As the centuries piled up, the human species had inevitably diverged
once more into many races in the various geographical areas. And each
race consisted of a swarm of tribes, each ignorant of all but its
immediate neighbours. After many millennia this vast diversification of
stocks and cultures made it possible for fresh biological transfusions
and revivifications to occur. At last, after many racial copulations, a
people arose in whom the ancient dignity of humanity was somewhat
restored. Once more there was a real distinction between the progressive
and the backward regions, between ‘primitive’ and relatively enlightened
cultures.
This rebirth occurred in the Southern Hemisphere. Complex climatic
changes had rendered the southern part of South America a fit nursery
for civilization. Further, an immense warping of the earth’s crust to
the east and south of Patagonia had turned what was once a relatively
shallow region of the ocean into a vast new land connecting America with
Antarctica by way of the former Falkland Islands and South Georgia, and
stretching thence east and north-east into the heart of the Atlantic.
It happened also that in South America the racial conditions were more
favourable than elsewhere. After the fall of the First World State the
European element in this region had dwindled, and the ancient ‘Indian’
and Peruvian stock had come into dominance. Many thousands of years
earlier, this race had achieved a primitive civilization of its own.
After its ruin at the hands of the Spaniards, it had seemed a broken and
negligible thing; yet it had ever kept itself curiously aloof in spirit
from its conquerors. Though the two stocks had mingled inextricably,
there remained ever in the remoter parts of this continent a way of life
which was foreign to the dominant Americanism. Superficially
Americanized, it remained fundamentally ‘Indian’ and unintelligible to
the rest of the world. Throughout the former civilization this spirit
had lain dormant like a seed in winter; but with the return of barbarism
it had sprouted, and quietly spread in all directions. From the
interaction of this ancient primitive culture and the many other racial
elements left over in the continent from the old cosmopolitan
civilization, civil life was to begin once more. Thus in a manner the
Incas were at last to triumph over their conquerors.
Various causes, then, combined in South America, and especially in the
new and virgin plains of Patagonia, to bring the First Dark Age to an
end. The great theme of mind began to repeat itself. But in a minor key.
For a grave disability hampered the Patagonians. They began to grow old
before their adolescence was completed. In the days of Einstein, an
individual’s youth lasted some twenty-five years, and under the World
State it had been artificially doubled. After the downfall of
civilization the increasing natural brevity of the individual life was
no longer concealed by artifice, and at the end of the First Dark Age a
boy of fifteen was already settling into middle-age. Patagonian
civilization at its height afforded considerable ease and security of
life, and enabled man to live to seventy or even eighty; but the period
of sensitive and supple youth remained at the very best little more than
a decade and a half. Thus the truly young were never able to contribute
to culture before they were already at heart middle-aged. At fifteen
their bones were definitely becoming brittle, their hair grizzled, their
faces lined. Their joints and muscles were stiffening, their brains were
no longer quick to learn new adjustments, their fervour was evaporating.
It may seem strange that under these circumstances any kind of
civilization could be achieved by the race, that any generation should
ever have been able to do more than learn the tricks of its elders. Yet
in fact, though progress was never swift, it was steady. For though
these beings lacked much of the vigour of youth, they were compensated
somewhat by escaping much of youth’s fevers and distractions. The First
Men, in fact, were now a race whose wild oats had been sown; and though
their youthful escapades had somewhat crippled them, they had now the
advantage of sobriety and singleness of purpose. Though doomed by
lassitude, and a certain fear of extravagance, to fall short of the
highest achievements of their predecessors, they avoided much of the
wasteful incoherence and mental conflict which had tortured the earlier
civilization at its height, though not in its decline. Moreover, because
their animal nature was somewhat subdued, the Patagonians were more
capable of dispassionate cognition, and more inclined toward
intellectualism. They were a people in whom rational behaviour was less
often subverted by passion, though more liable to fail through mere
indolence or faintheartedness. Though they found detachment relatively
easy, theirs was the detachment of mere lassitude, not the leap from the
prison of life’s cravings into a more spacious world.
One source of the special character of the Patagonian mind was that in
it the sexual impulses was relatively weak. Many obscure causes had
helped to temper that lavish sexuality in respect of which the first
human species differed from all other animals, even the continuously
sexual apes. These causes were diverse, but they combined to produce in
the last phase of the life of the species a general curtailment of
excess energy. In the Dark Ages the severity of the struggle for
existence had thrust the sexual interest back almost into the
subordinate place which it occupies in the animal mind. Coitus became a
luxury only occasionally desired, while self-preservation had become
once more an urgent and ever-present necessity. When at last life began
to be easier, sexuality remained in partial eclipse, for the forces of
racial ‘senescence’ were at work. Thus the Patagonian culture differed
in mood from all the earlier cultures of the First Men. Hitherto it had
been the clash of sexuality and social taboo that had generated half the
fervour and half the delusions of the race. The excess energy of a
victorious species, directed by circumstance into the great river of
sex, and damned by social convention, had been canalized for a thousand
labours. And though often it would break loose and lay all waste before
it, in the main it had been turned to good account. At all times indeed,
it had been prone to escape in all directions and carve out channels for
itself, as a lopped tree stump sends forth not one but a score of
shoots. Hence the richness, diversity, incoherence, violent and
uncomprehended cravings and enthusiasms, of the earlier peoples. In the
Patagonians there was no such luxuriance. That they were not highly
sexual was not in itself a weakness. What mattered was that the springs
of energy which formerly happened to flood into the channel of sex were
themselves impoverished.
Conceive, then, a small and curiously sober people established east of
the ancient Bahia Blanca, and advancing century by century over the
plains and up the valleys. In time it reached and encircled the heights
which were once the island of South Georgia, while to the north and west
it spread into the Brazilian highlands and over the Andes. Definitely of
higher type than any of their neighbours, definitely more vigorous and
acute, the Patagonians were without serious rivals. And since by
temperament they were peaceable and conciliatory, their cultural
progress was little delayed, either by military imperialism or internal
strife. Like their predecessors in the northern hemisphere, they passed
through phases of disruption and union, retrogression and regeneration;
but their career was on the whole more steadily progressive, and less
dramatic, than anything that had occurred before. Earlier peoples had
leapt from barbarism to civil life and collapsed again within a thousand
years. The slow march of the Patagonians took ten times as long to pass
from a tribal to a civic organization.
Eventually they comprised a vast and highly organized community of
autonomous provinces, whose political and cultural centre lay upon the
new coast north-east of the ancient Falkland Islands, while its
barbarian outskirts included much of Brazil and Peru. The absence of
serious strife between the various parts of this ‘empire’ was due partly
to an innately pacific disposition, partly to a genius for organization.
These influences were strengthened by a curiously potent tradition of
cosmopolitanism, or human unity, which had been born in the agony of
disunion before the days of the World State, and was so burnt into men’s
hearts that it survived as an element of myth even through the Dark Age.
So powerful was this tradition, that even when the sailing ships of
Patagonia had founded colonies in remote Africa and Australia, these new
communities remained at heart one with the mother country. Even when the
almost Nordic culture of the new and temperate Antarctic coasts had
outshone the ancient centre, the political harmony of the race was never
in danger.