THE FIRE COUNTRY.
It was light now and the sun shone fairly on Ab's place of refuge. As his
senses brought to him full appreciation he wondered at the scene about
him. He was in a glade so depressed as to be a valley. About it, to the
east and north and west, in a wavering, tossing wall, rose the uplifting
line of fire through which he had leaped, though there were spaces where
the height was insignificant. On the south, and extending till it circled
a trifle to east, rose a wall of rock, evidently the end of a
forest-covered promontory, for trees grew thickly to its very edge and
their green branches overhung its sheer descent. Coming from some crevice
of the rocks on the east, and tumbling downward through the valley, was a
riotous brook, which disappeared through some opening at the west. Within
this area, thus hemmed in by fire and rock, appeared no living thing save
the birds which sang upon the bushes beside the small stream's banks and
the butterflies which hung above the flowers and all the insect world
which joined in the soft, humming chorus of the morning. It was something
that Ab looked upon with delighted wonder, but without understanding. What
he saw was not a marvel. It was but the result of one of many upheavals at
a time when the earth's cooled shell was somewhat thinner than now and
when earthquakes, though there were no cities to overthrow, at least made
havoc sometimes by changing the face of nature. There had come a great
semi-circular crack in the earth, near and extending to the line of the
sheer rock range. The natural gas, the product of the vegetation of
thousands of centuries before, had found a chance to escape and had poured
forth into the outer world. Something, perhaps a lightning stroke and a
flaming tree, perhaps some cave man making fire and consumed on the
instant when he succeeded, had ignited the sheet of rising gas, and the
result was the wall of flame. It was all natural and commonplace, for the
time. There were other upleaping flame sheets in the surrounding region
forever burning--as there are in northern Asia to-day--but Ab knew of
these fires only from Old Mok's tales. He stood wonderstruck at what he
saw about him.
But this man in the valley was young and very strong, with tissues to be
renewed, and the physical man within him clamored and demanded. He must
eat. He ran forward and around, anxiously observant, and soon learned that
at the western end of the valley, where the little creek tumbled through a
rocky cut into a lower level, there was easy exit from the
fire-encompassed and protected area. He clambered along the creek's rough,
descending side. He emerged upon an easier slope and then found it
possible to climb the hillside to the plane of the great wood. There must,
he thought, be food of some sort, even for a man with only Oak's knife in
his possession! There was the forest and there were nuts. He was in the
forest soon, among the gray-trunked, black-mottled beeches and the rough
brown oaks. He found something of what he sought, the nuts lying under
shed leaves, though the supply was scant. But nuts, to the cave man, made
moderately good food, supplying a part of the sustenance he required, and
Ab ate of what he could find and arose from the devouring search and
looked about him.
He was weaponless, save for the knife, and a flint knife was but a thing
for closest struggle. He longed now for his ax and spear and the strong
bow which could hurt so at a distance. But there was one sort of weapon to
be had. There was the club. He wandered about among the tops of fallen
trees and wrenched at their dried limbs, and finally tore one away and
broke off, later, with a prying leverage, what made a rough but available
club for a cave man's purposes. It was much better than nothing. Then
began a steady trot toward what should be fair life again. There were
vague paths through the forest made by wild beasts. As he moved the man
thought deeply.
He thought of the fire-wall, and could not with all his reasoning
determine upon the cause of its existence, and so abandoned the subject as
a thing, the nub of which was unreachable. That was the freshest object in
his mind and the first to be mentally disposed of. But there were other
subjects which came in swift succession. As he went along with a dog's
gait he was not in much terror, practically weaponless as he was. His eye
was good and he was going through the forest in the daylight. He was
strong enough, club in hand, to meet the minor beasts. As for the others,
if any of them appeared, there were the trees, and he could climb. So, as
he trotted he could afford to think.
And he thought much that day, this perplexed man, our grandfather with so
many "greats" before the word. He had nothing to divert him even in the
selection of the course toward his cave. He noted not where the sun stood,
nor in what direction the tiny head-waters of the rivulets took their
course, nor how the moss grew on the trees. He traveled in the wood by
instinct, by some almost unexplainable gift which comes to the thing of
the woods. The wolf has it; the Indian has it; sometimes the white man of
to-day has it.
As he went Ab engaged in deeper and more sustained thought than ever
before in all his life. He was alone; new and strange scenes had enlarged
his knowledge and swift happenings had made keener his perceptions. For
days his entire being had been powerfully affected by his meeting with
Lightfoot at the Feast of the Mammoth and the events which had followed
that meeting in such swift succession. The tragedy of Oak's death had
quickened his sensibilities. Besides, what had ensued latest had been what
was required to make him in a condition for the divination of things. The
wise agree that much stimulant or much deprivation enables the brain
convolutions to do their work well, though deprivation gets the cleaner
end. The asceticism of Marcus Aurelius was productive of greater results
than the deep drinking of any gallant young Roman man of letters of whom
he was a patron. The literature of fasting thinkers is something fine. Ab,
after exerting his strength to the utmost for days, had not eaten of
flesh, and the strong influences to which he was subjected were exerted
upon a man still, practically, fasting. For a time, the rude and
earth-born child of the cave was lifted into a region of comparative
sentiment and imagination. It was an experience which affected materially
all his later life.
Ever to the trotting man came the feelings which must follow fierce love
and deadly action and vague remorse and fear of something indefinable. He
saw the face and form of Lightfoot; he saw again the struggle,
death-ending, with the friend of youth and of mutual growing into manhood.
He remembered dimly the half insane flight, the leaps across the dreaded
morass and, more distinctly, the chase by the wolves. The aspect of the
Fire Country and of all that followed his awakening was, of course, yet
fresh in his mind. He was burdened.
Ever uprising and oppressing above all else was the memory of the man he
had killed and buried, covering the face first, so that it might not look
at him. Was Oak really dead? he asked himself again! Had not he, Ab, as
soon as he slept again, seen, alive and well, the close friend of his? He
clung to the vision. He reasoned as deeply as it was in him to reason.
As he struggled in his mind to obtain light there came to him the fancy of
other things dimly related to the death mystery which had perplexed him
and all his kind. There must be some one who made the river rise and fall
or the nut-bearing forest be either fruitful or the hard reverse. Who and
what could it be? What should he do, what should all his friends do in the
matter of relation to this unknown thing?
With this day and hour did not come really the beginning of Ab's thought
upon the subject of what was, to him and those he knew, the supernatural.
He had thought in the past--he could not help it--of the shadow and the
echo. He remembered how he and Oak had talked about the echo, and how they
had tried to get rid of the thing which had more than once called back to
them insolently across the valley. Every word they shouted this hidden
creature would mockingly repeat and there was no recourse for them. They
had once fully armed themselves and, in a burst of desperate bravery, had
resolved to find who and what the owner of this voice was and have, at
least, a fight. They had crossed the valley and ranged about the woodland
whence the voice seemed to have come, but they never found what they
sought!
The shadow which pursued them on sunny afternoons had puzzled them in
another way. Very persistent had been the flat, black, earth-clinging and
distorted thing which followed them so everywhere. What was this black,
following thing, anyhow, this thing which swung its unsubstantial body
around as one moved but which ever kept its own feet at the feet of the
pursued, wherever there was no shade, and which lay there beside one so
persistently?
But the echoes and the shadows were nothing as compared with the things
which came to one at night. What were those creatures which came when a
man was sleeping? Why did they escape with the dawn and appear again only
when he was asleep and helpless, at least until he awoke fairly and seized
his ax?
The sun rose high and dropped slowly down toward the west, where the far
ocean was, and the shadows somewhat lengthened, but it was still light
along the forest pathways and the untiring man still hurried on. He was
now close to his country and becoming careless and at ease. But his
imagination was still busy; he could not free himself of memory. There
came to him still the vision of the friend he had buried, hiding his face
first of all. The frenzy of his wish for knowing rushed again upon him.
Where was Oak now? he demanded of himself and of all nature. "Where is
Oak?" he yelled to the familiar trees beside his path. But the trees, even
to the cave man, so close to them in the economy of wild life, so like
them in his naturalness, could give no answer.
So the cave man struggled in his dim, uncertain way with the eternal
question: "If a man die shall he live again?" So the human mind still
struggles, after thousands of centuries have contributed to its
development. A wall more impassable than the wall of flame Ab had so
lately looked upon still rises between us and those who no longer live. We
reach out for some knowledge of those who have died, and go almost into
madness because we can grasp nothing. Silence unbroken, darkness
impenetrable ever guard the mystery of death. In the long ages since the
cave man ran that day, love and hope have in faith erected, beyond the
grim barriers of blackness and despair, fair pavilions of promise and
consolation, but to the stern examiners of physical fact and reality there
has come no news from beyond the walls of silence since. We clamor
tearfully for some word from those who are dead, but no answer comes. So
Ab groped and strove alone in the forest, in his youth and ignorance, and
in the youth and ignorance of our race.
Upon the pathway along the river's bank Ab emerged at last. All was
familiar to him now. There, by the clump of trees in the flat below, was
the place where he and Oak had dug the pit when they were but mere boys
and had learned their first important lessons in sterner woodcraft. Soon
came in sight, as he ran, the entrance to the cave of his own family. He
was home again. But he was not the one who had left that rude habitation
three days before. He had gone away a youth. He had come back one who had
suffered and thought. He came back a man.