Source

by James A. Michener

  “Now what are you doing?” Ur asked.

  And his son replied, with words that put him into formal opposition to his father, “If the trees give us walls, we should use them.” And Ur saw that his wife was bringing rushes from the wadi and reeds to be woven into a tightly matted roof, under which the family would find protection from the sun. And what he saw Ur did not like.

  At nightfall he led his family back to the cave, where he recounted in vivid phrases the story of his hunt, but he ended the narration much sooner than usual, for he was worried about what his wife and son were doing. He loved this cave, so cool and convenient to the well. It bred lice, to be sure, and it smelled, but the fire was warm and the companionship a thing to be cherished. For the past seventy thousand years the cave had been continuously occupied by Ur’s ancestors, one generation after the other, leaving behind them brief mementos of their short and ugly lives. Ur could remember as a boy, in that far corner over there, finding a long-forgotten skeleton encased in hard rock which had formed when rainwater seeped down over the limestone, and later, back in the narrow part of the tunnel, he had come upon a hand axe, adroitly chipped from a core of flint by some brutish, stooped figure more than two hundred thousand years ago. On fleeting occasions in his life Ur had caught the inner spirit of the cave, that closed community which embraced its members and excluded all others. The cave lent strength to those who lived within it and the preposterous idea of his wife and son, to build a separate house for one small family by the well, was instinctively repugnant to him. Men should live together, smelling each other and bringing honey home to all.

  He especially liked the moment when a dozen men surged out of the cave bent on hunting, twelve men guided by a single will, and that will most often his. He could remember how, as a boy, he had surprised the older hunters with his unusual feeling for the land and his ability to predict where animals would take cover. “Come along and show us where the lion is hiding,” they had often called, and he had led them westward as far as the Roaring Sea, clinging to the lion’s spoor until he could point to a thicket, saying, “He’s in there.” In the opposite direction he had scouted paths leading to the Whispering Sea and had taken his men along these paths in search of deer, who grew panicky when Ur and his team followed their trail, smelling them out with a canniness that was frightening. It was no uncommon thing, when the men of Ur’s cave spotted the track of a lion, for them to maintain the chase for three days or even four, driving the beast at last to cover where they could assault him with their spears and arrows.

  But the finest part of any hunt came when they struck the spoor of a wild boar and tracked it to the vast wilderness south of the wadi, for then the cave men were required to plunge into the mysterious swampy area where sharp-thorned vines clutched at them and sucking mud tried to grasp their ankles. For several days the team of hunters would move cautiously through the swamps, marking their way as they went, until at last, in moments of blazing excitement, they would rout out the monstrous beast, the wild boar weighing as much as six hundred pounds, with flashing tusks and cruel visage, and they would harry it to death, minding always those scimitar-like weapons which could cut down a man or impale him and send him shrieking into the air. For men like Ur the final moments of a boar hunt were the ultimate experience, and he was proud that in the middle years of his life, from twenty to twenty-four, he had often served as captain of his hunters, directing them to move thus and so in the last stages of the fight.

  But now, as the house by the well grew to completion, Ur became aware that when it was finished he would be expected to move from the cave and live in the separated house, subject to storms and loneliness and wind. It was not a commodious house his wife and son were building, nor was it completely rainproof. It was susceptible to fire, and winds easily penetrated the walls; but it had enormous advantages over a cave: it was better ventilated and was therefore healthful; it could be moved or added to as occasion necessitated; and it could be placed so that its owner might watch his fields and stay close to his well. But the greatest advantage came in an area which the old man could not have foreseen: In the cave Ur’s ancestors had lived much like animals. They had been forced to live where the cave was and within the space it provided; they were its prisoners both in acting and thinking, and in their older years they were apt to be killed or starved to death because younger families required the cave. But with the building of the self-contained house Ur would become the master and the house would be his servant. He would be forced to engage in new ways of thinking, whether he wanted to or not.

  When the house was finished Ur reluctantly assembled his family in the cave, where many were inclined to laugh at him for his fatuous venture but refrained from doing so because of his reputation as a hunter. He grabbed his four spears, his two animal skins, a bowl and a stone hammer and started for the narrow exit, but sensing that this was his farewell to a way of life, he stopped to look once more at the grimy walls that had protected him from birth, and on the opposite side of the cave he could see the dark tunnel reaching far back into darkness. Turning his face toward the light, he passed through the exit and moved rapidly down the path to the well. There he threw his spears against the wall and sat for a long time looking at the clean white trunks of the trees that formed the wall. To him they looked most alien and uninviting.

  The family had not been in the house long when Ur’s son discovered that the springtime planting of wheat need not be left to the chance scatter of autumn grains. By holding back some of the harvest and keeping it dry in a pouch of deerskin, the grains could be planted purposefully in the spring and the wheat could be made to grow exactly where and when it was needed, and with this discovery the Family of Ur moved close to the beginnings of a self-sufficient society. They did not know it, but if a food supply could be insured, the speed of change would be unbelievable: within a few thousand years cities would be feasible and civilizations too. Men would be able to plan ahead and allocate specialized jobs to each other. They would find it profitable to construct roads to speed the movement of food and to devise a money system for convenient payments. The whole intricate structure of an interlocking society became practical the moment Ur’s son mastered his wild grains.

  It was Ur’s wife who first appreciated the change immanent in her son’s discovery. It was an autumn day, a glowing time of gold and falling leaves, and she stood on the rock watching her husband return from the swamps, helping to lug a great boar to the rock where it would be divided, and she heard the chanting of the men:

  “Ur led us to the swamps where the soft sand bites.

  He took us to the darkness where birds hide.

  Ur caught the gleaming eyes of the boar in darkness.

  It was he who shouted, ‘Now! Now!’”

  It was a pleasing chant, gratifying to the wife whose husband it memorialized, but as she watched the hunters approach the rock she saw them outlined for a moment against the ripened wheat and realized for the first time that in the future, men like Ur would not go venturing into the swamp like excited boys but would stay closer to home, guarding the wheat; and a sense of sadness possessed her, so that she wanted to leave the triumphant men and weep for their lost simplicity. She saw their whole way of life modified by the taming of a thin stalk of wild grass. She saw them leaving the oak forests where the deer roamed, and going no more to the dark swamp where the wild boars hid. She had loved her brave young mate in the days when he led the hunters, and she felt for him the pain which he had not yet discovered for himself.

  And barely had she recognized this change than she became aware of an even more disturbing problem evoked by the grain, one too powerful for her to formulate in words. As her development of the wild wheat had proved, she was both courageous and perceptive and now she began to wonder about the unseen forces that influence men, and just as she had been quick to sense the impact of cultivation upon men like Ur, so she was the first to perceive, no matter how incompletely, its relation to f
orces greater even than the hunters.

  Through ten thousand centuries the animal-like people living near this well had worked out a plodding but viable relationship with the forces that surrounded them. Throughout the alternating ages of ice and great heat they had learned to live with these forces. They did not understand them, nor their interrelationships; they did not even give them names, but they knew them intimately as the source of supreme power. The proper balance between life and death had been painfully ascertained and all were anxious that it not be disturbed. At night, when towering storms thundered over the Carmel mountains to the south, it was apparent that the spirit of the storm was angry with man and wished to destroy him. How else could one explain the blinding flash of lightning that tore a tree in half and set fire to forests? How else describe to a neighbor the unexpected cloudburst that struck the wadi, washing away all things before it? How otherwise could an immovable boulder, many times larger than a man, suddenly run with the flood and strike that man? Obviously the spirit of storm was angered by something men had done and was personally seeking revenge.

  The same behavior could be noticed regarding water. Sometimes it loved men and served them with life; at other times it grew angry and stayed away until men nearly perished. Even the water in the well behaved this way, retreating in petulance deep to some unknown cave until men came close to dying, then surging back with joy and kisses for the gasping children. The air, the spirit of death, the burning wind from the south, the spirit that opened the body of a woman so that new men could be born, the tree that gave fruit or withheld it—everything of importance in nature had a will of its own that operated either in favor of man or against him.

  No ritual had yet been established for placating these conflicting forces. In those years no precious children were sacrificed to the god of the storm in order to win his favor, nor was the hideous wild boar given human blood in order to assuage his enmity. There were no altars to the rain, nor temples to the god of day who regularly conquered night. Men had not yet discovered that the forces of the world could be propitiated by conscious acts of subservience; many times in the preceding two hundred thousand years the cave had been deserted when food supplies in the region diminished, but when the animals returned the apelike men came back too. They were attentive to the commands of nature, and they watched for omens, but they were not slaves either to the spirit of the storm or to its warning omens. It was known that the wild boar was malevolent, both in appearance and conduct, but it had not yet been discovered that this malevolence could be counteracted by some conscious act of man. In other words, the embryonic beginnings of religion had not yet been conceived. The closest approach, perhaps, to a ritualized behavior came at the moment of death, when it was acknowledged that the dead man would require some food and protection in the unknown days ahead. He was therefore buried in a specified position, his head on a pillow of rock, accompanied by a few pots of food, a spear and some ornament he had loved, perhaps a carved shell or a necklace of beads.

  Up to now the attitude of Ur’s wife toward these matters had been clear-cut: the storm had a living spirit, as did water and wind and sky and each tree and every animal. Ur’s wife was constantly aware of these spirits and she treated them with awe. Had she ever seen the spirits openly? She thought so: once when lightning struck close and she heard an extraordinary voice speaking in a hiss of sulphur. Prayer had not yet been invented, but she spoke confidently to that voice and it did not harm her. The great rock had a spirit, broad and generous, as did the fish in rivers, the flint that threw sparks, and the swamp and the trees therein. What her relation to these myriad spirits was she did not rightly know, but as a rough rule she said, “They must not be offended.” Therefore she did not boast about having survived the storm, and told no one of her conversation with the spirit of lightning. She did not throw stones at animals or waste water, and when Ur’s father died she buried him with her best carved bowls, Ur’s good spear and a small string of stone beads.

  But with the advent of cultivated wheat, the balance of nature was disturbed and she knew it. Before the first season ended it was obvious that success in planting depended upon sufficient rain and the faithful performance of the sun—not so much heat as to wither the young plants but enough to ripen the maturing heads—and she began to watch with apprehension any shift in the attitude of either the spirit of water or the spirit of sun. In the second and third seasons, when the area planted was considerable, she became actually terrified when rains were postponed, and she began speculating on what tangible thing she might do to encourage the spirit of rain to send the coveted water. Finally she cried to the open sky, “May the rain come!” and she begged for mercy; but even in doing so she assumed the I-It relationship which had always been maintained in the cave, for she conceived of the rain as an impersonal spirit, powerful but inanimate.

  When she spoke of these growing fears to Ur, he laughed at her apprehension and said, “If a man tracks the wild boar right, he finds him. If he fights him right, he wins.”

  “Is it the same with grain?” she asked.

  “Plant it right. Guard it from your new house, and it will bring food,” he promised her. But even as he spoke he remembered the day at the well when his image had been moved about and altered by some unknown force, and in this moment of recollection his new life began. His arrogance faded, and when his wife left him he wondered if killing a wild boar was as simple a thing as he had said. Once or twice in the past he had suspected that his hunters would not of themselves be able to subdue the formidable beast; there must be some mysterious force of nature assisting them, as if it too were afraid and allied itself with man to conquer the ugly beast. But the men from the cave called, “We’re ready,” and he left his fields to lead them toward the dark swamp.

  So his wife turned with her questions to her son, and before she had finished formulating the problem she found that he had anticipated her. Sitting on a rock beside the grain field, the boy watched the hunters depart, then shared with his mother certain speculations that had troubled him: “In the wadi we have many birds. The black-headed birds that sing in the evening, and those beautiful things with long bills and blue wings that nest in river banks to catch fish. And the crested larks walking about the field out there, searching for grains. And that swift bird, faster than all the rest …” He hesitated. “The one that eats bees.” He pointed to where a bird somewhat larger than his hand, with long sharp beak, blue body and a profusion of bright colors on its wings and head, darted in and out among the trees. It was a magnificent bird, swooping in lovely arches through the sky, but what concerned Ur’s son was not its beauty. “See! He catches a bee in mid-flight. He takes it to a dead branch. And there he eats it. But watch! He spits out the wings. And this he does all day.”

  Now the Family of Ur knew, better than most, that bees were an asset to the wadi, and one of the boy’s first memories was of his father coming home, near-blinded with stings, swearing and slapping at his beard, with a hoard of honey which the children of the cave had fought for. The flowers of the area were so diverse in flavor that honey from four different combs might taste like four quite different things. For their sting, bees were respected; but for their song and their honey, they were loved. And to think that a bird as alluring as the bee eater existed solely to feed upon bees raised in the boy’s mind a whole new range of questions: How could two things, each so excellent, be in such mortal conflict? How could two desirable aspects of nature be so incompatible?

  He asked his mother, “If a bee does so much good in the wadi and is tormented by an enemy as fatal as the bird …” He followed the flight of the dazzling predator and watched as it swooped down upon a bee returning from the flowers and then spit out the wings. It was an ugly incident and he said, “Is it possible that we also have enemies somewhere in the sky, waiting to pounce on us?” Again he paused, and then put into exact words the problem that had begun to torment his mother: “Suppose the rain has a spirit of its
own? Or the sun? What then with our wheat?”

  A second aspect of nature led the boy to an even more difficult question. The cypress, that tall and stately tree which marched along the edges of open fields serving as a dark pointer to the sky, was a splendid tree in whose narrow body birds loved to nest, and it produced each season a crop of small cones about the size of a thumb-tip, remarkable for the fact that each contained nine faces cleverly fitted together to hide the seeds inside. There were never eight faces and never ten, but always nine, ingeniously matched in a manner that could not have happened by accident. Some spirit within the cypress had consciously willed its cone to appear as it did, and if this were true of the tree, why was it not also true of the field in which wheat grew? And of the wheat itself?

  The boy sat with his mother in the sunlight pondering these matters when a bee eater flew past, creating brilliance in the sky, then disappearing among the cypress trees which stood like warning sentinels. A tantalizing thought played across the boy’s mind, a thought not easy to formulate but one that he could not throw aside. A trio of crested larks marched past, pecking for fallen grains, and after they disappeared he stared at the cypresses and asked, “Suppose the spirit that forms the beautiful cone is not within the cypress? Suppose the rain comes or stays away not because of what the rain wants to do …” His thoughts were leading him into areas too vague and shadowy for him to explore, and for the moment he dropped the matter, but the fear he had aroused would not go away.

  It would not be correct to say that with the discovery of cultivated wheat fear was also discovered, for ordinary fear the Family of Ur had long known. When Ur came upon a cornered boar or a lion from the north he knew fear. And when a woman in the cave was about to give birth Ur’s wife knew fear, for she had seen women die at such moments. And one mournful night when Ur had lost a hunter in the swamps, killed by a boar, his daughter had heard the messenger’s cry from afar, “He is dead!” and she had thought it was Ur himself. Even she knew fear. But the fear which the family was now discovering was of another kind: it sprang from the slow-maturing apprehension regarding the relationship of man to his world, the gnawing suspicion that perhaps things were not so simple as they seemed on this average autumn day when ripening grain hid in the stalks and a rumor of deer echoed in the forest. Again and again the glorious bee eater flashed through the wadi, driving the mother and son to wonder whether it had been dispatched by some outside power as an exquisite messenger to warn men that the same force which endangered the bees was ready to swoop down on fields and houses.