by Harold Lamb
"So much the archaeologists have told us. The physicists add their word, which confirms rather than rejects a situ such as Kurdistan as the origin of human progress. For the physicists say that as the great glaciers retreated northward a belt of cyclonic winds prevailed from the end of the Mediterranean to the Tibetan plateau. These cyclones followed the retreat of the ice, leaving an area of abundant rains behind them.
"Within this area, during those early millenniums, the floods abated, the inland seas dwindled to the great lakes that became more salt. The steppes and hills of this southern slope of the great Eurasian mountain spine became temperate, incredibly fertile, and prolific of animal life. To the north, beyond the mountain spine, the great winds prevailed, with cold. To the south, the plains were drying up and the lakes becoming salt beds.
"In this garden belt, left to primitive man by the receding floods, we have some traces of supremely happy life. The inhabitants of the garden area seemed to have had no destructive enemies. No elaborate weapons of polished flint have been found in the few grave sites we have uncovered. Animal bones unearthed in this region belong neither to a distinct wild nor tame species (as at Anau). Apparently the men made some use of animals such as sheep, dogs, and horses without either slaughtering them or domesticating them—which means actually binding them into a slavery of work.
"Human minds here had invented the wheel, to be turned by water. Human tongues had mastered the tremendous feat of speech to convey ideas. Fire had become the universal servant of the settlements. Seed assured them of next season's food.
"These earliest intelligent humans we will call the Wanderers. They traveled about more than we realize, because their herds could be moved with them, and they could carry seed of bread wheat, to be planted at the next stage in their journey. Owing to the abundant rainfall, they were not confined to irrigation works. Since they moved about, the land never became sterile under them.
"Having articulate speech, good memories, and active minds, they felt as yet no need of writing. For numerals they must have had ten signs or symbols—having ten lingers upon which to do their first counting.
"They had not entered yet upon the Metallic Age. They made fine vases of clay and painted them; they used some of the more beautiful stones, such as jasper and chalcedony, and alabaster, and perhaps melted some gold or copper for utensils. They plaited baskets out of reeds. They built their dwellings out of wood, using tree trunks to support the roofs and porches, because forests were abundant and these builders did not need to work the harder stone or more laborious bricks of clay.
"These Wanderers lived, it seems, what we would call a balanced life—balanced, that is, between active labor and thought. The gold they shaped into headbands and drinking cups had not been cast as yet into coins, the possession of which might lead to theft or strife. Oil seeping up from the ground—for this garden area overlies some of the greatest oil deposits—gave them fuel. When ignited within its rock formation it provided an eternal fire. There was as yet no danger of conflagrations such as destroyed those cities of the plain, Sodom and Gomorrah, in a later day. Probably no towns were built by these Wanderers because they still existed in small family or tribal groups each having its animal herd—as did the Hebrew patriarchs after them.
"This way of life had been adjusted to animals in a fashion not clear to us. Hides of the beasts provided the stuff that clothed the humans and the milk nourished them. Shepherds' crooks, horse bits, and ox goads were the Wanderers' chief implements. The half-tame ox or bull provided their most powerful work engine. Vestiges of their care for the cherished oxen survive in the wall paintings of Cnossus in Crete, of youths and girls leaping charging bulls in a form of play that bore no resemblance to the bullfights of modern Spanish cities. To the east, the protection of cows and bullocks, as of other animal life, has held good among the Brahmans of northern India since prehistoric times.
"This balanced life of the Wanderers had no ease in it. Most certainly they knew no Utopia. Only by conforming to a law of nature that permitted life to continue could they themselves live. They had no joy in hunting as a sport, but the strongest of them hunted carnivorous beasts like the lion on foot, to protect the herds. Traces of that hunting survive in the earliest stone sculptures at Carchemish and Nineveh.
"This tenacity of the Wanderers, urging them toward self-fulfillment by raising themselves above savagery, depended upon two intangible weapons—their courage and inventiveness. They conceived and stored up their treasures of accomplishment within their minds. Knowledge, as such, became a priceless thing, to be taught by word of mouth and memorized. They had no benefit of written texts or of machines to make labor easy. Knowledge they discovered to be harmful as well as helpful. Carefully, they must have separated the protective skills from the destructive in their effort to preserve life. Continually, they weighed the balance of a man's helpful deeds against those that were harmful. Transgressions could only be atoned for by mightier works on the assistance side. No one was permitted to depart from the truth of the spoken word, because that in itself was their only hold upon exact knowledge. The great skill of a metalworker could not be learned by one to whom he gave a brazier or spoon; it had to be taught patiently, or the art of the first smith would die with him. The secret lay in the mind of the smith, setting him apart from his fellows. His skill partook of magic, good or bad. Masters of the arts of firing or melting metals, as of medicine, were placed in a later day among the gods by the superstitious Greeks who personified the metalworker in the dark-tempered Hephaestus. The forging of swords became in legends the work of magicians or dwarfs.
"So with the skill of medicine; for the man able to select herbs to heal could also concoct poisons. And there was a black art as well as white in skill with numbering; for one who could accomplish much by combining numbers in his brain could also destroy others by such calculations. Only the skill of a musician was altogether beneficial. I think they had only harps and pipes for instruments.
"With this sole force of the human spirit the Wanderers sustained themselves in their long struggle toward self-fulfillment. The mind of a single man might at times be tuned to such splendor that he led and enlightened his people; the anger of a malevolent spirit sacrificed the hope of a community. How many Newtons or Aristotles worked among them without any apparatus except thought? The soul of one such man might send out repercussions that would be felt, like the wash of a tidal wave, at the edges of this primitive garden.
"Their laboratory was the natural earth. In their patient progress toward betterment they advanced far—how far we do not know. They sought to prolong life after death.
"At some time before the first light of history their world ended. Some catastrophe of the earth, or some internal cleavage, drove the Wanderers to migrate. Perhaps the drying up of their valleys drove them to follow the rainfall, or to seek new lands. They went in the main to the east and west, reaching India and the end of the Mediterranean. Even the outpost communities of Harappa, Carchemish, and Ur became ruined; the speech of the different migrant groups altered from the original speech. But some may have stayed behind and survived by retreating to the mountaintops.
"How long the world of the Wanderers had endured it is impossible to say. But it had ended when the Metallic Age began, some five millenniums ago, with the rise of scattered cultures in city centers, in Crete and the valley of the Nile, in Babylon and Ray—wherein the science of astronomy led to the worship of the stars, and images of strange gods were set up. Invention turned toward mechanics, ideas were preserved in writing upon clay tablets and papyrus—in different scripts—and the continuity of the modern world had begun.
"This picture, conjured up of a vanished world, cannot be sustained as yet by the findings of archaeology. Only the evidence of stone buildings or bronze implements could have survived seven millenniums, and the Wanderers left no such evidence behind. The Wanderers held fire to be sacred, but they built no fire temples, nor did they shape massive end
uring things in bronze.
"They left no certain indication of their garden spot. It might have been in these fertile mountains south of the spine of Eurasia, now populated by the Kurds; it could have been in the grasslands of fertile black earth north of the spine, now called the steppes of Russia. As it happened both these regions remained almost unexplored by the archaeologists of the nineteenth and twentieth Christian centuries. They have not been combed for evidence until today.
"There is evidence of another kind of this early paradise. Most peoples retain myths of an earlier age of the gods, or golden age, when life was simpler. But in lands not too distant from these Kurdish mountains, folk memories endure of an actual earthly paradise.
"As early as 2100 b.c. an unusual man named Gudea appeared in the city of Lagash on the lower Tigris at the head of his people from the eastern mountains. Statues of him that have survived show a turbaned head with kindly meditative face. He carried with him a plan of a temple traced on lapis-lazuli, and he said he meant to build it, to serve 'The men bright as the sky, merry as the earth, their heads being the heads of gods, who come with the black storm cloud. They have commanded that this house be built; I do not understand their words.'
"After Gudea's lifetime, the lofty mound-temple was built at Babylon—the one called by the Hebrews the Tower of Babel—and named 'The House like the Terrace between Earth and Heaven.'
"When the Hebrews followed Abraham away from the land of Ur they carried with them the memory of a time when there had been only one language and one people.'And the Lord God planted a garden eastward in Eden '
"Only a little later—about 1000 b.c.—the barbaric Aryan Greeks migrating to the west held to a folk memory of a Parnassus where divine beings had dwelt in etherian air between the earth and the sky. This place they believed to be in the remote mountains under the rising sun.
"Other Aryan folk threading down from the mountains into India in that same age kept a clearer tradition of a homeland they had left behind them, to the northwest of India. Some of their folk had remained there—'those who were left behind.' In their writing, Avestic, this ancestral land had been Aryan-vej, the place of the hearth, or the homeland. Their word Aryaman signified a god or a comrade."
With the last page in his hand, Jacob fell silent. There were notes scribbled upon it in pencil that appeared at first to be incoherent. "Here's something that doesn't make sense," he muttered. "The Wanderers of our first civilization remain a mystery to us because they left no evidence in the way of artifacts or buildings. . .we have to look elsewhere for a trace of them. . .into the tradition of the human spirit. That spirit has left us messages almost obliterated by time. . .messages left by the descendants of the Wanderers who went out into the world. Of those who went out we know little except of the last two, Siddhattha and Zarathushtra?
And he read from the last page:
"In India, as late as the dawn of history, a high-born Aryan of the warrior caste set out on a mission. His name has come down to us, Siddhattha. Abandoning his weapons, his chariot, and his servants, leaving his young wife who had given birth to a son, Siddhattha went away from the triumphal birth-festival, stepping over the sleeping dancing girls, to go into the jungle, renouncing his old life. There, it is written, he preached with the voice of a bell resounding in the sky. He was called the Gautama, and the religion that grew in his footsteps became Buddhism. The Buddha became the figure of a myth, but Siddhattha had been a human being.
"It is said that he turned aside from his own existence when he drove in his chariot to his pleasure ground, and passed on the way the bodies of people plague-stricken, and the rotting bodies of the dead.
"A few generations after Siddhattha a man of these mountains of Kurdistan, living near Lake Urmiah, taught again the doctrine of the spirit governing the body. Like the Gautama, he wandered among the villages, meditating and explaining that human life availed nothing unless it served the life to come, in purity. His disciples built fire altars as a sign of purification, putting on themselves, as he did, the clothing of beggars. They were mendicants, begging for the salvation of mankind, against the destruction which they believed would come after three thousand years by a conflagration of the earth and unendurable heat that would melt all metals. Such was the doctrine of Zarathushtra, whom the Greeks called Zoroaster. He gave the name of his homeland as Aryan Vej.
"In their lifetimes, these two men, speaking much the same language, had carried out a mission. Zarathushtra's teaching helped to shape the wisdom of the Magi, those men of the East whose mission led them far afield, even to the birthplace of Jesus of Nazareth.
"By then the Metallic Age had begun, with the use of iron hardening into steel. With Greece and Rome greater inventions had come into being, and the modern world was recording its history."
Thoughtfully, Jacob stared at the lamp's flame, and Michal stirred. "Go on," she urged.
"That's the end of the chapter. There isn't any more."
"It sounds like daydreaming. But it's a nice, comforting dream, isn't it?" She eyed him, questioning.
Jacob folded up the pages before he answered. "Comforting? Sir Clement says you and I may be housed at this moment on the spot where our very remote ancestors started to make good use of their human consciousness."
"No, I mean the garden that was paradise." Michal smiled up at him suddenly. "Didn't I say that if there is a paradise on earth, this is it?"
Jacob laughed. "Yes, you did put it more concisely than Sir Clement."
"I feel it, I don't reason about it. The process is much quicker. What does your editorial mind think?"
"It doesn't think just now, except about you."
"I'm glad of that." In her own way Michal had been pondering. "It seems too good to be true that there was an earthly paradise we've forgotten. Sir Clement said something about standing in the presence of a truth we do not recognize."
"Here, or in the steppes of Russia." Jacob had been thinking back methodically over the written pages. "That adds up to nothing. Something that might have been. A spot on the earth that might have been X." He went on, as Michal started to protest. "I'm not tearing down your dream, Michal. It's true that the site itself means nothing much. The Golden Gate is still in the wall of Jerusalem. What can it tell us? The stones do not speak. No, the miracle is in human consciousness that, unarmed and suffering, achieved something more enduring than the stones."
It was strange that they should be so concerned with these thoughts. They held to the words written by a sick man, turning them over as if something of vast importance might lie in them. Perhaps it did, because in this place such words did have importance. Because of them tomorrow or the next year might be different.
"Sir Clement wrote down only known facts, or near-facts," he said aloud. "But he added them up in a way of his own. He added folk-memory to archaeology. His conjecture seems to be that the consciousness of that earlier age has not passed from the earth—that something was set in motion then in the souls of men that has influenced happenings since. Like a train which passes a given point and is gone but continues on its way elsewhere in time. Can you imagine human suffering or joy so great that its effect never quite dies away?"
"That's a lovely dream," Michal exclaimed. "Go on, Jacob."
"I can't. And you can break that one down easily."
"I don't want to."
"I don't mean you, Michal"—she was forever seizing upon a thought to apply to herself alone—"I mean the juries of learned minds; they'd demolish such a conjecture as easily as a house of cards."
"Why?"
"We have no artifacts."
"Meaning ?"
"No bones, no skulls to be measured, no stone implements, no exhibits A, B, and C of any earthly paradise."
"Oh." Michal grimaced, and then brightened, pointing past him. "Jacob! My white elephant!" And as he glanced at the ill-assorted pair, man and beast, on the wall: "In the legend Gautama had an elephant like that in the jungle, and there they
are coming out of it."
It was odd that an artist in a place like this so far from India should paint the figures of the Jataka legend. "Perhaps Michelangelo's grandfather liked the legend. It can't have been done so very long ago."
"But why?" She peered around at the other wall. "And who would he be?"
"He's still a shepherd playing a harp."
"Is he?" Michal looked doubtful and a little sleepy. "I'm not so sure that my house is my own now."
She was asleep when Jacob blew out the light. The fumes of the wine had cleared from his head, but he could not manage to sleep. He listened to the wind that tore at the stones of the house.
At times a gust of rain sent its spray through the cracks without waking Michal. Even when she was removed from him, unconscious of him, he felt the warmth of her body and the touch of her hand on his throat. In this way she lay holding to him, as if to guard against being left alone.
Her slight body, so quick to respond to the touch of desire, kept its touch upon him in another way when she was not conscious, even then attentive to his silence.
In the outer darkness the storm buffeted at the summit of the mount. Jacob heard at times a single melodious clang of the bell at the steps, as it was stirred by the violent blows of the air. The bell he had heard at the monastery-The bell of Saint George, that human being who was depicted now as an armored knight, treading a dragon underfoot. Giorgios had abandoned his rank and duty as a soldier to gain faith in something, as Siddhattha had left his wealth and his sleeping wife, and the dancing girls in his hall. In their tremendous endeavor the two had been alike, moved by a common purpose.
However differently they might be pictured now, a common impulse had moved them once.
The next evening the intruders came. The wind had died down, there was no storm, but their coming had the force of a storm.