Vamireh

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  A noise of galloping hooves, vague at first, came closer and became more precise. The deer reappeared, moving just as rapidly, but less steadily, in its headlong flight. It was sweating, and its breath was too sonorous. Fifty paces behind was the leopard, untiring and full of grace, already victorious.

  The astonished man, annoyed by the carnivore’s rapid victory, felt an increasing desire to intervene, when something frightful occurred. In the distance, on the edge of the maples, in the full glare of the moonlight, a massive silhouette appeared—in which, from its 20 meter bound and its thick mane, the man recognized the almost-sovereign beast: a lion. The poor deer, mad with fright, made an abrupt and awkward detour, fell back, and suddenly found itself beneath the leopard’s trenchant claws.

  There was a brief, frantic struggle, and the dying deer made a choking sound. The leopard held itself rigid in alarm; the lion was approaching at a tranquil pace. Thirty paces away it came to a halt, with a growl, not yet crouching down. The quaternary leopard, large in stature, hesitated, furious about the effort made in vain considering the risk of battle—but the louder voice of the dominant beast reverberated through the valley, sounding the attack, and the leopard gave way, retreating without haste, with a mewl of rage and humiliation, its head stretched toward the tyrant. The other was already ripping up the deer, devouring huge chunks of the stolen prey, paying no heed to the vanquished animal—which continued its retreat, exploring the shadows with its emerald-gold eyes.

  The man, rendered prudent by the proximity of the lion, hid himself scrupulously, but not fearfully, in his leafy retreat, ready for any adventure.

  After a brief interval of furious consumption, the beast paused; anxiety and doubt appeared in its whole attitude: in the bristling of its mane, and its anguished wariness. Suddenly, as if convinced, it seized the deer firmly in its jaws, threw it over its shoulders and set off at a run. It had covered 400 meters when a monstrous beast emerged at almost the same spot where it had appeared itself shortly before. Intermediate in form and gait between a tiger and a lion, but more colossal, the sovereign of the forest and the savannah symbolized Force as it stood there in the vaporous gleam.

  The man trembled, stirred to the utmost depths of his being.

  After pausing under the ash-trees, the animal set off on the chase. It moved like a cyclone, covering the ground effortlessly, pursuing the fleeing lion westwards—while the leopard, having stopped, watched the scene. The two dwindling silhouettes vanished.

  Again the man was thinking of quitting his retreat—for the leopard did not scare him—when things became complicated. The lion came back obliquely, having been forced to make a detour by some obstacle—a pool or a gully. The man laughed derisively, mocking the beast for not having calculated its flight better, and hid himself away again, for the colossal antagonists were heading almost straight for him. Slowed down by the detour and the deer’s weight, however, the runaway was losing ground.

  What should he do? The hunter inspected the surroundings; to reach one of the poplars he would have to run 200 meters; in any case, the Felis spelaea4 could climb trees. As for the troglodytes’ rock, that was ten times as far away. He decided to see what would happen.

  He did not have long to wait. Within two minutes, the wild beasts reached the vicinity of his hiding-place. There, seeing that flight was in vain, the lion dropped the deer and waited. There was a pause similar to the earlier one, when the leopard had held the prey. All around there was the silence of the annunciatory hour: the interval when nocturnal creatures were going to sleep and diurnal ones waking up to the light. There was a faint glimmer of light, on treetops bathed in pale wool, on clumps of grass trembling in every blade in the hesitant westerly breeze, and around the entire perimeter, there was the vague confused natural ambush composed of arborescent frontiers, straits and silky bands of sky. Up above were the stellar night-lights, the psalm of eternal life.

  On a mound, the tall and dominating profile of the Felis spelaea was outlined by the moonlight, its mane swept back over a pelt speckled like a panther’s, its brow flat and its jaws pre-eminent. Once king of Chellean Europe, the species was now in decline, reduced to narrow bands of territory. Lower down was the lion, its breath hoarse, its flanks in tumult and its heavy paw posed on the deer, hesitant before the colossus as the leopard had previously been in its own presence, with a phosphorescence of mingled fear and anger in its eyes. Lurking in the semi-darkness, already harmonized with the drama, was the man.

  Releasing a muffled roar, the spelaea shook its mane and began to descend. The recoiling lion, its teeth bared, released its prey for two seconds; then, in despair, its pride injured, it came back with a roar more resounding than its adversary’s, and set its paw back on the deer. That was the acceptance of the battle. In spite of its prodigious strength, the spelaea did not respond immediately. Pausing, drawn back, it examined the lion, estimating its strength and agility. The other, with the pride of its race, stood upright, head raised. There was a second roar from the aggressor, a resounding reply from the lion, and they found themselves a single bound apart.

  “Llô! Llô!” whispered the man.

  The spelaea crossed the intervening distance, its monstrous paw raised. It met its adversary’s claws. For two seconds the red paw and the spotted claw confronted one another, in the final pause. Then the attack was launched, a confusion of jaws and manes, accompanied by raucous cries, while blood began to flow.

  At first, the lion drew back under the formidable assault. Soon disengaged, it launched a flank attack with a sideways leap, and the battle became indecisive, the spelaea’s speed nullified. Then there was the frenzy of living bodies, the quivering of giant muscles, the indecision of reckless—and thus ineffectual—forces, the bristling of manes in the moonlight, the unfolding of flesh like the palpitations of maritime waves, the foam of maws and the phosphorescence of wild eyes, the hoarse grunts like the sobbing of a storm in the oak-trees…

  Finally, with a terrible blow, the lion was struck down, collapsing at full stretch; like lightning, the spelaea was upon it, slashing its belly open. It struggled, with frightful roars. It succeeded in disengaging itself again, its entrails hanging out and its mane red. Understanding the impossibility of retreat, and that the other would show it no mercy, it faced up to the adversary without hesitation, and re-engaged in combat so furiously that the spelaea could not get hold of it again for several minutes. The end was approaching, however; the vanquished creature’s strength was decreasing rapidly. Seized again, and pinned against the ground, the lion’s torture began as the stronger beast persisted. The lion’s viscera were ripped out; its bones were broken between omnipotent fangs; its face was crushed and deformed…and its roars of agony echoed across the horizon, ever more raucous and weaker, soon dying away into sighs, coughs and a quiver of vertebrae. Finally, there was one last convulsion of the throat, a lamentable sigh—and the sovereign beast died.

  At first, the spelaea persisted in rending the cadaver’s still-vibrant flesh, in the voluptuousness of vengeance and the fear of a return to life. Finally, reassured, it cast the lion aside with a disdainful thrust, and roared its triumph and challenge at the shadows. Its shoulders and thorax were bleeding from large cuts.

  The first light of dawn appeared, a filtration of quicksilver on the low horizon. The Moon’s bow faded and became blurred. The spelaea, having licked its wounds, feeling hunger returning, launched itself upon the carcass of the deer. Weary, and too far away from its lair, it sought a retreat in which it could feast in the shade. The nearby bush in which the hunter was hiding attracted its gaze, and it started dragging its prey toward it.

  Meanwhile, fascinated by the magnificence of the battle, the man was still contemplating the victor when he saw it coming toward him.

  A breath of charnel terror and horripilation passed over him, without him losing his instinct for combat and calculation. He thought that, after such a battle, avid for rest and nourishment, the spelaea would
doubtless pay no heed to his retreat. However, he could not be certain of that; he remembered tales told by old men late in the evening about the big cats’ hatred of humans. Rare, and in continuing decline, they seemed to have an inkling of the role of primates in their extinction, and satisfied their confused resentment every time they encountered a solitary individual.

  As these memories strayed through the watcher’s mind, he wondered whether the shelter of the bushes or the bare savannah would be preferable if he were attacked. If the former nullified the speed of the beast, the latter made it easier to throw a spear and wield a club. There was no time for lengthy hesitation; the spelaea was already parting the foliage.

  The man leapt sideways, his choice abruptly made. He emerged from the bushes by the easiest route, at right-angles to the gap through which the monster was entering. The rustle of the branches disturbed the spelaea, which moved around the edge. Seeing the human silhouette emerge, it roared. At this threat, with all thought of escape extinct, the hunter raised his spear, his muscles supple and docile, and took aim. The weapon quivered, and flew straight into the feline’s throat.

  “Ehô! Ehô!” cried the man, brandishing his long club in both hands. Then he stood still, solidly—a handsome human giant, a clear-sighted hero of the ages of strife.

  The spelaea advanced, gathering itself, calculating its leap. With marvelous ease, the man moved aside, letting the monster pass by; then, just as it came back at an angle, his club descended like a mighty hammer and vertebrae cracked. A roar was cut short, and the fallen colossus abruptly became still—and the man repeated his victorious battle-cry: “Ehô! Ehô!” He maintained his defensive pose, however, fearful of a recovery, contemplating the beast with its open large yellow eyes, its half-meter-long claws, its giant muscles its gaping mouth full of the blood of the lion and the deer: that whole miraculous organism of war, with a pale belly beneath its yellow coat with black spots.

  The Felis spelaea was quite dead, however; it would never make the darkness tremble again. The man felt a great sense of well-being in his breast: the swelling of an exceedingly pleasant pride; an enlargement of personality, of life, of self-confidence, which rendered him meditative and nervous before the luminous flowering of the dawn.

  The first scarlet fanfares were rising over the horizon as the breeze increased. The small creatures of the daylight were opening their eyes one by one, the birds chirping their delight, turned towards the east with their little breasts swelling. In the fine mist, the river had a slightly dull tinplate appearance at first; then the splendor of the clouds plunged a shivering world of shapes and tints into the water. The tops of the tall poplars and the short grasses of the savannah trembled with the same ardor of life. Already the Sun had appeared above the distant forest; its rays poured over the valley, punctuated by the interminable shadows of slender trees.

  The man extended his arms, in a confused religiosity with no precise object of worship, perceiving the force of the radiance, the eternity of the Sun, the ephemeral nature of his own being. Then he laughed, and repeated his triumphant cry: “Ehô! Ehô! Ehô!”

  And the humans appeared at the mouth of the cavern.

  II. The Horde

  In the radiant morning, while the breath of the river and the savannah were regenerative and voluptuous, the embers of the first cooking-fire were dying at the mouth of the humans’ cave. A hundred meters away, the Sepulcher-Tree5 rose up, its branches full of pale skeletons of dead troglodytes. The gentle collisions occasioned by the breeze caused the aerial ossuary to send forth canticles of sighs and euphonious syllables, and one old man, squatting on his heels, his long-sighted eyes perceiving a few skulls in the shadowed branches, recalled the feats of a glorious hunter, a companion of his youth devoured by oblivion.

  The scattered horde of Pzânns yielded to the charm of the moment. The children bounded through the grass to the edge of the water; among the mysterious willows, a half-naked young woman washed herself and her finery, braiding the vague unruliness of her hair. The males were busy with equipment for hunting or labor; almost all of them were heavy in build and muscle, with highly-developed skulls and combative energy. Warriors were crushing and mixing red lead with urus-marrow in flint bowls, and painting their faces and breasts with fine fiber-brushes, designing awkward parabolas, interlocking networks, vague representations of natural forms, rings and sets of radiant lines. Some of them were kneeling down, attaching barbaric jewelry to their necks, foreheads and feet: necklaces made of the canine teeth of lions, wolves, bears, aurochs and deer, punctured at the base; the backbones of fish; pierces of fluorspar with amethyst gleams; sculpted pebbles; and various fragile marine ornaments—cowries, periwinkles and limpets.

  The horde represented a humankind already inclined toward the ideal, industrious and artistic, given to hunting but not warlike, which accepted the mystery of things without having yet submitted itself to worship, scarcely prey to vague symbolisms. Sons of the great dolichocephalic race dominant in Quaternary Europe, living in peace with other hordes, strangers to the oppressions of slavery, they were characterized by a coarse nobility, a grandeur and a generosity that would not be found again until the Neolithic.6 Their territories were large, so abundant in nourishment that no instinct of direct appropriation or low trickery had been able to arise. The tribal leaders, equipped with no power of enforcement, freely elected and followed by virtue of their wisdom and experience, had not yet enthroned despotism. Only quarrels of love and emulation occasionally reddened the earth with human blood spilled by humans.

  After the meal and the toilette, the women and those males who were not involved in today’s hunt began their labor. Oh, what frontiers had been crossed in the cerebral realm since the flints of Thenay7 and taciturn anthropopithecus, when the ancestral Chelleans appeared in the bosom of the fauna: the division of labor; the tradition of tool-making; sovereignty over nature; organization multiplying human strength; artistic drawings!

  Several of them were sewing furs with fine eyed needles, using holes pierced in advance by means of pointed stones. Others were cleaning fresh hides with scrapers and scourers. A few, established in the open air, were hammering with pieces of stone or wood, sharpening axes, knives, saws and chisels. The sculpting, with little sharp blows, was carried out with marvelous skill and patience, causing points and blades slowly to appear; the artisans, familiar with their materials and endowed with the divination acquired by long practice, rarely failed to discover the favorable directions of percussion. Some of them were engaged in even more delicate work, carving points, hooks and harpoons of bone and horn, thus equipping themselves with delicate and precise tools, which humankind would be unable to surpass until the Stone Age gave way to the Age of Metal.

  Most of all, the needle expressed an ingenious industry: rounded splinters of bone, indented by notched flints, delicately polished and pointed, with eyes drilled by rotating points with calculated slowness, avoiding a thousand risks of breakage.

  While the work began, a group of hunters met at the cavern entrance.

  A young man with sharp eyes climbed up to the top of the crag to explore the view. To his left, beneath a vague, soft gleam of tarnished amethyst, the forest extended between the river and the horizon. Facing him were valleys, the gradual circles of steppes, a few low and gently-sloping hills, oases like water-lilies on a marsh, and the sinuous mirrors of fecund waters. Beyond, lost in the dusty light and the pallor of the clouds, was mountainous country. Everywhere, there were the diminutive profiles of animals grazing the plain; the hunter took note of a herd of horses and a herd of urus. In a resounding voice he denounced them to his companions, tracing the areas of the hunt with his finger. In response to his speech, they all went in quest of weapons: bows, harpoons, spears and clubs. Then, as they were about to leave, the old leader looked around and cried: “Vamireh!”

  Then the young man who had vanquished the Felis spelaea appeared on the threshold of a cave. He hesitated between the desire
to continue the preparation of a cloak made from the monster’s skin, which he had begun the night before, and the desire to go hunting. Youth was triumphant, along with the appeal of the rejuvenated valley, the exclamations of his companions. He went back into the cavern, and promptly reappeared armed with a bow and a club—and the troop marched off in a northward direction.

  Restless at first, their barbaric brains overexcited by the march and the fine morning, they gradually fell silent. Soon, from the top of a hill, the urus herd became visible to them. Several hundred of the large herbivores were in a triangular formation, with a circumference of about 2000 meters. The bulls with leonine flanks and stubborn heads were circulating among the heifers and young males with a heavy tread. The whole multitude realized the splendors of leisurely life, peaceful majesty and social strength.

  At the call of the leader—the colossal bull standing at the most acute angle of the triangle—the other males grouped together for the battle. A wild intelligence—an intelligence atrophied in their Asian kin by a servitude that was already long—endowed them with tactical aptitude and spontaneity.

  The hunters paused. Hidden behind a hillock, they discussed the plan of attack. The nature of the terrain and the disposition of the animals left room for two alternatives: to approach them simultaneously from the right and the left, taking advantage of a slanting series of hillocks; or to move around the plain and surge forth from a clump of fig-trees some two leagues away. After a few minutes, the majority favored the first method, for the other, although more productive in the case of success, was evidently less certain, because panic might scatter the urus before the ambush could be sprung.