CHAPTER XXI.

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 æons 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 fire-burnt, 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 was 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 there 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 Brünnhilde and Guinevere, Iseult and

Juliet, Héloïse 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.