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_ Pascal somewhere says: "In viewing the march of human evolution,
the philosophic mind should look upon humanity as one man, and not
as a conglomeration of individuals."
I sit here in Murderers' Row in Folsom, the drowsy hum of flies in
my ears as I ponder that thought of Pascal. It is true. Just as
the human embryo, in its brief ten lunar months, with bewildering
swiftness, in myriad forms and semblances a myriad times multiplied,
rehearses the entire history of organic life from vegetable to man;
just as the human boy, in his brief years of boyhood, rehearses the
history of primitive man in acts of cruelty and savagery, from
wantonness of inflicting pain on lesser creatures to tribal
consciousness expressed by the desire to run in gangs; just so, I,
Darrell Standing, have rehearsed and relived all that primitive man
was, and did, and became until he became even you and me and the
rest of our kind in a twentieth century civilization.
Truly do we carry in us, each human of us alive on the planet to-
day, the incorruptible history of life from life's beginning. This
history is written in our tissues and our bones, in our functions
and our organs, in our brain cells and in our spirits, and in all
sorts of physical and psychic atavistic urgencies and compulsions.
Once we were fish-like, you and I, my reader, and crawled up out of
the sea to pioneer in the great, dry-land adventure in the thick of
which we are now. The marks of the sea are still on us, as the
marks of the serpent are still on us, ere the serpent became serpent
and we became we, when pre-serpent and pre-we were one. Once we
flew in the air, and once we dwelt arboreally and were afraid of the
dark. The vestiges remain, graven on you and me, and graven on our
seed to come after us to the end of our time on earth.
What Pascal glimpsed with the vision of a seer, I have lived. I
have seen myself that one man contemplated by Pascal's philosophic
eye. Oh, I have a tale, most true, most wonderful, most real to me,
although I doubt that I have wit to tell it, and that you, my
reader, have wit to perceive it when told. I say that I have seen
myself that one man hinted at by Pascal. I have lain in the long
trances of the jacket and glimpsed myself a thousand living men
living the thousand lives that are themselves the history of the
human man climbing upward through the ages.
Ah, what royal memories are mine, as I flutter through the aeons of
the long ago. In single jacket trances I have lived the many lives
involved in the thousand-years-long Odysseys of the early drifts of
men. Heavens, before I was of the flaxen-haired Aesir, who dwelt in
Asgard, and before I was of the red-haired Vanir, who dwelt in
Vanaheim, long before those times I have memories (living memories)
of earlier drifts, when, like thistledown before the breeze, we
drifted south before the face of the descending polar ice-cap.
I have died of frost and famine, fight and flood. I have picked
berries on the bleak backbone of the world, and I have dug roots to
eat from the fat-soiled fens and meadows. I have scratched the
reindeer's semblance and the semblance of the hairy mammoth on ivory
tusks gotten of the chase and on the rock walls of cave shelters
when the winter storms moaned outside. I have cracked marrow-bones
on the sites of kingly cities that had perished centuries before my
time or that were destined to be builded centuries after my passing.
And I have left the bones of my transient carcasses in pond bottoms,
and glacial gravels, and asphaltum lakes.
I have lived through the ages known to-day among the scientists as
the Paleolithic, the Neolithic, and the Bronze. I remember when
with our domesticated wolves we herded our reindeer to pasture on
the north shore of the Mediterranean where now are France and Italy
and Spain. This was before the ice-sheet melted backward toward the
pole. Many processions of the equinoxes have I lived through and
died in, my reader . . . only that I remember and that you do not.
I have been a Son of the Plough, a Son of the Fish, a Son of the
Tree. All religions from the beginnings of man's religious time
abide in me. And when the Dominie, in the chapel, here in Folsom of
a Sunday, worships God in his own good modern way, I know that in
him, the Dominie, still abide the worships of the Plough, the Fish,
the Tree--ay, and also all worships of Astarte and the Night.
I have been an Aryan master in old Egypt, when my soldiers scrawled
obscenities on the carven tombs of kings dead and gone and forgotten
aforetime. And I, the Aryan master in old Egypt, have myself
builded my two burial places--the one a false and mighty pyramid to
which a generation of slaves could attest; the other humble, meagre,
secret, rock-hewn in a desert valley by slaves who died immediately
their work was done. . . . And I wonder me here in Folsom, while
democracy dreams its enchantments o'er the twentieth century world,
whether there, in the rock-hewn crypt of that secret, desert valley,
the bones still abide that once were mine and that stiffened my
animated body when I was an Aryan master high-stomached to command.
And on the great drift, southward and eastward under the burning sun
that perished all descendants of the houses of Asgard and Vanaheim,
I have been a king in Ceylon, a builder of Aryan monuments under
Aryan kings in old Java and old Sumatra. And I have died a hundred
deaths on the great South Sea drift ere ever the rebirth of me came
to plant monuments, that only Aryans plant, on volcanic tropic
islands that I, Darrell Standing, cannot name, being too little
versed to-day in that far sea geography.
If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what
I see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the
mighty driftage of the races in the times before our present written
history began! Yes, we had our history even then. Our old men, our
priests, our wise ones, told our history into tales and wrote those
tales in the stars so that our seed after us should not forget.
From the sky came the life-giving rain and the sunlight. And we
studied the sky, learned from the stars to calculate time and
apportion the seasons; and we named the stars after our heroes and
our foods and our devices for getting food; and after our
wanderings, and drifts, and adventures; and after our functions and
our furies of impulse and desire.
And, alas! we thought the heavens unchanging on which we wrote all
our humble yearnings and all the humble things we did or dreamed of
doing. When I was a Son of the Bull, I remember me a lifetime I
spent at star-gazing. And, later and earlier, there were other
lives in which I sang with the priests and bards the taboo-songs of
the stars wherein we believed was written our imperishable record.
And here, at the end of it all, I pore over books of astronomy from
the prison library, such as they allow condemned men to read, and
learn that even the heavens are passing fluxes, vexed with star-
driftage as the earth is by the drifts of men.
Equipped with this modern knowledge, I have, returning through the
little death from my earlier lives, been able to compare the heavens
then and now. And the stars do change. I have seen pole stars and
pole stars and dynasties of pole stars. The pole star to-day is in
Ursa Minor. Yet, in those far days I have seen the pole star in
Draco, in Hercules, in Vega, in Cygnus, and in Cepheus. No; not
even the stars abide, and yet the memory and the knowledge of them
abides in me, in the spirit of me that is memory and that is
eternal. Only spirit abides. All else, being mere matter, passes,
and must pass.
Oh, I do see myself to-day that one man who appeared in the elder
world, blonde, ferocious, a killer and a lover, a meat-eater and a
root-digger, a gypsy and a robber, who, club in hand, through
millenniums of years wandered the world around seeking meat to
devour and sheltered nests for his younglings and sucklings.
I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped
who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of
the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle.
I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through
the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish,
clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of
stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with
leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow-roots,
fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and
wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to
scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibres
of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising
systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade-
routes, building boats, and founding navigation--ay, and organizing
village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes,
welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the
laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might
live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy
all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else
destroy them.
I was that man in all his births and endeavours. I am that man to-
day, waiting my due death by the law that I helped to devise many a
thousand years ago, and by which I have died many times before this,
many times. And as I contemplate this vast past history of me, I
find several great and splendid influences, and, chiefest of these,
the love of woman, man's love for the woman of his kind. I see
myself, the one man, the lover, always the lover. Yes, also was I
the great fighter, but somehow it seems to me as I sit here and
evenly balance it all, that I was, more than aught else, the great
lover. It was because I loved greatly that I was the great fighter.
Sometimes I think that the story of man is the story of the love of
woman. This memory of all my past that I write now is the memory of
my love of woman. Ever, in the ten thousand lives and guises, I
loved her. I love her now. My sleep is fraught with her; my waking
fancies, no matter whence they start, lead me always to her. There
is no escaping her, that eternal, splendid, ever-resplendent figure
of woman.
Oh, make no mistake. I am no callow, ardent youth. I am an elderly
man, broken in health and body, and soon to die. I am a scientist
and a philosopher. I, as all the generations of philosophers before
me, know woman for what she is--her weaknesses, and meannesses, and
immodesties, and ignobilities, her earth-bound feet, and her eyes
that have never seen the stars. But--and the everlasting,
irrefragable fact remains: HER FEET ARE BEAUTIFUL, HER EYES ARE
BEAUTIFUL, HER ARMS AND BREASTS ARE PARADISE, HER CHARM IS POTENT
BEYOND ALL CHARM THAT HAS EVER DAZZLED MEN; AND, AS THE POLE WILLY-
NILLY DRAWS THE NEEDLE, JUST SO, WILLY-NILLY, DOES SHE DRAW MEN.
Woman has made me laugh at death and distance, scorn fatigue and
sleep. I have slain men, many men, for love of woman, or in warm
blood have baptized our nuptials or washed away the stain of her
favour to another. I have gone down to death and dishonour, my
betrayal of my comrades and of the stars black upon me, for woman's
sake--for my sake, rather, I desired her so. And I have lain in the
barley, sick with yearning for her, just to see her pass and glut my
eyes with the swaying wonder of her and of her hair, black with the
night, or brown or flaxen, or all golden-dusty with the sun.
For woman IS beautiful . . . to man. She is sweet to his tongue,
and fragrance in his nostrils. She is fire in his blood, and a
thunder of trumpets; her voice is beyond all music in his ears; and
she can shake his soul that else stands steadfast in the draughty
presence of the Titans of the Light and of the Dark. And beyond his
star-gazing, in his far-imagined heavens, Valkyrie or houri, man has
fain made place for her, for he could see no heaven without her.
And the sword, in battle, singing, sings not so sweet a song as the
woman sings to man merely by her laugh in the moonlight, or her
love-sob in the dark, or by her swaying on her way under the sun
while he lies dizzy with longing in the grass.
I have died of love. I have died for love, as you shall see. In a
little while they will take me out, me, Darrell Standing, and make
me die. And that death shall be for love. Oh, not lightly was I
stirred when I slew Professor Haskell in the laboratory at the
University of California. He was a man. I was a man. And there
was a woman beautiful. Do you understand? She was a woman and I
was a man and a lover, and all the heredity of love was mine up from
the black and squalling jungle ere love was love and man was man.
Oh, ay, it is nothing new. Often, often, in that long past have I
given life and honour, place and power for love. Man is different
from woman. She is close to the immediate and knows only the need
of instant things. We know honour above her honour, and pride
beyond her wildest guess of pride. Our eyes are far-visioned for
star-gazing, while her eyes see no farther than the solid earth
beneath her feet, the lover's breast upon her breast, the infant
lusty in the hollow of her arm. And yet, such is our alchemy
compounded of the ages, woman works magic in our dreams and in our
veins, so that more than dreams and far visions and the blood of
life itself is woman to us, who, as lovers truly say, is more than
all the world. Yet is this just, else would man not be man, the
fighter and the conqueror, treading his red way on the face of all
other and lesser life--for, had man not been the lover, the royal
lover, he could never have become the kingly fighter. We fight
best, and die best, and live best, for what we love.
I am that one man. I see myself the many selves that have gone into
the constituting of me. And ever I see the woman, the many women,
who have made me and undone me, who have loved me and whom I have
loved.
I remember, oh, long ago when human kind was very young, that I made
me a snare and a pit with a pointed stake upthrust in the middle
thereof, for the taking of Sabre-Tooth. Sabre-Tooth, long-fanged
and long-haired, was the chiefest peril to us of the squatting
place, who crouched through the nights over our fires and by day
increased the growing shell-bank beneath us by the clams we dug and
devoured from the salt mud-flats beside us.
And when the roar and the squall of Sabre-Tooth roused us where we
squatted by our dying embers, and I was wild with far vision of the
proof of the pit and the stake, it was the woman, arms about me,
leg-twining, who fought with me and restrained me not to go out
through the dark to my desire. She was part-clad, for warmth only,
in skins of animals, mangy and fireburnt, that I had slain; she was
swart and dirty with camp smoke, unwashed since the spring rains,
with nails gnarled and broken, and hands that were calloused like
footpads and were more like claws than like hands; but her eyes were
blue as the summer sky is, as the deep sea is, and there was that in
her eyes, and in her clasped arms about me, and in her heart beating
against mine, that withheld me . . . though through the dark until
dawn, while Sabre-Tooth squalled his wrath and his agony, I could
hear my comrades snickering and sniggling to their women in that I
had not the faith in my emprise and invention to venture through the
night to the pit and the stake I had devised for the undoing of
Sabre-Tooth. But my woman, my savage mate held me, savage that I
was, and her eyes drew me, and her arms chained me, and her twining
legs and heart beating to mine seduced me from my far dream of
things, my man's achievement, the goal beyond goals, the taking and
the slaying of Sabre-Tooth on the stake in the pit.
Once I wan Ushu, the archer. I remember it well. For I was lost
from my own people, through the great forest, till I emerged on the
flat lands and grass lands, and was taken in by a strange people,
kin in that their skin was white, their hair yellow, their speech
not too remote from mine. And she was Igar, and I drew her as I
sang in the twilight, for she was destined a race-mother, and she
was broad-built and full-dugged, and she could not but draw to the
man heavy-muscled, deep-chested, who sang of his prowess in man-
slaying and in meat-getting, and so, promised food and protection to
her in her weakness whilst she mothered the seed that was to hunt
the meat and live after her.
And these people knew not the wisdom of my people, in that they
snared and pitted their meat and in battle used clubs and stone
throwing-sticks and were unaware of the virtues of arrows swift-
flying, notched on the end to fit the thong of deer-sinew, well-
twisted, that sprang into straightness when released to the spring
of the ask-stick bent in the middle.
And while I sang, the stranger men laughed in the twilight. And
only she, Igar, believed and had faith in me. I took her alone to
the hunting, where the deer sought the water-hole. And my bow
twanged and sang in the covert, and the deer fell fast-stricken, and
the warm meat was sweet to us, and she was mine there by the water-
hole.
And because of Igar I remained with the strange men. And I taught
them the making of bows from the red and sweet-smelling wood like
unto cedar. And I taught them to keep both eyes open, and to aim
with the left eye, and to make blunt shafts for small game, and
pronged shafts of bone for the fish in the clear water, and to flake
arrow-heads from obsidian for the deer and the wild horse, the elk
and old Sabre-Tooth. But the flaking of stone they laughed at, till
I shot an elk through and through, the flaked stone standing out and
beyond, the feathered shaft sunk in its vitals, the whole tribe
applauding.
I was Ushu, the archer, and Igar was my woman and mate. We laughed
under the sun in the morning, when our man-child and woman-child,
yellowed like honey-bees, sprawled and rolled in the mustard, and at
night she lay close in my arms, and loved me, and urged me, because
of my skill at the seasoning of woods and the flaking of arrow-
heads, that I should stay close by the camp and let the other men
bring to me the meat from the perils of hunting. And I listened,
and grew fat and short-breathed, and in the long nights, unsleeping,
worried that the men of the stranger tribe brought me meat for my
wisdom and honour, but laughed at my fatness and undesire for the
hunting and fighting.
And in my old age, when our sons were man-grown and our daughters
were mothers, when up from the southland the dark men, flat-browed,
kinky-headed, surged like waves of the sea upon us and we fled back
before them to the hill-slopes, Igar, like my mates far before and
long after, leg-twining, arm-clasping, unseeing far visions, strove
to hold me aloof from the battle.
And I tore myself from her, fat and short-breathed, while she wept
that no longer I loved her, and I went out to the night-fighting and
dawn-fighting, where, to the singing of bowstrings and the shrilling
of arrows, feathered, sharp-pointed, we showed them, the kinky-
heads, the skill of the killing and taught them the wit and the
willing of slaughter.
And as I died them at the end of the fighting, there were death
songs and singing about me, and the songs seemed to sing as these
the words I have written when I was Ushu, the archer, and Igar, my
mate-woman, leg-twining, arm-clasping, would have held me back from
the battle.
Once, and heaven alone knows when, save that it was in the long ago
when man was young, we lived beside great swamps, where the hills
drew down close to the wide, sluggish river, and where our women
gathered berries and roots, and there were herds of deer, of wild
horses, of antelope, and of elk, that we men slew with arrows or
trapped in the pits or hill-pockets. From the river we caught fish
in nets twisted by the women of the bark of young trees.
I was a man, eager and curious as the antelope when we lured it by
waving grass clumps where we lay hidden in the thick of the grass.
The wild rice grew in the swamp, rising sheer from the water on the
edges of the channels. Each morning the blackbirds awoke us with
their chatter as they left their roosts to fly to the swamp. And
through the long twilight the air was filled with their noise as
they went back to their roosts. It was the time that the rice
ripened. And there were ducks also, and ducks and blackbirds
feasted to fatness on the ripe rice half unhusked by the sun.
Being a man, ever restless, ever questing, wondering always what lay
beyond the hills and beyond the swamps and in the mud at the river's
bottom, I watched the wild ducks and blackbirds and pondered till my
pondering gave me vision and I saw. And this is what I saw, the
reasoning of it:
Meat was good to eat. In the end, tracing it back, or at the first,
rather, all meat came from grass. The meat of the duck and of the
blackbird came from the seed of the swamp rice. To kill a duck with
an arrow scarce paid for the labour of stalking and the long hours
in hiding. The blackbirds were too small for arrow-killing save by
the boys who were learning and preparing for the taking of larger
game. And yet, in rice season, blackbirds and ducks were
succulently fat. Their fatness came from the rice. Why should I
and mine not be fat from the rice in the same way?
And I thought it out in camp, silent, morose, while the children
squabbled about me unnoticed, and while Arunga, my mate-woman,
vainly scolded me and urged me to go hunting for more meat for the
many of us.
Arunga was the woman I had stolen from the hill-tribes. She and I
had been a dozen moons in learning common speech after I captured
her. Ah, that day when I leaped upon her, down from the over-
hanging tree-branch as she padded the runway! Fairly upon her
shoulders with the weight of my body I smote her, my fingers wide-
spreading to clutch her. She squalled like a cat there in the
runway. She fought me and bit me. The nails of her hands were like
the claws of a tree-cat as they tore at me. But I held her and
mastered her, and for two days beat her and forced her to travel
with me down out of the canyons of the Hill-Men to the grass lands
where the river flowed through the rice-swamps and the ducks and the
blackbirds fed fat.
I saw my vision when the rice was ripe. I put Arunga in the bow of
the fire-hollowed log that was most rudely a canoe. I bade her
paddle. In the stern I spread a deerskin she had tanned. With two
stout sticks I bent the stalks over the deerskin and threshed out
the grain that else the blackbirds would have eaten. And when I had
worked out the way of it, I gave the two stout sticks to Arunga, and
sat in the bow paddling and directing.
In the past we had eaten the raw rice in passing and not been
pleased with it. But now we parched it over our fire so that the
grains puffed and exploded in whiteness and all the tribe came
running to taste.
After that we became known among men as the Rice-Eaters and as the
Sons of the Rice. And long, long after, when we were driven by the
Sons of the River from the swamps into the uplands, we took the seed
of the rice with us and planted it. We learned to select the
largest grains for the seed, so that all the rice we thereafter ate
was larger-grained and puffier in the parching and the boiling.
But Arunga. I have said she squalled and scratched like a cat when
I stole her. Yet I remember the time when her own kin of the Hill-
Men caught me and carried me away into the hills. They were her
father, his brother, and her two own blood-brothers. But she was
mine, who had lived with me. And at night, where I lay bound like a
wild pig for the slaying, and they slept weary by the fire, she
crept upon them and brained them with the war-club that with my
hands I had fashioned. And she wept over me, and loosed me, and
fled with me, back to the wide sluggish river where the blackbirds
and wild ducks fed in the rice swamps--for this was before the time
of the coming of the Sons of the River.
For she was Arunga, the one woman, the eternal woman. She has lived
in all times and places. She will always live. She is immortal.
Once, in a far land, her name was Ruth. Also has her name been
Iseult, and Helen, Pocahontas, and Unga. And no stranger man, from
stranger tribes, but has found her and will find her in the tribes
of all the earth.
I remember so many women who have gone into the becoming of the one
woman. There was the time that Har, my brother, and I, sleeping and
pursuing in turn, ever hounding the wild stallion through the
daytime and night, and in a wide circle that met where the sleeping
one lay, drove the stallion unresting through hunger and thirst to
the meekness of weakness, so that in the end he could but stand and
tremble while we bound him with ropes twisted of deer-hide. On our
legs alone, without hardship, aided merely by wit--the plan was
mine--my brother and I walked that fleet-footed creature into
possession.
And when all was ready for me to get on his back--for that had been
my vision from the first--Selpa, my woman, put her arms about me,
and raised her voice and persisted that Har, and not I, should ride,
for Har had neither wife nor young ones and could die without hurt.
Also, in the end she wept, so that I was raped of my vision, and it
was Har, naked and clinging, that bestrode the stallion when he
vaulted away.
It was sunset, and a time of great wailing, when they carried Har in
from the far rocks where they found him. His head was quite broken,
and like honey from a fallen bee-tree his brains dripped on the
ground. His mother strewed wood-ashes on her head and blackened her
face. His father cut off half the fingers of one hand in token of
sorrow. And all the women, especially the young and unwedded,
screamed evil names at me; and the elders shook their wise heads and
muttered and mumbled that not their fathers nor their fathers'
fathers had betrayed such a madness. Horse meat was good to eat;
young colts were tender to old teeth; and only a fool would come to
close grapples with any wild horse save when an arrow had pierced
it, or when it struggled on the stake in the midst of the pit.
And Selpa scolded me to sleep, and in the morning woke me with her
chatter, ever declaiming against my madness, ever pronouncing her
claim upon me and the claims of our children, till in the end I grew
weary, and forsook my far vision, and said never again would I dream
of bestriding the wild horse to fly swift as its feet and the wind
across the sands and the grass lands.
And through the years the tale of my madness never ceased from being
told over the camp-fire. Yet was the very telling the source of my
vengeance; for the dream did not die, and the young ones, listening
to the laugh and the sneer, redreamed it, so that in the end it was
Othar, my eldest-born, himself a sheer stripling, that walked down a
wild stallion, leapt on its back, and flew before all of us with the
speed of the wind. Thereafter, that they might keep up with him,
all men were trapping and breaking wild horses. Many horses were
broken, and some men, but I lived at the last to the day when, at
the changing of camp-sites in the pursuit of the meat in its
seasons, our very babes, in baskets of willow-withes, were slung
side and side on the backs of our horses that carried our camp-
trappage and dunnage.
I, a young man, had seen my vision, dreamed my dream; Selpa, the
woman, had held me from that far desire; but Othar, the seed of us
to live after, glimpsed my vision and won to it, so that our tribe
became wealthy in the gains of the chase.
There was a woman--on the great drift down out of Europe, a weary
drift of many generations, when we brought into India the shorthorn
cattle and the planting of barley. But this woman was long before
we reached India. We were still in the mid-most of that centuries-
long drift, and no shrewdness of geography can now place for me that
ancient valley.
The woman was Nuhila. The valley was narrow, not long, and the
swift slope of its floor and the steep walls of its rim were
terraced for the growing of rice and of millet--the first rice and
millet we Sons of the Mountain had known. They were a meek people
in that valley. They had become soft with the farming of fat land
made fatter by water. Theirs was the first irrigation we had seen,
although we had little time to mark their ditches and channels by
which all the hill waters flowed to the fields they had builded. We
had little time to mark, for we Sons of the Mountain, who were few,
were in flight before the Sons of the Snub-Nose, who were many. We
called them the Noseless, and they called themselves the Sons of the
Eagle. But they were many, and we fled before them with our
shorthorn cattle, our goats, and our barleyseed, our women and
children.
While the Snub-Noses slew our youths at the rear, we slew at our
fore the folk of the valley who opposed us and were weak. The
village was mud-built and grass-thatched; the encircling wall was of
mud, but quite tall. And when we had slain the people who had built
the wall, and sheltered within it our herds and our women and
children, we stood on the wall and shouted insult to the Snub-Noses.
For we had found the mud granaries filled with rice and millet. Our
cattle could eat the thatches. And the time of the rains was at
hand, so that we should not want for water.
It was a long siege. Near to the beginning, we gathered together
the women, and elders, and children we had not slain, and forced
them out through the wall they had builded. But the Snub-Noses slew
them to the last one, so that there was more food in the village for
us, more food in the valley for the Snub-Noses.
It was a weary long siege. Sickness smote us, and we died of the
plague that arose from our buried ones. We emptied the mud-
granaries of their rice and millet. Our goats and shorthorns ate
the thatch of the houses, and we, ere the end, ate the goats and the
shorthorns.
Where there had been five men of us on the wall, there came a time
when there was one; where there had been half a thousand babes and
younglings of ours, there were none. It was Nuhila, my woman, who
cut off her hair and twisted it that I might have a strong string
for my bow. The other women did likewise, and when the wall was
attacked, stood shoulder to shoulder with us, in the midst of our
spears and arrows raining down potsherds and cobblestones on the
heads of the Snub-Noses.
Even the patient Snub-Noses we well-nigh out-patienced. Came a time
when of ten men of us, but one was alive on the wall, and of our
women remained very few, and the Snub-Noses held parley. They told
us we were a strong breed, and that our women were men-mothers, and
that if we would let them have our women they would leave us alone
in the valley to possess for ourselves and that we could get women
from the valleys to the south.
And Nuhila said no. And the other women said no. And we sneered at
the Snub-Noses and asked if they were weary of fighting. And we
were as dead men then, as we sneered at our enemies, and there was
little fight left in us we were so weak. One more attack on the
wall would end us. We knew it. Our women knew it. And Nuhila said
that we could end it first and outwit the Snub-Noses. And all our
women agreed. And while the Snub-Noses prepared for the attack that
would be final, there, on the wall, we slew our women. Nuhila loved
me, and leaned to meet the thrust of my sword, there on the wall.
And we men, in the love of tribehood and tribesmen, slew one another
till remained only Horda and I alive in the red of the slaughter.
And Horda was my elder, and I leaned to his thrust. But not at once
did I die. I was the last of the Sons of the Mountain, for I saw
Horda, himself fall on his blade and pass quickly. And dying with
the shouts of the oncoming Snub-Noses growing dim in my ears, I was
glad that the Snub-Noses would have no sons of us to bring up by our
women.
I do not know when this time was when I was a Son of the Mountain
and when we died in the narrow valley where we had slain the Sons of
the Rice and the Millet. I do not know, save that it was centuries
before the wide-spreading drift of all us Sons of the Mountain
fetched into India, and that it was long before ever I was an Aryan
master in Old Egypt building my two burial places and defacing the
tombs of kings before me.
I should like to tell more of those far days, but time in the
present is short. Soon I shall pass. Yet am I sorry that I cannot
tell more of those early drifts, when there was crushage of peoples,
or descending ice-sheets, or migrations of meat.
Also, I should like to tell of Mystery. For always were we curious
to solve the secrets of life, death, and decay. Unlike the other
animals, man was for ever gazing at the stars. Many gods he created
in his own image and in the images of his fancy. In those old times
I have worshipped the sun and the dark. I have worshipped the
husked grain as the parent of life. I have worshipped Sar, the Corn
Goddess. And I have worshipped sea gods, and river gods, and fish
gods.
Yes, and I remember Ishtar ere she was stolen from us by the
Babylonians, and Ea, too, was ours, supreme in the Under World, who
enabled Ishtar to conquer death. Mitra, likewise, was a good old
Aryan god, ere he was filched from us or we discarded him. And I
remember, on a time, long after the drift when we brought the barley
into India, that I came down into India, a horse-trader, with many
servants and a long caravan at my back, and that at that time they
were worshipping Bodhisatwa.
Truly, the worships of the Mystery wandered as did men, and between
filchings and borrowings the gods had as vagabond a time of it as
did we. As the Sumerians took the loan of Shamashnapishtin from us,
so did the Sons of Shem take him from the Sumerians and call him
Noah.
Why, I smile me to-day, Darrell Standing, in Murderers' Row, in that
I was found guilty and awarded death by twelve jurymen staunch and
true. Twelve has ever been a magic number of the Mystery. Nor did
it originate with the twelve tribes of Israel. Star-gazers before
them had placed the twelve signs of the Zodiac in the sky. And I
remember me, when I was of the Assir, and of the Vanir, that Odin
sat in judgment over men in the court of the twelve gods, and that
their names were Thor, Baldur, Niord, Frey, Tyr, Bregi, Heimdal,
Hoder, Vidar, Ull, Forseti, and Loki.
Even our Valkyries were stolen from us and made into angels, and the
wings of the Valkyries' horses became attached to the shoulders of
the angels. And our Helheim of that day of ice and frost has become
the hell of to-day, which is so hot an abode that the blood boils in
one's veins, while with us, in our Helheim, the place was so cold as
to freeze the marrow inside the bones. And the very sky, that we
dreamed enduring, eternal, has drifted and veered, so that we find
to-day the scorpion in the place where of old we knew the goat, and
the archer in the place of the crab.
Worships and worships! Ever the pursuit of the Mystery! I remember
the lame god of the Greeks, the master-smith. But their vulcan was
the Germanic Wieland, the master-smith captured and hamstrung lame
of a leg by Nidung, the kind of the Nids. But before that he was
our master-smith, our forger and hammerer, whom we named Il-marinen.
And him we begat of our fancy, giving him the bearded sun-god for
father, and nursing him by the stars of the bear. For, he, Vulcan,
or Wieland, or Il-marinen, was born under the pine tree, from the
hair of the wolf, and was called also the bear-father ere ever the
Germans and Greeks purloined and worshipped him. In that day we
called ourselves the Sons of the Bear and the Sons of the Wolf, and
the bear and the wolf were our totems. That was before our drift
south on which we joined with the Sons of the Tree-Grove and taught
them our totems and tales.
Yes, and who was Kashyapa, who was Pururavas, but our lame master-
smith, our iron-worker, carried by us in our drifts and re-named and
worshipped by the south-dwellers and the east-dwellers, the Sons of
the Pole and of the Fire Drill and Fire Socket.
But the tale is too long, though I should like to tell of the three-
leaved Herb of Life by which Sigmund made Sinfioti alive again. For
this is the very soma-plant of India, the holy grail of King Arthur,
the--but enough! enough!
And yet, as I calmly consider it all, I conclude that the greatest
thing in life, in all lives, to me and to all men, has been woman,
is woman, and will be woman so long as the stars drift in the sky
and the heavens flux eternal change. Greater than our toil and
endeavour, the play of invention and fancy, battle and star-gazing
and mystery--greatest of all has been woman.
Even though she has sung false music to me, and kept my feet solid
on the ground, and drawn my star-roving eyes ever back to gaze upon
her, she, the conserver of life, the earth-mother, has given me my
great days and nights and fulness of years. Even mystery have I
imaged in the form of her, and in my star-charting have I placed her
figure in the sky.
All my toils and devices led to her; all my far visions saw her at
the end. When I made the fire-drill and fire-socket, it was for
her. It was for her, although I did not know it, that I put the
stake in the pit for old Sabre-Tooth, tamed the horse, slew the
mammoth, and herded my reindeer south in advance of the ice-sheet.
For her I harvested the wild rice, tamed the barley, the wheat, and
the corn.
For her, and the seed to come after whose image she bore, I have
died in tree-tops and stood long sieges in cave-mouths and on mud-
walls. For her I put the twelve signs in the sky. It was she I
worshipped when I bowed before the ten stones of jade and adored
them as the moons of gestation.
Always has woman crouched close to earth like a partridge hen
mothering her young; always has my wantonness of roving led me out
on the shining ways; and always have my star-paths returned me to
her, the figure everlasting, the woman, the one woman, for whose
arms I had such need that clasped in them I have forgotten the
stars.
For her I accomplished Odysseys, scaled mountains, crossed deserts;
for her I led the hunt and was forward in battle; and for her and to
her I sang my songs of the things I had done. All ecstasies of life
and rhapsodies of delight have been mine because of her. And here,
at the end, I can say that I have known no sweeter, deeper madness
of being than to drown in the fragrant glory and forgetfulness of
her hair.
One word more. I remember me Dorothy, just the other day, when I
still lectured on agronomy to farmer-boy students. She was eleven
years old. Her father was dean of the college. She was a woman-
child, and a woman, and she conceived that she loved me. And I
smiled to myself, for my heart was untouched and lay elsewhere.
Yet was the smile tender, for in the child's eyes I saw the woman
eternal, the woman of all times and appearances. In her eyes I saw
the eyes of my mate of the jungle and tree-top, of the cave and the
squatting-place. In her eyes I saw the eyes of Igar when I was Ushu
the archer, the eyes of Arunga when I was the rice-harvester, the
eyes of Selpa when I dreamed of bestriding the stallion, the eyes of
Nuhila who leaned to the thrust of my sword. Yes, there was that in
her eyes that made them the eyes of Lei-Lei whom I left with a laugh
on my lips, the eyes of the Lady Om for forty years my beggar-mate
on highway and byway, the eyes of Philippa for whom I was slain on
the grass in old France, the eyes of my mother when I was the lad
Jesse at the Mountain Meadows in the circle of our forty great
wagons.
She was a woman-child, but she was daughter of all women, as her
mother before her, and she was the mother of all women to come after
her. She was Sar, the corn-goddess. She was Isthar who conquered
death. She was Sheba and Cleopatra; she was Esther and Herodias.
She was Mary the Madonna, and Mary the Magdalene, and Mary the
sister of Martha, also she was Martha. And she was Brunnhilde and
Guinevere, Iseult and Juliet, Heloise and Nicolette. Yes, and she
was Eve, she was Lilith, she was Astarte. She was eleven years old,
and she was all women that had been, all women to be.
I sit in my cell now, while the flies hum in the drowsy summer
afternoon, and I know that my time is short. Soon they will apparel
me in the shirt without a collar. . . . But hush, my heart. The
spirit is immortal. After the dark I shall live again, and there
will be women. The future holds the little women for me in the
lives I am yet to live. And though the stars drift, and the heavens
lie, ever remains woman, resplendent, eternal, the one woman, as I,
under all my masquerades and misadventures, am the one man, her
mate. _
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