Джеймс Миченер - The Source

Up to now the attitude of Ur’s wife toward these matters had been clear-cut: the storm had a living spirit, as did water and wind and sky and each tree and every animal. Ur’s wife was constantly aware of these spirits and she treated them with awe. Had she ever seen the spirits openly? She thought so: once when lightning struck close and she heard an extraordinary voice speaking in a hiss of sulphur. Prayer had not yet been invented, but she spoke confidently to that voice and it did not harm her. The great rock had a spirit, broad and generous, as did the fish in rivers, the flint that threw sparks, and the swamp and the trees therein. What her relation to these myriad spirits was she did not rightly know, but as a rough rule she said, “They must not be offended.” Therefore she did not boast about having survived the storm, and told no one of her conversation with the spirit of lightning. She did not throw stones at animals or waste water, and when Ur’s father died she buried him with her best carved bowls, Ur’s good spear and a small string of stone beads.

But with the advent of cultivated wheat, the balance of nature was disturbed and she knew it. Before the first season ended it was obvious that success in planting depended upon sufficient rain and the faithful performance of the sun—not so much heat as to wither the young plants but enough to ripen the maturing heads—and she began to watch with apprehension any shift in the attitude of either the spirit of water or the spirit of sun. In the second and third seasons, when the area planted was considerable, she became actually terrified when rains were postponed, and she began speculating on what tangible thing she might do to encourage the spirit of rain to send the coveted water. Finally she cried to the open sky, “May the rain come!” and she begged for mercy; but even in doing so she assumed the I-It relationship which had always been maintained in the cave, for she conceived of the rain as an impersonal spirit, powerful but inanimate.

When she spoke of these growing fears to Ur, he laughed at her apprehension and said, “If a man tracks the wild boar right, he finds him. If he fights him right, he wins.”

“Is it the same with grain?” she asked.

“Plant it right. Guard it from your new house, and it will bring food,” he promised her. But even as he spoke he remembered the day at the well when his image had been moved about and altered by some unknown force, and in this moment of recollection his new life began. His arrogance faded, and when his wife left him he wondered if killing a wild boar was as simple a thing as he had said. Once or twice in the past he had suspected that his hunters would not of themselves be able to subdue the formidable beast; there must be some mysterious force of nature assisting them, as if it too were afraid and allied itself with man to conquer the ugly beast. But the men from the cave called, “We’re ready,” and he left his fields to lead them toward the dark swamp.

So his wife turned with her questions to her son, and before she had finished formulating the problem she found that he had anticipated her. Sitting on a rock beside the grain field, the boy watched the hunters depart, then shared with his mother certain speculations that had troubled him: “In the wadi we have many birds. The black-headed birds that sing in the evening, and those beautiful things with long bills and blue wings that nest in river banks to catch fish. And the crested larks walking about the field out there, searching for grains. And that swift bird, faster than all the rest …” He hesitated. “The one that eats bees.” He pointed to where a bird somewhat larger than his hand, with long sharp beak, blue body and a profusion of bright colors on its wings and head, darted in and out among the trees. It was a magnificent bird, swooping in lovely arches through the sky, but what concerned Ur’s son was not its beauty. “See! He catches a bee in mid-flight. He takes it to a dead branch. And there he eats it. But watch! He spits out the wings. And this he does all day.”

Now the Family of Ur knew, better than most, that bees were an asset to the wadi, and one of the boy’s first memories was of his father coming home, near-blinded with stings, swearing and slapping at his beard, with a hoard of honey which the children of the cave had fought for. The flowers of the area were so diverse in flavor that honey from four different combs might taste like four quite different things. For their sting, bees were respected; but for their song and their honey, they were loved. And to think that a bird as alluring as the bee eater existed solely to feed upon bees raised in the boy’s mind a whole new range of questions: How could two things, each so excellent, be in such mortal conflict? How could two desirable aspects of nature be so incompatible?

He asked his mother, “If a bee does so much good in the wadi and is tormented by an enemy as fatal as the bird …” He followed the flight of the dazzling predator and watched as it swooped down upon a bee returning from the flowers and then spit out the wings. It was an ugly incident and he said, “Is it possible that we also have enemies somewhere in the sky, waiting to pounce on us?” Again he paused, and then put into exact words the problem that had begun to torment his mother: “Suppose the rain has a spirit of its own? Or the sun? What then with our wheat?”

A second aspect of nature led the boy to an even more difficult question. The cypress, that tall and stately tree which marched along the edges of open fields serving as a dark pointer to the sky, was a splendid tree in whose narrow body birds loved to nest, and it produced each season a crop of small cones about the size of a thumb-tip, remarkable for the fact that each contained nine faces cleverly fitted together to hide the seeds inside. There were never eight faces and never ten, but always nine, ingeniously matched in a manner that could not have happened by accident. Some spirit within the cypress had consciously willed its cone to appear as it did, and if this were true of the tree, why was it not also true of the field in which wheat grew? And of the wheat itself?

The boy sat with his mother in the sunlight pondering these matters when a bee eater flew past, creating brilliance in the sky, then disappearing among the cypress trees which stood like warning sentinels. A tantalizing thought played across the boy’s mind, a thought not easy to formulate but one that he could not throw aside. A trio of crested larks marched past, pecking for fallen grains, and after they disappeared he stared at the cypresses and asked, “Suppose the spirit that forms the beautiful cone is not within the cypress? Suppose the rain comes or stays away not because of what the rain wants to do …” His thoughts were leading him into areas too vague and shadowy for him to explore, and for the moment he dropped the matter, but the fear he had aroused would not go away.

It would not be correct to say that with the discovery of cultivated wheat fear was also discovered, for ordinary fear the Family of Ur had long known. When Ur came upon a cornered boar or a lion from the north he knew fear. And when a woman in the cave was about to give birth Ur’s wife knew fear, for she had seen women die at such moments. And one mournful night when Ur had lost a hunter in the swamps, killed by a boar, his daughter had heard the messenger’s cry from afar, “He is dead!” and she had thought it was Ur himself. Even she knew fear. But the fear which the family was now discovering was of another kind: it sprang from the slow-maturing apprehension regarding the relationship of man to his world, the gnawing suspicion that perhaps things were not so simple as they seemed on this average autumn day when ripening grain hid in the stalks and a rumor of deer echoed in the forest. Again and again the glorious bee eater flashed through the wadi, driving the mother and son to wonder whether it had been dispatched by some outside power as an exquisite messenger to warn men that the same force which endangered the bees was ready to swoop down on fields and houses.