Джеймс Миченер - The Source

But the finest part of any hunt came when they struck the spoor of a wild boar and tracked it to the vast wilderness south of the wadi, for then the cave men were required to plunge into the mysterious swampy area where sharp-thorned vines clutched at them and sucking mud tried to grasp their ankles. For several days the team of hunters would move cautiously through the swamps, marking their way as they went, until at last, in moments of blazing excitement, they would rout out the monstrous beast, the wild boar weighing as much as six hundred pounds, with flashing tusks and cruel visage, and they would harry it to death, minding always those scimitar-like weapons which could cut down a man or impale him and send him shrieking into the air. For men like Ur the final moments of a boar hunt were the ultimate experience, and he was proud that in the middle years of his life, from twenty to twenty-four, he had often served as captain of his hunters, directing them to move thus and so in the last stages of the fight.

But now, as the house by the well grew to completion, Ur became aware that when it was finished he would be expected to move from the cave and live in the separated house, subject to storms and loneliness and wind. It was not a commodious house his wife and son were building, nor was it completely rainproof. It was susceptible to fire, and winds easily penetrated the walls; but it had enormous advantages over a cave: it was better ventilated and was therefore healthful; it could be moved or added to as occasion necessitated; and it could be placed so that its owner might watch his fields and stay close to his well. But the greatest advantage came in an area which the old man could not have foreseen: In the cave Ur’s ancestors had lived much like animals. They had been forced to live where the cave was and within the space it provided; they were its prisoners both in acting and thinking, and in their older years they were apt to be killed or starved to death because younger families required the cave. But with the building of the self-contained house Ur would become the master and the house would be his servant. He would be forced to engage in new ways of thinking, whether he wanted to or not.

When the house was finished Ur reluctantly assembled his family in the cave, where many were inclined to laugh at him for his fatuous venture but refrained from doing so because of his reputation as a hunter. He grabbed his four spears, his two animal skins, a bowl and a stone hammer and started for the narrow exit, but sensing that this was his farewell to a way of life, he stopped to look once more at the grimy walls that had protected him from birth, and on the opposite side of the cave he could see the dark tunnel reaching far back into darkness. Turning his face toward the light, he passed through the exit and moved rapidly down the path to the well. There he threw his spears against the wall and sat for a long time looking at the clean white trunks of the trees that formed the wall. To him they looked most alien and uninviting.

The family had not been in the house long when Ur’s son discovered that the springtime planting of wheat need not be left to the chance scatter of autumn grains. By holding back some of the harvest and keeping it dry in a pouch of deerskin, the grains could be planted purposefully in the spring and the wheat could be made to grow exactly where and when it was needed, and with this discovery the Family of Ur moved close to the beginnings of a self-sufficient society. They did not know it, but if a food supply could be insured, the speed of change would be unbelievable: within a few thousand years cities would be feasible and civilizations too. Men would be able to plan ahead and allocate specialized jobs to each other. They would find it profitable to construct roads to speed the movement of food and to devise a money system for convenient payments. The whole intricate structure of an interlocking society became practical the moment Ur’s son mastered his wild grains.

It was Ur’s wife who first appreciated the change immanent in her son’s discovery. It was an autumn day, a glowing time of gold and falling leaves, and she stood on the rock watching her husband return from the swamps, helping to lug a great boar to the rock where it would be divided, and she heard the chanting of the men:“Ur led us to the swamps where the soft sand bites.

He took us to the darkness where birds hide.

Ur caught the gleaming eyes of the boar in darkness.

It was he who shouted, ‘Now! Now!’”

It was a pleasing chant, gratifying to the wife whose husband it memorialized, but as she watched the hunters approach the rock she saw them outlined for a moment against the ripened wheat and realized for the first time that in the future, men like Ur would not go venturing into the swamp like excited boys but would stay closer to home, guarding the wheat; and a sense of sadness possessed her, so that she wanted to leave the triumphant men and weep for their lost simplicity. She saw their whole way of life modified by the taming of a thin stalk of wild grass. She saw them leaving the oak forests where the deer roamed, and going no more to the dark swamp where the wild boars hid. She had loved her brave young mate in the days when he led the hunters, and she felt for him the pain which he had not yet discovered for himself.

And barely had she recognized this change than she became aware of an even more disturbing problem evoked by the grain, one too powerful for her to formulate in words. As her development of the wild wheat had proved, she was both courageous and perceptive and now she began to wonder about the unseen forces that influence men, and just as she had been quick to sense the impact of cultivation upon men like Ur, so she was the first to perceive, no matter how incompletely, its relation to forces greater even than the hunters.

Through ten thousand centuries the animal-like people living near this well had worked out a plodding but viable relationship with the forces that surrounded them. Throughout the alternating ages of ice and great heat they had learned to live with these forces. They did not understand them, nor their interrelationships; they did not even give them names, but they knew them intimately as the source of supreme power. The proper balance between life and death had been painfully ascertained and all were anxious that it not be disturbed. At night, when towering storms thundered over the Carmel mountains to the south, it was apparent that the spirit of the storm was angry with man and wished to destroy him. How else could one explain the blinding flash of lightning that tore a tree in half and set fire to forests? How else describe to a neighbor the unexpected cloudburst that struck the wadi, washing away all things before it? How otherwise could an immovable boulder, many times larger than a man, suddenly run with the flood and strike that man? Obviously the spirit of storm was angered by something men had done and was personally seeking revenge.

The same behavior could be noticed regarding water. Sometimes it loved men and served them with life; at other times it grew angry and stayed away until men nearly perished. Even the water in the well behaved this way, retreating in petulance deep to some unknown cave until men came close to dying, then surging back with joy and kisses for the gasping children. The air, the spirit of death, the burning wind from the south, the spirit that opened the body of a woman so that new men could be born, the tree that gave fruit or withheld it—everything of importance in nature had a will of its own that operated either in favor of man or against him.

No ritual had yet been established for placating these conflicting forces. In those years no precious children were sacrificed to the god of the storm in order to win his favor, nor was the hideous wild boar given human blood in order to assuage his enmity. There were no altars to the rain, nor temples to the god of day who regularly conquered night. Men had not yet discovered that the forces of the world could be propitiated by conscious acts of subservience; many times in the preceding two hundred thousand years the cave had been deserted when food supplies in the region diminished, but when the animals returned the apelike men came back too. They were attentive to the commands of nature, and they watched for omens, but they were not slaves either to the spirit of the storm or to its warning omens. It was known that the wild boar was malevolent, both in appearance and conduct, but it had not yet been discovered that this malevolence could be counteracted by some conscious act of man. In other words, the embryonic beginnings of religion had not yet been conceived. The closest approach, perhaps, to a ritualized behavior came at the moment of death, when it was acknowledged that the dead man would require some food and protection in the unknown days ahead. He was therefore buried in a specified position, his head on a pillow of rock, accompanied by a few pots of food, a spear and some ornament he had loved, perhaps a carved shell or a necklace of beads.