Out of Bondage
The mist was heavy and thick, and through it the flying creatures darted
upon their innumerable businesses, visible for an instant in all their
colorful beauty, then melting slowly into indefiniteness as they sped
away. The tribefolk on the clustered rafts watched them as they darted
overhead, and for hours the little squadron of fungoid vessels floated
slowly through the central channel of the marsh.
The river had split into innumerable currents which meandered
purposelessly through the glistening black mud of the swamp, but after a
long time they seemed to reassemble, and Burl could see what had caused
the vast morass.
Hills appeared on either side of the stream, which grew higher and
steeper, as if the foothills of a mountain chain. Then Burl turned and
peered before him.
Rising straight from the low hills, a wall of high mountains rose toward
the sky, and the low-hanging clouds met their rugged flanks but half-way
toward the peaks. To right and left the mountains melted into the
tenuous haze, but ahead they were firm and stalwart, rising and losing
their heights in the cloud-banks.
They formed a rampart which might have guarded the edge of the world,
and the river flowed more and more rapidly in a deeper and narrower
current toward a cleft between two rugged giants that promised to
swallow the water and all that might swim in its depths or float upon
its surface.
Tall, steep hills rose from either side of the swift current, their
sides covered with flaking molds of an exotic shade of rose-pink,
mingled here and there with lavender and purple. Rocks, not hidden
beneath a coating of fungus, protruded their angular heads from the
hillsides. The river valley became a gorge, and then little more than a
cañon, with beetling sides that frowned down upon the swift current
running beneath them.
The small flotilla passed beneath an overhanging cliff, and then shot
out to where the cliffsides drew apart and formed a deep amphitheater,
whose top was hidden in the clouds.
And across this open space, on cables all of five hundred feet long, a
banded spider had flung its web. It was a monster of its tribe. Its
belly was swollen to a diameter of no less than two yards, and its
outstretched legs would have touched eight points of a ten-yard circle.
It was hanging motionless in the center of the colossal snare as the
little group of tribefolk passed underneath, and they saw the broad
bands of yellow and black and silver upon its abdomen. They shivered as
their little crafts were swept below.
Then they came to a little valley, where yellow sand bordered the river
and there was a level space of a hundred yards on either side before the
steep sides of the mountains began their rise. Here the cluster of
mushroom rafts were caught in a little eddy and drawn out of the swiftly
flowing current. Soon there was a soft and yielding jar. The rafts had
grounded.
Led by Burl, the tribesmen waded ashore, wonderment and excitement in
their hearts. Burl searched all about with his eyes. Toadstools and
mushrooms, rusts and molds, even giant puff-balls grew in the little
valley, but of the deadly red mushrooms he saw none.
A single bee was buzzing slowly over the tangled thickets of fungoids,
and the loud voice of a cricket came in a deafening burst of sound,
reechoed from the hillsides, but save for the far-flung web of the
banded spider a mile or more away, there was no sign of the deadly
creatures that preyed upon men.
Burl began to climb the hillside with his tribefolk after him. For an
hour they toiled upward, through confused masses of fungus of almost
every species. Twice they stopped to seize upon edible fungi and break
them into masses they could carry, and once they paused and made a wide
detour around a thicket from which there came a stealthy rustling.
Burl believed that the rustling was merely the sound of a moth or
butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, but was unwilling to take any
chances. He and his people circled the mushroom thicket and mounted
higher.
And at last, perhaps six or seven hundred feet above the level of the
river, they came upon a little plateau, going back into a small pocket
in the mountainside. Here they found many of the edible fungoids, and no
less than a dozen of the giant cabbages, on whose broad leaves many
furry grubs were feeding steadily in placid contentment with themselves
and all the world.
A small stream bubbled up from a tiny basin and ran swiftly across the
plateau, and there were dense thickets of toadstools in which the
tribesmen might find secure hiding-places. The tribe would make itself a
new home here.
That night they hid among inextricably tangled masses of mushrooms, and
saw with amazement the multitude of creatures that ventured forth in the
darkness. All the valley and the plateau were illumined by the shining
beacons of huge but graceful fireflies, who darted here and there in
delight and--apparently--in security.
Upon the earth below, also, many tiny lights glowed. The larvæ of the
fireflies crawled slowly but happily over the fungus-covered
mountainside, and great glow-worms clambered upon the shining tops of
the toadstools and rested there, twin broad bands of bluish fire burning
brightly within their translucent bodies.
They were the females of the firefly race, which never attain to legs
and wings, but crawl always upon the earth, merely enlarged creatures in
the forms of their own larvæ. Moths soared overhead with mighty,
throbbing wing-beats, and all the world seemed a paradise through which
no evil creatures roamed in search of prey.
And a strange thing came to pass. Soon after darkness fell upon the
earth and the steady drip-drop of the rain began, a musical tinkling
sound was heard which grew in volume, and became a deep-toned roar,
which reechoed and reverberated from the opposite hillsides until it was
like melodious and long-continued thunder. For a long time the people
were puzzled and a little afraid, but Burl took courage and
investigated.
He emerged from the concealing thicket and peered cautiously about,
seeing nothing. Then he dared move in the direction of the sound, and
the gleam from a dozen fireflies showed him a sheet of water pouring
over a vertical cliff to the river far below.
The rainfall, gentle as it was, when gathered from all the broad expanse
of the mountainside, made a river of its own, which had scoured out a
bed, and poured down each night to plunge in a smother of spray and foam
through six hundred feet of empty space to the swiftly flowing river in
the center of the valley. It was this sound that had puzzled the
tribefolk, and this sound that lulled them to sleep when Burl at last
came back to allay their fears.
The next day they explored their new territory with a boldness of which
they would not have been capable a month before. They found a single
great trap-door in the earth, sure sign of the burrow of a monster
spider, and Burl resolved that before many days the spider would be
dealt with. He told his tribesmen so, and they nodded their heads
solemnly instead of shrinking back in terror as they would have done not
long since.
The tribe was rapidly becoming a group of men, capable of taking the
aggressive. They needed Burl's rash leadership, and for many generations
they would need bold leaders, but they were infinitely superior to the
timid, rabbit-like creatures they had been. They bore spears, and they
had used them. They had seen danger, and had blindly followed Burl
through the forest of strangled things instead of fleeing weakly from
the peril.
They wore soft, yellow fur about their middles, taken from the bodies of
giant slugs they had slain. They had eaten much meat, and preferred its
succulent taste to the insipid savor of the mushrooms that had once been
their steady diet. They knew the exhilaration of brave adventure--though
they had been forced into adventure by Burl--and they were far more
worthy descendants of their ancestors than those ancestors had known for
many thousand years.
The exploration of their new domain yielded many wonders and a few
advantages. The tribefolk found that the nearest ant-city was miles
away, and that the small insects would trouble them but rarely. (The
nightly rush of water down the sloping sides of the mountain made it
undesirable for the site of an ant colony.)
And best of all, back in the little pocket in the mountainside, they
found old and disused cells of hunting wasps. The walls of the pocket
were made of soft sandstone with alternate layers of clay, and the wasps
had found digging easy.
There were a dozen or more burrows, the shaft of each some four feet in
diameter and going back into the cliff for nearly thirty feet, where
they branched out into a number of cells. Each of the cells had once
held a grub which had grown fat and large upon its hoard of paralyzed
crickets, and then had broken away to the outer world to emerge as a
full-grown wasp.
Now, however, the laboriously tunneled caverns would furnish a
hiding-place for the tribe of men, a far more secure hiding-place than
the center of the mushroom thickets. And, furthermore, a hiding-place
which, because more permanent, would gradually become a possession for
which the men would fight.
It is a curious thing that the advancement of a people from a state of
savagery and continual warfare to civilization and continual peace is
not made by the elimination of the causes of strife, but by the addition
of new objects and ideals, in defense of which that same people will
offer battle.
A single chrysalis was found securely anchored to the underside of a
rock-shelf, and Burl detached it with great labor and carried it into
one of the burrows, though the task was one that was almost beyond his
strength. He desired the butterfly that would emerge for his own use.
He preempted, too, a solitary burrow a little distant from the others,
and made preparations for an event that was destined to make his plans
wiser and more far-reaching than before.
His followers were equally busy with their various burrows, gathering
stores of soft growth for their couches, and later--at Burl's
suggestion--even carrying within the dark caverns the radiant heads of
the luminous mushrooms to furnish illumination. The light would be dim,
and after the mushroom had partly dried it would cease, but for a people
utterly ignorant of fire it was far from a bad plan.
Burl was very happy for that time. His people looked upon him as a
savior, and obeyed his least order without question. He was growing to
repose some measure of trust in them, too, as men who began to have some
glimmerings of the new-found courage that had come to him, and which he
had striven hard to implant in their breasts.
The tribe had been a formless gathering of people. There were six or
seven men and as many women, and naturally families had come into
being--sometimes after fierce and absurd fights among the men--but the
families were not the sharply distinct agreements they would have been
in a tribe of higher development.
The marriage was but an agreement, terminable at any time, and the men
had but little of the feeling of parenthood, though the women had all
the fierce maternal instinct of the insects about them.
These burrows in which the tribefolk were making their homes would put
an end to the casual nature of the marriage bonds. They were homes in
the making--damp and humid burrows without fire or heat, but homes,
nevertheless. The family may come before the home, in the development of
mankind, but it invariably exists when the home has been made.
The tribe had been upon the plateau for nearly a week when Burl found
that stirrings and strugglings were going on within the huge cocoon he
had laid close beside the burrow he had chosen for his own. He cast
aside all other work, and waited patiently for the thing he knew was
about to happen. He squatted on his haunches beside the huge, oblong
cylinder, his spear in his hand, waiting patiently. From time to time he
nibbled at a bit of edible mushroom.
Burl had acquired many new traits, among which a little foresight was
most prominent, but he had never conquered the habit of feeling hungry
at any and every time that food was near at hand. He had to wait. He had
food. Therefore, he ate.
The sound of scrapings came from the closed cocoon, caked upon its outer
side with dirt and mold. The scraping and scratching continued, and
presently a tiny hole showed, which rapidly enlarged. Tiny jaws and a
dry, glazed skin became visible, the skin looking as if it had been
varnished with many coats of brown shellac. Then a malformed head forced
its way through and stopped.
All motion ceased for a matter of perhaps half an hour, and then the
strange, blind head seemed to become distended, to be swelling. A crack
appeared along its upper part, which lengthened and grew wide. And then
a second head appeared from within the first.
This head was soft and downy, and a slender proboscis was coiled beneath
its lower edge like the trunk of one of the elephants that had been
extinct for many thousand years. Soft scales and fine hairs alternated
to cover it, and two immense, many-faceted eyes gazed mildly at the
world on which it was looking for the first time. The color of the whole
was purest milky-white.
Slowly and painfully, assisting itself by slender, colorless legs that
seemed strangely feeble and trembling, a butterfly crawled from the
cocoon. Its wings were folded and lifeless, without substance or color,
but the body was a perfect white. The butterfly moved a little distance
from its cocoon and slowly unfurled its wings. With the action, life
seemed to be pumped into them from some hidden spring in the insect's
body. The slender antennæ spread out and wavered gently in the warm air.
The wings were becoming broad expanses of snowy velvet.
A trace of eagerness seemed to come into the butterfly's actions.
Somewhere there in the valley sweet food and joyous companions awaited
it. Fluttering above the fungoids of the hillsides, surely there was a
mate with whom the joys of love were to be shared, surely upon those
gigantic patches of green, half hidden in the haze, there would be laid
tiny golden eggs that in time would hatch into small, fat grubs.
Strength came to the butterfly's limbs. Its wings were spread and
closed with a new assurance. It spread them once more, and raised them
to make the first flight of this new existence in a marvelous world,
full of delights and adventures--Burl struck home with his spear.
The delicate limbs struggled in agony, the wings fluttered helplessly,
and in a little while the butterfly lay still upon the fungus-carpeted
earth, and Burl leaned over to strip away the great wings of snow-white
velvet, to sever the long and slender antennæ, and then to call his
tribesmen and bid them share in the food he had for them.
And there was a feast that afternoon. The tribesmen sat about the white
carcass, cracking open the delicate limbs for the meat within them, and
Burl made sure that Saya secured the choicest bits. The tribesmen were
happy. Then one of the children of the tribe stretched a hand aloft and
pointed up the mountainside.
Coming slowly down the slanting earth was a long, narrow file of living
animals. For a time the file seemed to be but one creature, but Burl's
keen eyes soon saw that there were many. They were caterpillars, each
one perhaps ten feet long, each with a tiny black head armed with sharp
jaws, and with dull-red fur upon their backs. The rear of the procession
was lost in the mist of the low-hanging cloud-banks that covered the
mountainside some two thousand feet above the plateau, but the foremost
was no more than three hundred yards away.
Slowly and solemnly the procession came on, the black head of the second
touching the rear of the first, and the head of the third touching the
rear of the second. In faultless alignment, without intervals, they
moved steadily down the slanting side of the mountain.
Save the first, they seemed absorbed in maintaining their perfect
formation, but the leader constantly rose upon his hinder half and waved
the fore part of his body in the air, first to the right and then to the
left, as if searching out the path he would follow.
The tribefolk watched in amazement mingled with terror. Only Burl was
calm. He had never seen a slug that meant danger to man, and he reasoned
that these were at any rate moving slowly so that they could be
distanced by the fleeter-footed human beings, but he also meant to be
cautious.
The slow march kept on. The rear of the procession of caterpillars
emerged from the cloud-bank, and Burl saw that a shining white line was
left behind them. No less than eighty great caterpillars clad in white
and dingy red were solemnly moving down the mountainside, leaving a path
of shining silk behind them. Head to tail, in single file, they had no
eyes or ears for anything but their procession.
The leader reached the plateau, and turned. He came to the cluster of
giant cabbages, and ignored them. He came to a thicket of mushrooms, and
passed through it, followed by his devoted band. Then he came to an open
space where the earth was soft and sandy, where sandstone had weathered
and made a great heap of easily moved earth.
The leading caterpillar halted, and began to burrow experimentally in
the ground. The result pleased him, and some signal seemed to pass
along the eight-hundred-foot line of creatures. The leader began to dig
with feet and jaws, working furiously to cover himself completely with
the soft earth. Those immediately behind him abandoned their formation,
and pressed forward in haste. Those still farther back moved more
hurriedly.
All, when they reached the spot selected by the leader, abandoned any
attempt to keep to their line, and hastened to find an unoccupied spot
in the open space in which to bury themselves.
For perhaps half an hour the clearing was the scene of intense activity,
incredible activity. Huge, ten-foot bodies burrowed desperately in the
whitish earth, digging frantically to cover themselves.
After the half-hour, however, the last of the caterpillars had vanished.
Only an occasional movement of the earth from the struggle of a buried
creature to bury itself still deeper, and the freshly turned surface
showed that beneath the clearing on the plateau eighty great slugs were
preparing themselves for the sleep of metamorphosis. The piled-up earth
and the broad, white band of silk, leading back up the hillside until it
became lost in the clouds, alone remained to tell of the visitation.
The tribesmen had watched in amazement. They had never seen these
creatures before, but they knew, of course, why they had entombed
themselves. Had they known what the scientists of thirty thousand years
before had written in weighty and dull books, they would have deduced
from the appearance of the processionary caterpillars--or
pine-caterpillars--that somewhere above the banks of clouds there were
growing trees and sunlight, that a moon shone down, and stars twinkled
from the blue vault of a cloudless sky.
But the tribesmen did not know. They only knew that there, beneath the
soft earth, was a mighty store of food for them when they cared to dig
for it, that their provisions for many months were secure, and that
Burl, their leader, was a great and mighty man for having led them to
this land of safety and plenty.
Burl read their emotions in their eyes, but better than their amazement
and wonderment was a glance that had nothing whatever to do with his
leadership of the tribe. And then Burl rose, and took the two
snowy-white velvet cloaks from the wings of the white butterfly. One of
them he flung about his own shoulders, and the other he flung about
Saya. And then those two stood up before the wide-eyed tribesmen, and
Burl spoke:
"This is my mate, and my food is her food, and her wrath is my wrath. My
burrow is her burrow, and her sorrow, my sorrow.
"Men whom I have led to this land of plenty, hear me. As ye obey my
words, see to it that the words of Saya are obeyed likewise, for my
spear will loose the life from any man who angers her. Know that as I am
great beyond all other men, so Saya is great beyond all other women, for
I say it, and it is so."
And he drew Saya toward him, trembling slightly, and put his arm about
her waist before all the tribe, and the tribesmen muttered in
acquiescent whispers that what Burl said was true, as they had already
known.
Then, while the pink-skinned men feasted on the meat Burl had provided
for them, he and Saya went toward the burrow he had made ready. It was
not like the other burrows, being set apart from them, and its entrance
was bordered on either side by mushrooms as black as night. All about
the entrance the black mushrooms clustered, a strange species that grew
large and scattered its spores abroad and then of its own accord melted
into an inky liquid that flowed away, sinking slowly into the ground.
In a little hollow below the opening of the burrow an inky pool had
gathered, which reflected the gray clouds above and the shapes of the
mushrooms that overhung its edges.
Burl and Saya made their way toward the burrow in silence, a picturesque
couple against the black background of the sable mushrooms and the earth
made dark by the inky liquid. Both of their figures were swathed in
cloaks of unsmirched whiteness and wondrous softness, and bound to
Burl's forehead were the feathery, lacelike antenna of a great moth,
making flowing plumes of purest gold. His spear seemed cast from
bronze, and he was a proud figure as he led Saya past the black pool and
to the doorway of their home.
They sat there, watching, while the darkness came on and the moths and
fireflies emerged to dance in the night, and listened when the rain
began its slow, deliberate dripping from the heavy clouds above.
Presently a gentle rumbling began--the accumulation of the rain from all
the mountainside forming a torrent that would pour in a six-hundred-foot
drop to the river far below.
The sound of the rushing water grew louder, and was echoed back from the
cliffs on the other side of the valley. The fireflies danced like fairy
lights in the chasm, and all the creatures of the night winged their way
aloft to join in the ecstasy of life and love.
And then, when darkness was complete, and only the fitful gleams of the
huge fireflies were reflected from the still surface of the black pool
beneath their feet, Burl reached out his hand to Saya, sitting beside
him in the darkness. She yielded shyly, and her soft, warm hand found
his in the obscurity. And Burl bent over and kissed her on the lips.
THE END