Doris Lessing - Mara and Dann

The light was going. Felissa and Felix had left a message that they would be served supper in their rooms, so that they could be alone to think about their decision.

"They don't like our manners," said Mara.

"When I am ruler," said Dann, and she interrupted with, "Dann, please stop it, even in joke. I'm afraid, don't you see." "What of, Mara?" He was defiant. "I'm afraid of — the other one."

He stared, then deflated, and sat moodily on his floor cushion and was silent for a while. "You are right," he said. "But I'm going to see Felix and ask to hear more of these plans of theirs. Because there are things they haven't said. For one thing, they must be planning concubines. A baby takes nine months, and then at best a year before another. Not that I'd use you so badly, Mara."

"I had thought of concubines."

"And how exactly do they plan to live in the interval before there is another Mara and another Dann? They are obviously very poor." "Another Shahana and another Shahmand."

"Do you know what? I keep thinking of Kira. I have dreams of her."

And she said softly, "And I am dreaming of Shabis."

"Are you, Mara? Well, we could start our own royal family, have you thought of that?"

"Please stop it, Dann."

He lay down on the big bed in her room, and then jumped up and went to his own bed in the next room. "I hate them," he said. "Curse them both. They've spoiled you and me."

Next morning Felissa accompanied them to the start of the Museum Tour. That was what it had been called once, and she could remember the lines of people stretching almost out of sight, waiting to get in to see the marvels of the past.

In the entrance was a tall metal shape, like a shield, with coils of wire behind it, and under it a button marked Press, in a dozen languages. They pressed, but the machine was dead. Next to this shield, or plaque, was another, and on it in the same languages, which included Mahondi and Charad, the information on the metal sheet, writing which would have come up in lights, had the thing still worked. This writing, on the plaque, in elegant black and yellowish grey, once white, was faded, and in some places illegible. Beside the plaque was a third attempt: a large piece of black slate, and on it, written in coloured earth, the same information as on the other two, but in fewer languages, headed by Mahondi and Charad.

"Start here for our tour through the ancient civilisations of The Warm Interregnum. Some of the artefacts you will see were brought from the museums of Yerrup while the first wave of the Ice was advancing. All the countries of Yerrup had innumerable museums of old artefacts. A replica of one of their museums will be found at Building 24. The first wave of the Ice crushed and swallowed some cities, but the ones on the edge of the Middle Sea were pushed over into it. There was a period when parts of the Middle Sea were half filled with the remains of the shoreline cities. The Middle Sea was already dry by then. It was this material that was brought here to the shores of North Ifrik to make the cities that copied those that had gone under the Ice. They, in their turn, went the way of all cities, to ruin. And that material was used to make other towns and cities. So some of the cities of Tundra are built of material used by those ancient peoples to make theirs."

They made their way to Building 24. The first room showed people dressed in skins, hunting, or sitting around fires. "These were the people that preceded the ancient Yerrupeans from whom we descend. Observe the shape of their heads. They lived for 140 thousand years. They retreated before the ice waves of the Old Ice Age, and returned to occupy sheltered valleys in the warmer interludes."

"They look rather like the Rock People," Dann said. He was disturbed. Mara felt the same — sad. It was painful, looking at a long extinct people. "Why should we care about them?" Dann protested, but they did, and moved on, holding hands, pleased the other was there.

The next room took them to the people who succeeded the Neanders. Again, people in skins, living in rough huts or thatched houses, hunting with knives and spears, and also with bows and arrows.

"I shall make one of those," said Dann. "Why don't we have them?"

Mara said she wouldn't have minded one of those spears at certain points during their travels.

"Well, Mara, are we being illuminated? I think not. We'd fit in very well here. Perhaps we could even teach them a thing or two about surviving."

And now at the entrance to a third room was a sign saying NO ENTRANCE, and the roof had fallen in. Peering past piles of plaster and tiles, they saw the walls were covered with scenes of wild looking people in boats that were longer and finer than any they had seen.

"So, we'll never know about the Peoples of the Sea," said Dann. For that was the description of this place.

And the next hall, a large one, The Age of Chivalry, was falling in. People encased in metal shells, with lances and spears of all kinds, with stuffed horses, had slid off them and the horses were bursting open and showing their shredded rag entrails.

It was now midday. Dann wanted to see the building described as Space Adventures, but Mara said she needed the continuity, she was already confused, and he said he didn't care about continuity. He was sounding angry as well as sad, and Mara too was angry, because of the futility of it all, a senselessness. Where these old people had lived the ice lay as thick as twice the height of the mountain that Daulis had said was where they would find the White Bird Inn. From their bedroom windows they could see it stretching up into the cold sky, and on its summit shone a cap of whiteness, snow and ice.

"I'm going to start crying, Mara, let's get out of here." And they began wandering about, lost, among this wilderness of buildings, and seeing a tall building, the tallest, went inside and stood limp with astonishment. They were surrounded by machines of a kind and complexity they could never have imagined, though it could be seen they were from the same time as the sun trap. These were not rooms, but halls, of machines once used for travelling between the stars — but stars was not a word they could any longer use as easily as they did, because all over the walls and ceilings were great maps of the sky, and there they saw the patterns of stars they had known all their lives shown as mere local manifestations, inside greater patterns. They saw that what they lived on, this place called Earth, was one of a little sprinkle of planets travelling around a central bright star, their sun; but this was a very minor star, that great pumping engine of heat that so directly ruled their lives, a little star among so many that the words thousands, or even millions, became irrelevant; and Ifrik, which they had learned to know with their feet, putting one foot in front of another, was merely a shape among several on this little ball. And the moon, whose face they knew as well as their own, was... "Enough," said Mara, "I can't take it in."

"I don't think I like knowing what an ignorant lot of barbarians we are," said Dann.

And they put their arms around each other, for comfort. They were looking at a kind of metal box that had all sorts of projections and wires and rods sticking out of it, that had gone to the planet farthest from the sun and had sent back information. But why, and what for, and above all, how? As they left this great building, a wall with writing on it informed them that before this Ice Age had swallowed all the northern parts of the Earth, machines had been sent into space as large as a big town, and in them people were able to live, it was believed indefinitely; and there were those that still believed that these machines existed, travelling about up there. And might even return one day.