In a few thousand years the new species filled the region from
Afghanistan to the China Sea, overran India, and penetrated far into the
new Australasian continent. Its advance was less military than cultural.
The remaining tribes of the First Men, with whom the new species could
not normally interbreed, were unable to live up to the higher culture
that flooded round them and over them. They faded out.
For some further thousands of years the Second Men remained as noble
savages, then passed rapidly through the pastoral into the agricultural
stage. In this era they sent an expedition across the new and gigantic
Hindu Kush to explore Africa. Here it was that they came upon the
subhuman descendants of the ship’s crew that had sailed from Siberia
millions of years earlier. These animals had spread south through
America and across the new Atlantic Isthmus into Africa.
Dwarfed almost to the knees of the superior species, bent so that as
often as not they used their arms as aids to locomotion, flat-headed and
curiously long-snouted, these creatures were by now more baboon-like
than human. Yet in the wild state they maintained a very complicated
organization into castes, based on the sense of smell. Their powers of
scent, indeed, had developed at the expense of their intelligence.
Certain odours, which had become sacred through their very
repulsiveness, were given off only by individuals having certain
diseases. Such individuals were treated with respect by their fellows;
and though, in fact, they were debilitated by their disease, they were
so feared that no healthy individual dared resist them. The
characteristic odours were themselves graded in nobility, so that those
individuals who bore only the less repulsive perfume, owed respect to
those in whom a widespread rotting of the body occasioned the most
nauseating stench. These plagues had the special effect of stimulating
reproductive activity; and this fact was one cause both of the respect
felt for them, and of the immense fertility of the species, such a
fertility that, in spite of plagues and obtuseness, it had flooded two
continents. For though the plagues were fatal, they were slow to
develop. Further, though individuals far advanced in disease were often
incapable of feeding themselves, they profited by the devotion of the
healthy, who were well-pleased if they also became infected.
But the most startling fact about these creatures was that many of them
had become enslaved to another species. When the Second Men had
penetrated further into Africa they came to a forest region where
companies of diminutive monkeys resisted their intrusion. It was soon
evident that any interference with the imbecile and passive subhumans in
this district was resented by the monkeys. And as the latter made use of
a primitive kind of bow and poisoned arrows, their opposition was
seriously inconvenient to the invaders. The use of weapons and other
tools, and a remarkable coordination in warfare, made it clear that in
intelligence this simian species had far outstripped all creatures save
man. Indeed, the Second Men were now face to face with the only
terrestrial species which ever evolved so far as to compete with man in
versatility and practical shrewdness.
As the invaders advanced, the monkeys were seen to round up whole flocks
of the submen and drive them out of reach. It was noticed also that
these domesticated submen were wholly free from the diseases that
infected their wild kinsfolk, who on this account greatly despised the
healthy drudges. Later it transpired that the submen were trained as
beasts of burden by the monkeys and that their flesh was a much relished
article of diet. An arboreal city of woven branches was discovered, and
was apparently in course of construction, for the submen were dragging
timber and hauling it aloft, goaded by the boneheaded spears of the
monkeys. It was evident also that the authority of the monkeys was
maintained less by force than by intimidation. They anointed themselves
with the juice of a rare aromatic plant, which struck terror into their
poor cattle, and reduced them to abject docility.
Now the invaders were only a handful of pioneers. They had come over the
mountains in search of metals, which had been brought to the earth’s
surface during the volcanic era. An amiable race, they felt no hostility
toward the monkeys, but rather amusement at their habits and ingenuity.
But the monkeys resented the mere presence of these mightier beings;
and, presently collecting in the tree-tops in thousands, they
annihilated the party with their poisoned arrows. One man alone escaped
into Asia. In a couple of years he returned, with a host. Yet this was
no punitive expedition, for the bland Second Men were strangely lacking
in resentment. Establishing themselves on the outskirts of the forest
region, they contrived to communicate and barter with the little people
of the trees, so that after a while they were allowed to enter the
territory unmolested, and begin their great metallurgical survey.
A close study of the relations of these very different intelligences
would be enlightening, but we have no time for it. Within their own
sphere the monkeys showed perhaps a quicker wit than the men; but only
within very narrow limits did their intelligence work at all. They were
deft at finding new means for the better satisfaction of their
appetites. But they wholly lacked self-criticism. Upon a normal outfit
of instinctive needs they had developed many acquired, traditional
cravings, most of which were fantastic and harmful. The Second Men, on
the other hand, though often momentarily outwitted by the monkeys, were
in the long run incomparably more able and more sane.
The difference between the two species is seen clearly in their reaction
to metals. The Second Men sought metal solely for the carrying on of an
already well-advanced civilization. But the monkeys, when for the first
time they saw the bright ingots, were fascinated. They had already begun
to hate the invaders for their native superiority and their material
wealth; and now this jealousy combined with primitive acquisitiveness to
make the slabs of copper and tin become in their eyes symbols of power.
In order to remain unmolested in their work, the invaders had paid a
toll of the wares of their own country, of baskets, pottery, and various
specially designed miniature tools. But at the sight of the crude metal,
the monkeys demanded a share of this noblest product of their own land.
This was readily granted, since it did away with the need of bringing
goods from Asia. But the monkeys had no real use for metal. They merely
hoarded it, and became increasingly avaricious. No one had respect among
them who did not laboriously carry a great ingot about with him wherever
he went. And after a while it came to be considered actually indecent to
be seen without a slab of metal. In conversation between the sexes this
symbol of refinement was always held so as to conceal the genitals.
The more metal the monkeys acquired the more they craved. Blood was
often shed in disputes over the possession of hoards. But this
internecine strife gave place at length to a concerted movement to
prevent the whole export of metal from their land. Some even suggested
that the ingots in their possession should be used for making more
effective weapons, with which to expel the invaders. This policy was
rejected, not merely because there were none who could work up the crude
metal, but because it was generally agreed that to put such a sacred
material to any kind of service would be base.
The will to be rid of the invader was augmented by a dispute about the
submen. These abject beings were treated very harshly by their masters.
Not only were they overworked, but also they were tortured in cold
blood, not precisely through lust in cruelty, but through a queer sense
of humour, or delight in the incongruous. For instance, it afforded the
monkeys a strangely innocent and extravagant pleasure to compel these
cattle to carry on their work in an erect posture, which was by now
quite unnatural to them, or to eat their own excrement or even their own
young. If ever these tortures roused some exceptional subman to rebel,
the monkeys flared into contemptuous rage at such a lack of humour, so
incapable were they of realizing the subjective processes of others. To
one another they could, indeed, be kindly and generous; but even among
themselves the imp of humour would sometimes run riot. In any matter in
which an individual was misunderstood by his fellows, he was sure to be
gleefully baited, and often harried to death. But in the main it was
only the slave-species that suffered.
The invaders were outraged by this cruel imbecility, and ventured to
protest. To the monkeys the protest was unintelligible. What were cattle
for, but to be used in the service of superior beings? Evidently, the
monkeys thought, the invaders were after all lacking in the finer
capacities of mind, since they failed to appreciate the beauty of the
fantastic.
This and other causes of friction finally led the monkeys to conceive a
means of freeing themselves for ever. The Second Men had proved to be
terribly liable to the diseases of their wretched subhuman kinsfolk.
Only by very rigorous quarantine had they stamped out the epidemic that
had revealed this fact. Now partly for revenge, but partly also through
malicious delight in the topsy-turvy, the monkeys determined to make use
of this human weakness. There was a certain nut, very palatable to both
men and monkeys, which grew in a remote part of the country. The monkeys
had already begun to barter this nut for extra metal; and the pioneering
Second Men were arranging to send caravans laden with nuts into their
own country. In this situation the monkeys found their opportunity. They
carefully infected large quantities of nuts with the plagues rampant
among those herds of submen which had not been domesticated. Very soon
caravans of infected nuts were scattered over Asia. The effect upon a
race wholly fresh to these microbes was disastrous. Not only were the
pioneering settlements wiped out, but the bulk of the species also. The
submen themselves had become adjusted to the microbes, and even
reproduced more rapidly because of them. Not so the more delicately
organized species. They died off like autumn leaves. Civilization fell
to pieces. In a few generations Asia was peopled only by a handful of
scattered savages, all diseased and mostly crippled.
But in spite of this disaster the species remained potentially the same.
Within a few centuries it had thrown off the infection and had begun
once more the ascent towards civilization. After another thousand years,
pioneers again crossed the mountain and entered Africa. They met with no
opposition. The precarious flicker of simian intelligence had long ago
ceased. The monkeys had so burdened their bodies with metal and their
minds with the obsession of metal, that at length the herds of subhuman
cattle were able to rebel and devour their masters.