executed the first gesture of history, and that, with his extended hand, he has taken possession of the world on behalf of centuries to come. Standing beneath the stormy sky, with the mothers at his feet, Daâh the vanquisher is symbolic, and on his granite pedestal, the group displays a statue of triumphant humankind.
For it really was a solemn day, the one on which the first hand hurled the first stone! All the genius of future times is in the power of that action; the world is conquered in advance. From that new discovery, the perfectible bimane will draw consequences that the quadrumane will never see; no species, except for his own, will conceive the latent possibilities of that gesture: striking at a distance.
The Ape had been able to throw its stone before him, without that projection being a peril for the world. Things would be different from now on, because Humans have brains. With them, Nature has introduced a new faculty into the world: henceforth, the world possesses an imaginative beast who dreams, and whose dreams amplify action; now that the animal in question knows the power of acting outside himself, they will dream incessantly of means of enlarging the limits of their reach, endlessly.
Humans have found their way, their role and their destiny. They have appeared on the planet to represent The-One-Who-Sees-a-Long-Way: the one who will propagate beyond himself and will extend himself beyond his reach. They are the life that exalts itself, and will be the presumptuous animal—the only one.
Think beyond. Believe beyond.
In that prideful injunction the secret of human strength resides, in its entirety; in that hopeful injunction, so rich in aspirations, a race has gained its motto:
Always beyond!
The thinking being that has once shown itself to be capable of acting at a distance will not stop, and will look forward, ever further. Not only will humans soon invent the sling and the arrow, the string held taught by the bow, the spring that extends and unwinds the projectile, and the compressed gas that explodes, but they will project their thoughts even further than their missiles.
By means of mind, even more than matter, they will project themselves into the distance, and two prodigious forces will spring forth therefrom: Faith and Science, both of which have a common origin, the idea of action at a distance, and both of which have an identical goal: to go further, and always beyond. With a parallel thrust, the centuries of mystical ecstasy and the ages of scientific effort will aspire toward the beyond; by prayer and calculation they will scale the sky.
In their overweening desire to abolish distance and subjugate duration, Humans will march over the seas and over the clouds; they will send their voices from one continent to another, and across time, all the way to death; to encompass the inaccessible they will provide themselves with wings; to lodge themselves in the invisible, they will invent gods fashioned in their own resemblance, which will populate the empyrean with mages of themselves and the passions of their hearts. They will fill the azure with concern for their destiny.
Parading their dreams and their sway over the universe, they will be able, by turns to reach with their hands the divinities that they implore and the suns that they weigh. They are the One who has come to attempt infinity, and wishes, mortal in body, to be immortal in soul.
Beyond, always beyond, since the marvelous and symbolic moment when a first stone was projected into the distance by a hand: which, from that moment on, was a human hand.
XLIV. The Inaccessible
As was his custom, Daâh was whirling his club, when it escaped from his fingers. He saw it fly away, cut an ample curve through the air, slashing leaves and breaking branches, and fall into the mud, which it splashed all around it. He stood there in surprise, being perfectly sure that he had not thrown it; that act of independence seemed to him to be displeasing; when he picked up the club, he rebuked it with a growl. Not long thereafter, however, he renewed the experience of loosening his fingers while the club was whirling; the latter flew more fervently, and he became irritated for a second time. At the following attempt, he recorded the fact; he adopted it.
From then on, the flight of his club ceased to appear to him as a gesture of insubordination and became, on the contrary, a product of his will; as such, it pleased him. Immediately, he constituted a game, and as the game was new, there was nothing he enjoyed more.
That primitive human, who bore within him the host of future humans, was a crowd in himself, and he had a soul subject to crazes. He undertook ventures with passion, and without measure, doing everything with violence, taking delight in repeating an action on the condition of doing so with stubborn frenzy, incapable of perseverance unless it became a mania. As he had done before in making his club whirl, he delighted in seeing it carve broad parabolas through the air. He had no pretention to be doing something useful; he was amusing himself. In admiring the flight of the object emanating from him, he thought: Bird-Stick!—and the spectacle of such an anomaly could not have been more interesting. As soon as the free space of a clearing opened up before him, he took advantage of it to launch his cudgel into flight, and shouted to the women:
“Ta! Ta!”
By extending his arms upwards he showed them the piece of wood beating its wings and going a long way because Daâh wanted it to do so. They laughed with him. The longer the trajectory was, the prouder the male was of it.
“Haâh!”
When the weapon inflicted damage, that was a triumph. It also happened that it flushed out animals, and the hunter concluded that they had recognized Daâh’s club and were running away. That incident, which was repeated, suggested the idea of aiming at a prey. Such attempts did not have any result for a long time; the human, by applying himself to it excessively, lost all his means and invariably missed the target.
However, informed by his wrist almost as much as by his brain, he began to glimpse that the distance traveled was proportional to the thrust imparted; he regulated his pra
ctice. As with a pebble, he was able to hit the object at which he aimed when it was large: a rock, a tree trunk or one of his women; but he refrained from trying it on a large prey, for fear of being without a club when battle was joined.
One day, he brought down a turtle dove.
That was one of the most violent gaieties of his career. When he saw the bird tumbling from branch to branch, he stood there mouth agape; the stupor of his visage expressed how unexpected that practical result was. He ran forward. With both hands he picked up the palpitating, fearful creature with little shining eyes. He devoured it with his gaze, but did not even think about eating it, as delightedly, he felt it struggling in that prison of human hands; he experienced an intoxication in which natural cruelty played no part. Those warm and living feathers, held for the first time, caused him a delirium; his emotion was so strong that he seemed to be going through a crisis of dementia, and he gave all the signs of it in his tremulous gestures, his contracted features and his shining eyes.
But was not that gleam of folly in the depths of his orbits, on the contrary, a flash of divination? Was not that flame in his pupils, perhaps, a dawn of reason striving to disengage itself from the darkness? In an event so novel, did Daâh not perceive the announcement of future conquests? The human was on the brink of understanding. At the very least, he sensed at that moment that there were things to admire that were too far out of reach.
Furtively, he had the notion of a formidable victory: he had caught the inaccessible! That warmth in the hollow of his palms was the sky conquered, space taken hostage, the air captured!
“Haâh!”
To make that strange joy last, to savor the impotent effort of the vanquished for longer, he refrained from tightening his grip around the fragile thorax—but his fingers clenched involuntarily; the turtle dove, as it cracked, closed its mauve eyelids. Then Daâh grabbed the bird by the foot and, raising it above his head, he danced frenziedly. Never, since the death of the Bear, had he testified to so much pride. Hock and Ta were astonished by such extravagant behavior to celebrate the capture of such small game.
The hunter did not consent to give anyone else the slightest morsel of his prey; he ate it on his own. Stuck to his bloody lips, a glory of plumes and down framed the hole of his mouth. When he had finished chewing, he planted the wings in his hair and resumed trundling along, waving his arms in the air, his face turned toward the sky, at which he launched clamors of provocation with all his might.
PART TWO: THE HORDE
XLV. The Offspring
Every year, Hock and Ta brought a child into the world. The first daughter issued from Ta, having been conceived of the man with the vertical forehead, resembled her father; several sons, among those she had of the man with the oblique forehead, resembled their older sister. But Daâh did not perceive any diversity among these products, and experienced an equal indifference for all of that progeniture, to which he believed himself to be unconnected.
He had ended up becoming accustomed to seeing the two women, in turn, produce a little human; when the event became manifest once again, he recorded it, like every other incident in his life, and immediately lost interest, since the mothers were decidedly opposed to their fruit being eaten.
All the ideas that Daâh had not realized immediately escaped him as water escapes from a sieve; on the other hand, the same thoughts came back to him in identical circumstances; every time one of the women gave birth in a time of famine, the temptations gripped him again to utilize the fresh flesh that arrived in such a timely fashion; his gesture inevitably provoked the same revolt and battle; he had then to defend himself against the two mothers, who each sided with the other. That struggle was sufficient to make him forget the initial cause of the dispute, and more often than not, the play of hands that was produced, not without anger but without hatred, terminated with a coupling, after which the ogre went away tranquilly to search for food elsewhere.
Nevertheless, the mothers distrusted him, and for several days thereafter they kept watch on the man, for fear that the desire to eat the child might recur. After a week had passed, they had nothing more to fear; habit had taken hold and the new-born was part of the horde, by the same entitlement as the others. Daâh protected them if necessary, not out of tenderness, but by imitation of that which he had seen done.
The great care that the women took of their children scarcely lasted beyond ten months, until another one arrived; they did not consent to breast-feed two at once for very long, and rudely pushed away the one that persisted in demanding the breast when its place had been taken. Neither tears nor pleas moved them, and, on the contrary, irritated them. They took pleasure in watching the contortions of those soft creatures, palpating their thin limbs, and exciting laughter on those round, scarcely hairy faces; suddenly, however, the game ceased to please them; they plunged the nursling into the sack and no longer gave it a thought.
They had very soon had the idea of throwing that pocket, which they had initially carried over the chest, onto the back. Their gestures gained more ease, and the burden seemed less heavy. That progress was virtually imposed on the day when a younger sibling followed its elder too closely, when the latter was not yet steady on its legs; it was necessary to lodge both of them in the same bag; the inconvenience that followed suggested the means of remedying it, and the Kangaroo’s pocket became the Woman’s backpack.
Usually, the two creatures lay in it together. At halts, it was unloaded by emptying it onto the moss, or it was suspended from a low branch. As soon as a child became capable of walking, it was allowed to run its risks; if, however, it got too far behind or wandered too far away, one of the mothers recalled it, whether or not it was her own, with the same protective instinct. That female solicitude, intermittent and often distracted, was exercised without distinction on all the little ones, as if their maternity were collective. Along the march, the same cry of appeal was heard in one voice or the other, monotonous and almost mechanical, reiterated in order to soften it:
“Ta, ta... Ta-ta...”
All the infants were called Tata.
Their father contemplated that increasing brood with a kind of pride, which, unable to be that of an author, was nevertheless that of a master. The sentiment of his importance was amplified by the number of beings that lived under his guard. He continued to march at the head of them all, as if he had claimed the honor of being the first to confront peril. When one of his sons, already growing up, dared to stray in front of him, he took umbrage and frowned; a tap of the club on his back invited the imprudent youngster to resume his place.
“Ta!”
The two mothers marched immediately behind the Chief; they had the right to do so, since they were accustomed to it; the rest swarmed in the rear, at hazard. When the daughters gave birth in their turn, their children followed them as they had followed their mothers. Thus the horde classified itself spontaneously by height; a kind of hierarchy was established, by affinities, between the three generations—and Daâh, who was then scarcely thirty years old, found himself, without being aware of it, simultaneously the grandfather and the father of that ample family.
XLVI. Multiply
The horde became considerable.
Although, among the mammals, females are ordinarily less numerous than males, they figured here in the greater number; perhaps that was one of the phenomena by which nature, as a consequence of logic, seems to manifest a consciousness of its work, with a determination to do it usefully: the nascent race had need of molds in order to multiply, and the molds arrived. As soon as the daughters reached their twelfth or thirteenth year, they began to give birth; no one was any more astonished by that than by seeing leaves appear on branches. Hock and Ta were not yet twenty-eight years old when they were already grandmothers; at forty, Daâh found himself a great-grandfather.
If all those creatures had lived, the family would soon have been formidable; indeed, among the twenty-five children that Daâh had of his two women in thirt
een years, eleven of whom were boys, the fourteen girls, in a further thirteen years, could have brought a hundred offspring into the world, since they would not have failed to give birth once a year, like their mothers, who would have continued to produce in the interim. By the third generation, the Chief, still valid, would have grouped around him more than a thousand human heads.
There were scarcely thirty.
The majority had died; others had been lost on the way. A few had even quit the group voluntarily, in order to venture forth alone; the latter, fortunately rare, were always males. The daughters, with a more alert sense of their weakness, and less pride, understood the dangers of isolation more fully; independence did not tempt them. The adolescent males, by contrast, irritable and believing themselves to be strong, were at the mercy of abrupt determinations: a fit of anger, a dispute, a discontentment, even a simple whim or an accident on the way was sufficient for them to decide to leave; their impulsive reflex prevented them from examining any of the reasons that ought to have retained them.
In any case, those defections passed unnoticed; not knowing how to count, they were ignorant of their number, and they only appreciated it in terms of the density of the group. When disappearances had been numerous, someone, after a time and by chance, darting a glance around during a halt, remarked vaguely that the mass had gaps, and that observation lasted exactly as long as the glance; it did not involve any sadness or anxiety, and no other concern with regard to the disappeared than for the interest of the horde, whose force had diminished.
Daâh: The First Human Page 12