The Unexpected Universe

by Loren Eiseley

  Bone hunting is not really a very romantic occupation. One walks day after day along miles of frequently unrewarding outcrop. One grows browner, leaner, and tougher, it is true, but one is far from the bright lights, and the prospect, barring a big strike, like a mammoth, is always to abandon camp and go on. It was really a gypsy profession, then, for those who did the field collecting.

  In this case, we did not go on. There was an eroding hill in the vicinity, and on top of that hill, just below sod cover, were the foot bones, hundreds of them, of some lost Tertiary species of American rhinoceros. It is useless to ask why we found only foot bones or why we gathered the mineralized things in such fantastic quantities that they must still lie stacked in some museum storeroom. Maybe the creatures had been immured standing up in a waterhole and in the millions of succeeding years the rest of the carcasses had eroded away from the hilltop stratum. But there were the foot bones, and the orders had come down, so we dug carpals and metacarpals till we cursed like an army platoon that headquarters has forgotten.

  There was just one diversion: the spring, and the pond in the meadow. There, under the bank, we cooled our milk and butter purchased from the soddy inhabitants. There we swam and splashed after work. The country people were reserved and kept mostly to themselves. They were uninterested in the dull bones on the hilltop unenlivened by skulls or treasure. After all, there was reason for their reserve. We must have appeared, by their rural standards, harmless but undoubtedly touched in the head. The barrier of reserve was never broken. The surly farmer kept to his parched acres and estimated to his profit our damage to his uncultivated hilltop. The slatternly wife tended a few scrawny chickens. In that ever blowing landscape their windmill largely ran itself.

  Only a stocky barefoot girl of twenty sometimes came hesitantly down the path to our camp to deliver eggs. Some sixty days had drifted by upon that hillside. I began to remember the remark of an old fossil hunter who in his time had known the Gold Coast and the African veldt. “When calico begins to look like silk,” he had once warned over a fire in the Sierras, “it is time to go home.”

  But enough of that. We were not bad young people. The girl shyly brought us the eggs, the butter, and the bacon, and then withdrew. Only after some little time did her appearance begin to strike me as odd. Men are accustomed to men in their various color variations around the world. When the past intrudes into a modern setting, however, it is less apt to be visible, because to see it demands knowledge of the past, and the past is always camouflaged when it wears the clothes of the present.

  The girl came slowly down the trail one evening, and it struck me suddenly how alone she looked and how, well, alien, she also appeared. Our cook was stoking up the evening fire, and as the shadows leaped and flickered I, leaning invisibly against a rock, was suddenly transported one hundred thousand years into the past. The shadows and their dancing highlights were the cause of it. They had swept the present out of sight. That girl coming reluctantly down the pathway to the fire was removed from us in time, and subconsciously she knew it as I did. By modern standards she was not pretty, and the gingham dress she wore, if anything, defined the difference.

  Short, thickset, and massive, her body was still not the body of a typical peasant woman. Her head, thrust a little forward against the light, was massive-boned. Along the eye orbits at the edge of the frontal bone I could see outlined in the flames an armored protuberance that, particularly in women, had vanished before the close of the Würmian ice. She swung her head almost like a great muzzle beneath its curls, and I was struck by the low bun-shaped breadth at the back. Along her exposed arms one could see a flash of golden hair.

  No, we are out of time, I thought quickly. We are each and every one displaced. She is the last Neanderthal, and she does not know what to do. We are those who eliminated her long ago. It is like an old scene endlessly re-enacted. Only the chipped stones and the dead game are lacking.

  I came out of the shadow then and spoke gently to her, taking the packages. It was the most one could do across that waste of infinite years. She spoke almost inaudibly, drawing an unconscious circle in the dust with a splayed bare foot. I saw, through the thin dress, the powerful thighs, the yearning fertility going unmated in this lonesome spot. She looked up, and a trick of the fire accentuated the cavernous eye sockets so that I saw only darkness within. I accompanied her a short distance along the trail. “What is it you are digging for?” she managed to ask.

  “It has to do with time,” I said slowly. “Something that happened a long time ago.”

  She listened incuriously, as one at the morning of creation might do.

  “Do you like this?” she persisted. “Do you always just go from one place to another digging these things? And who pays for it, and what comes of it in the end? Do you have a home?” The soddy and her burly father were looming in the dusk. I paused, but questions flung across the centuries are hard to answer.

  “I am a student,” I said, but with no confidence. How could I say that suddenly she herself and her ulnar-bowed and golden-haired forearms were a part of a long reach backward into time?

  “Of what has been, and what will come of it we are trying to find out. I am afraid it will not help one to find a home,” I said, more to myself than her. “Quite the reverse, in fact. You see—”

  The dark sockets under the tumbled hair seemed somehow sadly vacant. “Thank you for bringing the things,” I said, knowing the customs of that land. “Your father is waiting. I will go back to camp now.” With this I strode off toward our fire but went, on impulse, beyond it into the full-starred night.

  This was the way of things along the Wild Cat escarpment. There was sand blowing and the past mingling with the present in more ways than professional science chose to see. There were eroded farms no longer running cattle and a diminishing population waiting, as this girl was waiting, for something they would never possess. They were, without realizing it, huntsmen without game, women without warriors. Obsolescence was upon their way of life.

  But about the girl lingered a curious gentleness that we know now had long ago touched the vanished Neanderthals she so resembled. It would be her fate to marry eventually one of the illiterate hard-eyed uplanders of my own kind. Whatever the subtle genes had resurrected in her body would be buried once more and hidden in the creature called sapiens. Perhaps in the end his last woman would stand unwanted before some fiercer, brighter version of himself. It would be no more than justice. I was farther out in the deep spaces than I knew, and the fire was embers when I returned.

  The season was waning. There came, inevitably, a time when the trees began to talk of winter in the crags above the camp. I have repeated all that can be said about so fragile an episode. I had exchanged in the course of weeks a few wistful, scarcely understood remarks. I had waved to her a time or so from the quarry hilltop. As the time of our departure neared I had once glimpsed her shyly surveying from a rise beyond the pond our youthful plungings and naked wallowings in the spring-fed water. Then suddenly the leaves were down or turning yellow. It was time to go. The fossil quarry and its interminable foot bones were at last exhausted.

  But something never intended had arisen for me there by the darkening water—some agonizing, lifelong nostalgia, both personal and, in another sense, transcending the personal. It was—how shall I say it?—the endurance in a single mind of two stages of man’s climb up the energy ladder that may be both his triumph and his doom.

  Our battered equipment was assembled in the Model T’s, which, in that time, were the only penetrators of deep-rutted upland roads. Morose good-byes were expressed; money was passed over the broken sod cover on the hilltop. Hundreds of once galloping rhinoceros foot bones were stowed safely away. And that was it. I stood by the running board and slowly, very slowly, let my eyes wander toward that massive, archaic, and yet tragically noble head—of a creature so far back in time it did not know it represented tragedy. I made, I think, some kind of little personal gesture of
farewell. Her head raised in recognition and then dropped. The motors started. Homo sapiens, the energy devourer, was on his way once more.

  What was it she had said, I thought desperately as I swung aboard. Home, she had questioned, “Do you have a home?” Perhaps I once did, I was to think many times in the years that followed, but I, too, was a mental atavism. I, like that lost creature, would never find the place called home. It lay somewhere in the past down that hundred-thousand-year road on which travel was impossible. Only ghosts with uncertain eyes and abashed gestures would meet there. Upon a surging tide of power first conceived in the hearth fires of dead caverns mankind was plunging into an uncontrolled future beyond anything the people of the Ice had known.

  The cell that had somehow mastered the secret of controlled energy, of surreptitious burning to a purpose, had finally produced the mind, judiciously, in its turn, controlling the inconstant fire at the cave mouth. Beyond anything that lost girl could imagine, words in the mouth or immured in libraries would cause substance to vanish and the earth itself to tremble. The little increments of individual energy dissolving at death had been coded and passed through the centuries by human ingenuity. A climbing juggernaut of power was leaping from triumph to triumph. It threatened to be more than man and all his words could master. It was more and less than man.

  I remembered those cavernous eye sockets whose depths were forever hidden from me in the firelight. Did they contain a premonition of the end we had invited, or was it only that I was young and hungry for all that was untouchable? I have searched once more for the old notebooks but, again, in vain. They would tell me, at best, only how living phantoms can be anatomically compared with those of the past. They would tell nothing of that season of the falling leaves or how I learned under the night sky of the utter homelessness of man.

  III

  I have seen a tree root burst a rock face on a mountain or slowly wrench aside the gateway of a forgotten city. This is a very cunning feat, which men take too readily for granted. Life, unlike the inanimate, will take the long way round to circumvent barrenness. A kind of desperate will resides even in a root. It will perform the evasive tactics of an army, slowly inching its way through crevices and hoarding energy until someday it swells and a living tree upheaves the heaviest mausoleum. This covert struggle is part of the lifelong battle waged against the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the heat death that has been frequently assumed to rule the universe. At the hands of man that hoarded energy takes strange forms, both in the methods of its accumulation and in the diverse ways of its expenditure.

  For hundreds of thousands of years, a time longer than all we know of recorded history, the kin of that phantom girl had lived without cities along the Italian Mediterranean or below the northern tentacles of the groping ice. The low archaic skull vault had been as capacious as ours. Neanderthal man had, we now know after long digging, his own small dreams and kindnesses. He had buried his dead with offerings—there were even evidences that they had been laid, in some instances, upon beds of wild flowers. Beyond the chipped flints and the fires in the cavern darkness his mind had not involved itself with what was to come upon him with our kind—the first bowmen, the great artists, the terrible creatures of his blood who were never still.

  It was a time of autumn driftage that might have lasted and been well forever. Whether it was his own heavy brow that changed in the chill nights or that somewhere his line had mingled with a changeling cuckoo brood who multiplied at his expense we do not know with certainty. We know only that he vanished, though sometimes, as in the case of my upland girl, a chance assemblage of archaic genes struggles to reemerge from the loins of sapiens.

  But the plucked flint had flown; the heavy sad girls had borne the children of the conquerors. Rain and leaves washed over the cave shelters of the past. Bronze replaced flint, iron replaced bronze, while the killing never ceased. The Neanderthals were forgotten; their grottoes housed the oracles of later religions. Marble cities gleamed along the Mediterranean. The ice and the cave bear had vanished. White-robed philosophers discoursed in Athens. Armed galleys moved upon the waters. Agriculture had brought wealth and diversification of labor. It had also brought professional soldiery. The armored ones were growing and, with them, slavery, torture, and death upon all the seas of the world.

  The energy that had once sufficed only to take man from one camping place to another, the harsh but innocent world glimpsed by Cook in the eighteenth century on the shores of Australia, century by century was driving toward a climax. The warriors with the tall foreheads given increasingly to fanatic religions and monumental art had finally grown to doubt the creations of their own minds.

  The remnants of what had once been talked about in Athens and been consumed in the flames of Alexandria hesitantly crept forth once more. Early in the seventeenth century Sir Francis Bacon asserted that “by the agency of man a new aspect of things, a new universe, comes into view.” In those words he was laying the basis of what he came to call “the second world,” that world which could be drawn out of the natural by the sheer power of the human mind. Man had, of course, unwittingly been doing something of the sort since he came to speak. Bacon, however, was dreaming of the new world of invention, of toleration, of escape from irrational custom. He was the herald of the scientific method itself. Yet that method demands history also—the history I as an eager student had long ago beheld symbolically upon a corner in the shape of a junkman’s cart. Without knowledge of the past, the way into the thickets of the future is desperate and unclear.

  Bacon’s second world is now so much with us that it rocks our conception of what the natural order was, or is, or in what sense it can be restored. A mathematical formula traveling weakly along the fibers of the neopallium may serve to wreck the planet. It is a kind of metabolic energy never envisaged by the lichen attacking a rock face or dreamed of in the flickering shadows of a cave fire. Yet from these ancient sources man’s hunger has been drawn. Its potential is to be found in the life of the world we call natural, just as its terrifying intricacy is the product of the second visionary world evoked in the brain of man.

  The two exist on the planet in an increasingly uneven balance. Into one or the other or into a terrifying nothing one of these two worlds must finally subside. Man, whose strange metabolism has passed beyond the search for food to the naked ingestion of power, is scarcely aware that the energy whose limited planetary store lies at the root of the struggle for existence has passed by way of his mind into another dimension. There the giant shadows of the past continue to contend. They do so because life is a furnace of concealed flame.

  Some pages back I spoke of a wild-plum thicket. I did so because I had a youthful memory of visiting it in autumn. All the hoarded juices of summer had fallen with that lush untasted fruit upon the grass. The tiny engines of the plant had painstakingly gathered throughout the summer rich stores of sugar and syrup from the ground. Seed had been produced; birds had flown away with fruit that would give rise to plum trees miles away. The energy dispersion was so beneficent on that autumn afternoon that earth itself seemed anxious to promote the process against the downward guttering of the stars. Even I, tasting the fruit, was in my animal way scooping up some of it into thoughts and dreams.

  Long after the Antillean adventure I chanced on an autumn walk to revisit the plum thicket. I was older, much older, and I had come largely because I wondered if the thicket was still there and because this strange hoarding and burning at the heart of life still puzzled me. I have spoken figuratively of fire as an animal, as being perhaps the very essence of animal. Oxidation, I mean, as it enters into life and consciousness.

  Fire, as we have learned to our cost, has an insatiable hunger to be fed. It is a nonliving force that can even locomote itself. What if now—and I half closed my eyes against the blue plums and the smoke drifting along the draw—what if now it is only concealed and grown slyly conscious of its own burning in this little house of sticks and clay that I
inhabit? What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired an ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk?

  The plums, like some gift given from no one to no one visible, continued to fall about me. I was old now, I thought suddenly, glancing at a vein on my hand. I would have to hoard what remained of the embers. I thought of the junkman’s horse and tried to release him so that he might be gone.

  Perhaps I had finally succeeded. I do not know. I remembered that star-filled night years ago on the escarpment and the heavy-headed dreaming girl drawing a circle in the dust. Perhaps it was time itself she drew, for my own head was growing heavy and the smoke from the autumn fields seemed to be penetrating my mind. I wanted to drop them at last, these carefully hoarded memories. I wanted to strew them like the blue plums in some gesture of love toward the universe all outward on a mat of leaves. Rich, rich and not to be hoarded, only to be laid down for someone, anyone, no longer to be carried and remembered in pain like the delicate paw lying forever on the beach at Curaçao.

  I leaned farther back, relaxing in the leaves. It was a feeling I had never had before, and it was strangely soothing. Perhaps I was no longer Homo sapiens, and perhaps that girl, the last Neanderthal, had known as much from the first. Perhaps all I was, really, was a pile of autumn leaves seeing smoke wraiths through the haze of my own burning. Things get odder on this planet, not less so. I dropped my head finally and gazed straight up through the branches at the sun. It was all going, I felt, memories dropping away in that high indifferent blaze that tolerated no other light. I let it be so for a little, but then I felt in my pocket the flint blade that I had carried all those years from the gravels on the escarpment. It reminded me of a journey I would not complete and the circle in the dust around which I had magically traveled for so long.