Doris Lessing - Mara and Dann

HarperCollins e-books

Map v

Author's Note vii

1

The scene that the child, then the girl, then the... 1

2

On the low hill overlooking the village was a tall... 55

3

It was almost dark in the room, because the door... 64

4

The two stood at the door and looked into the... 82

5

She walked away from the house, and never in her... 115

6

Now they began walking down a steep slope of chalky. 134

7

Now Mara spent her days in the fields with Meryx... 153

8

Mara set off for the centre of Chelops watched by... 176

9

In the running chair, Mara held her sack, Dann his,... 204

10

This wide river did not have the force of its. 229

11

Most evenings Shabis was not there; on reconnaissance, he said,. 254

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Mara had not seen much more than what immediately... 262

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At first they marched through grasslands broken by clumps of. 271

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Then, unexpectedly, since no one had believed the rumours, a… 277

15

Mara and Dann, each with a sack over a shoulder,. 284

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It was past midnight when the girl gasped, "Here it... 290

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In the street a couple of men strode fast towards. 300

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Mara was falling asleep, and she was thinking, not of. 325

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On this last night before the river, Daulis said they. 356

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It was only just light. They were walking east, returning... 386

About the Author

One day last autumn my son Peter Lessing came in to say that he had just been listening, on the radio, to a tale about an orphaned brother and sister who had all kinds of adventures, suffered a hundred vicissitudes, and ended up living happily ever after. This was the oldest story in Europe. "Why don't you write something like that?" he suggested. "Oddly enough," I replied, "that is exactly what I am writing and I have nearly finished it."

This kind of thing happens in families, but perhaps not so often in laboratories.

Mara and Dann is a reworking of a very old tale, and it is found not only in Europe but in most cultures in the world.

It is set in the future, in Africa, called Ifrik because of how often we may hear how the short a becomes a short i.

An Ice Age covers all the northern hemisphere.

I cannot be the only person who, hearing that the most common condition for the northern parts of the world is to be under — sometimes — miles of ice, shivers, not because of imagined cold winds, since every one of us is equipped with that potent talisman for survival, It can't happen to me, making it impossible for us to weaken ourselves by brooding on possible calamities, but from the thought that one day, thousands of years in the future, our descendants might be saying, "In the 12,000-year interval between one thrust of the Ice Age and the next, there flourished a whole story of human development, from savagery and barbarism to high culture" — and all our civilisations and languages, and cities and skills and inventions, our farms and gardens and forests, and the birds and the beasts we try so hard to protect against our depredations, will amount to a sentence or a paragraph in a long history. But perhaps it will be a 15,000-year interregnum, or less or more, for our experts say that the next Ice Age, already overdue, may begin in a year's time or in a thousand years.

Mara and Dann is an attempt to imagine what some of the consequences might be when the ice returns and life must retreat to the middle and southern latitudes. Our past experiences help to picture the future. During the hardest of previous periods of ice, the Mediterranean was dry. During warmer intervals, when the ice withdrew for a while, the Neanderthals returned from exile in the south to take up life again in their still chilly valleys. If they did not see their sojourns south as exile, why did they always return?

Perhaps it is the Neanderthals who will turn out to have been our truest ancestors, having bequeathed to us our amazing diversity, our ability to live in any clime or condition and, above all, our endurance. I like to imagine them, with their great experience of ice, posting a watch for the advancing white mountains.

April 1998

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The scene that the child, then the girl, then the young woman tried so hard to remember was clear enough in its beginnings. She had been hustled — sometimes carried, sometimes pulled along by the hand — through a dark night, nothing to be seen but stars, and then she was pushed into a room and told, Keep quiet, and the people who had brought her disappeared. She had not taken notice of their faces, what they were, she was too frightened, but they were her people, the People, she knew that. The room was nothing she had known. It was a square, built of large blocks of rock. She was inside one of the rock houses. She had seen them all her life. The rock houses were where they lived, the Rock People, not her people, who despised them. She had often seen the Rock People walking along the roads, getting quickly out of the way when they saw the People; but a dislike of them that she had been taught made it hard to look much at them. She was afraid of them, and thought them ugly.

She was alone in the big, bare rock room. It was water she was looking for — surely there must be water somewhere? But the room was empty. In the middle of it was a square made of the rock blocks, which she supposed must be a table; but there was nothing on it except a candle stuck in its grease, and burning low... it would soon go out. By now she was thinking, But where is he, where is my little brother? He, too, had been rushed through the dark. She had called out to him, right at the beginning, when they were snatched away from home — rescued, she now knew — and a hand had come down over her mouth, "Quiet." And she had heard him cry out to her, and the sudden silence told her a hand had stopped his cry in the same way.

She was in a fever, hot and dry over her whole body, but it was hard to distinguish the discomfort of this from her anxiety over her brother.

She went to the place in the wall where she had been thrust in, and tried to push a rock that was a door to one side. It moved in a groove, and was only another slab of rock; but just as she was giving up, because it was too heavy for her, it slid aside, and her brother rushed at her with a great howl that made her suddenly cold with terror and her hair prickle. He flung himself at her, and her arms went around him while she was looking at the doorway, where a man was mouthing at her and pointing to the child, Quiet, quiet. In her turn she put her hand over his open, howling mouth and felt his teeth in her palm. She did not cry out or pull away, but staggered back against a wall to support his weight; and she put her arms tight around him, whispering, "Hush, shhh, you must be quiet." And then, using a threat that frightened her too, "Quiet, or that bad man will come." And he at once went quiet, and trembled as he clutched her. The man who had brought in the little boy had not gone away. He was whispering with someone out in the darkness. And then this someone came in, and she almost screamed, for she thought this was the bad man she had threatened her brother with; but then she saw that no, this man was not the same but only looked like him. She had in fact begun to scream, but slammed her own free hand across her mouth, the hand that was not pressing her brother's head into her chest.