Pictor's Metamorphoses (11 page)

The Man of the Forests

I
N THE BEGINNING
of the Age of Man, even before the human race had spread over the face of the earth, there were the men of the forests. They lived, timid and confined, in the twilight of the tropical primeval forests, perpetually in battle with their relatives the apes, while over them stood the one godhead and the one law that governed them in all their actions: the Forest. It was their homeland, refuge, cradle, nest, and grave, and life outside its boundaries was unthinkable. Even approaching its borders was to be avoided, and whosoever—through some strange turn of Fate—was forced toward them, in hunting or fleeing, told in fear and trembling of the white Void beyond, where one could see the fearful Nothingness glistening in the deadly burning rays of the sun. An old man of the forest, who decades before had fled from wild beasts beyond the forest's outermost rim, still lived, blind from that day. He was now a kind of priest and holy man and was called
mata dalam
(he whose eye is turned inward). It was he who had composed the sacred Song of the Forest, which was sung whenever there was a great storm, and the forest people listened to him. That he had seen the sun with his own eyes and had survived was his glory and the secret of his power.

The forest people were small and brown and very hairy; their posture was hunched, and they had timid, wild eyes. Like men and like apes, they could walk, and they felt just as secure high in the branches as they did on the ground. As yet they had no knowledge of building houses and huts, but they used various weapons and tools, and they made jewelry. Out of hardwoods they made bows, arrows, lances, and clubs. From bast fiber they made necklaces, hung with dried berries or nuts, and around their necks or in their hair they also wore other objects of value: boars' teeth, tigers' claws, parrots' feathers, the shells of freshwater mussels. Through the middle of the immense forest flowed the great river; the men of the forest, however, dared to walk along its bank only in the darkness of night, and many of them had never seen it. Sometimes the more courageous crept out of the thicket at night, shy and wary, and in the shimmering darkness they would see the elephants bathing, and when they looked up through the overhanging treetops, with terror they beheld the radiant stars hanging in the network of the many-armed mangroves. They had never seen the sun, and it was considered extremely dangerous even to glimpse its reflection in the summer.

In that clan of forest people over which the blind
mata dalam
presided there was also a youth named Kubu; he was leader and spokesman for the young and discontented. Since the
mata dalam
had grown older and more tyrannical, the ranks of the discontented grew. Until now, it had been the blind one's special right to have his food provided for him by the others; they also looked to him for advice, and they sang his Forest Song. But gradually he began to introduce all sorts of burdensome new customs, which, he claimed, the God of the Forest had revealed to him in dreams. But a few young skeptics maintained that the old man was an impostor, who had only his own best interests in mind.

The most recent custom the
mala dalam
had instituted was a celebration of the new moon. Beating on a bark drum, he sat in the center of a circle while the other forest people danced around him in a ring, singing
golo elah
until they dropped, dead-tired, to their knees. At this point, each male had to pierce his left ear with a thorn, and the young women were brought before the priest, who pierced each one's ear with a thorn. Kubu and a few of his companions had avoided this ceremony, and they were set on persuading the girls to offer resistance too.

One time they had a chance to put an end to the priest's power and to triumph over him. The old man was again holding the celebration of the new moon, piercing the left ears of the young females. As he did this, a strong young woman stood up and began to scream terribly; and so it happened that the blind one pierced her eye with the thorn, and blood poured from the eye. Now she screamed so desperately that everyone came running, and when they saw what had happened, they fell into a dazed and angry silence. Exultant now, the boys intervened and Kubu even dared to grab hold of the priest's shoulder. But the old man stood up by his drum and crowed in a scornful voice so ghastly a curse that everyone drew back in fear, and Kubu's own heart froze. No one could understand the precise meaning of the old priest's words, but the manner and sound of his utterance wildly and terribly recalled to them the awesome words of the divine service. And he laid a curse on the youth's eyes, which he commended to the hawk for food; and he cursed the youth's entrails, prophesying that one day they would broil in the sun in the open field. But then the priest, whose power was greater now than at any other time, ordered the young woman to come back to him, and he plunged the thorn through her other eye. And everyone looked on, horrified, and no one dared to breathe.

“You will die Outside,” was the curse the old one had put on Kubu, and from then on everyone avoided the youth as one beyond all hope. “Outside”—that meant outside the bounds of their homeland, outside the bounds of the darkening forest! “Outside,” that meant terror, scorching sun, and the glowing, fatal Void.

Terrified, Kubu fled, and when he saw everyone who encountered him shrink back, he hid in a hollow tree trunk and admitted defeat. For days and nights he lay there, vacillating between fear of death and defiance, uncertain now whether the people of his clan would come to strike him down or whether the sun itself would break through the forest, besiege and hunt him down, take him captive, and slay him. But neither arrow nor lance, neither sun nor bolt of lightning came to Kubu, nothing came but extreme weariness and the bellowing voice of hunger.

Then Kubu got back on his feet and crawled out of the tree, sober and with a feeling that bordered on disappointment.

“The curse of the priest is powerless,” he thought in amazement. Then he went out searching for food, and after he had eaten and could again feel life coursing through his limbs, pride and hatred returned to his soul. He no longer wanted to go back among his people. He wanted to be a loner and an outcast, one whom the people despised, one upon whom the priest—that blind animal—called down impotent curses. He wanted to be alone and to remain alone. But first he would take his revenge.

He went off to think. He contemplated all those things which had ever sowed doubt in his mind, things which appeared to be deceit, and foremost he contemplated the priest's drum and his ceremonies; and the more he thought and the longer he was alone, the more clearly he could see: yes, it was deceit, all of it was nothing but deceit and lying. And since he had already come so far, he thought still further and aimed his now vigilant suspiciousness directly at all that was held to be sacred and true. What, for example, was the truth about the God of the Forest, and the sacred Song of the Forest? Oh, these too were nothing but sheer duplicity! And overcoming a secret terror, he began to sing the Song of the Forest with scorn and contempt in his voice, twisting all its words, and three times he called upon the God of the Forest, whose name it was forbidden to utter—to all but the priest—on pain of death; yet everything remained peaceful and calm, no storm rent the heavens, no lightning bolt fell from the blue.

For many days and weeks the solitary wandered, with furrowed brow and penetrating gaze. He did something else no one had ever dared: he went to the bank of the river on the night of the full moon. First he looked at the moon's reflection, then at the moon itself; then he gazed into the eyes of all the stars, long and boldly, and nothing untoward befell him. Whole moonlit nights he sat on the riverbank, cherishing his thoughts and reveling in the forbidden delirium of light. Many bold and terrible schemes rose in his soul. The moon is my friend, he thought, and the star is my friend, but the old blind man is my enemy. Thus, the Outside may be better than our Inside, and perhaps the sanctitude of the forest itself is empty talk! And one night, many generations before any human being did, he hit upon a daring and fabulous idea. In all probability, one could bind together some branches with bast fiber, set oneself on them, and float downstream. His eyes sparkled and his heart beat faster, but he did not act on his idea; the river was full of crocodiles.

There was but one way into the future: to go through the forest until he reached its end—if it really had an end—and there to leave it, and put his faith in the glowing Void, the evil Outside. He had to go in search of that monster the sun and endure it. Because—who could say?—in the end maybe even the ancient taboo on the sun was nothing but another lie!

This thought, the last in a bold, feverish sequence, made Kubu tremble. This was something that no man of the forest before him had ever dared: voluntarily to leave the forest and expose himself to the terrifying light of the sun. And from day to day he went about bearing this thought in mind. At last he took courage. Trembling, he crept toward the river in the glare of midday; warily he neared its glittering bank, and with timid eyes he sought out the image of the sun in the water. The radiance pained and dazzled his eyes; he had to close them quickly, but after a while he dared to open them again, and then one more time, and he succeeded. It was possible, it was to be borne; moreover, it made one spirited and brave. Kubu put his faith in the sun. He loved it, even if it should kill him; and he hated the old, dark, putrid forest, where the priests shrilled, and from which he, the young valiant, had been outlawed and outcast.

Now his resolve had grown ripe, and he plucked the deed like a sweet fruit. He made a fine, new hammer of ironwood and equipped it with a very thin, light handle. Early the next morning, he went after the
mata dalam,
tracked him down and found him, hit him on the head with the hammer and watched his soul escape through the crooked mouth. Kubu laid down his weapon on the old man's breast, so that people would know how the old man had met his end; on the hammer's smooth surface, with the shell of a mussel, he had painstakingly scratched a sign, a circle out of which radiated several straight lines: the image of the sun.

Courageously, he set out on his journey to the distant Outside, and from morning to night he walked in one direction, and at night he slept in the tree branches and continued on his way in the early morning, all day long for several days, crossing over streams and black swamps, and over rising land and mossy banks of stone, the likes of which he had never before seen, and finally upward more steeply, stopped by ravines, farther on into the mountains, and always through the eternal forests, so that in the end he became doubtful and sad, pondering the possibility that perhaps some god really did forbid the creatures of the forest to leave their homeland.

Then one evening, after he had long been climbing and climbing in ever-higher, drier, and thinner air, he came, unexpectedly, to the end. But with the end of the forest came the end of the earth as well; here the forest plummeted down into the emptiness of air, as if here the world had been broken in two. There was nothing to see but a distant, feeble redness, and above, a few stars, for night had already begun to fall.

Kubu sat down at the edge of the world and bound himself fast with vines so as not to fall off. He spent the night crouching in horror and wild agitation, his eyes wide open, and in the first gray of morning he impatiently jumped to his feet and waited, bent over the Void, for day to come.

Lovely yellow strips of light glimmered in the distance, and the sky seemed to tremble in expectation, just as Kubu trembled, never before having seen the coming of day in the broad expanse of the atmosphere. Yellow bundles of light flared up, and on the other side of the monstrous abyss, the sun sprang, huge and red, into the sky. It leapt up out of an endless, gray nothingness, which soon became blue-black: the sea.

Before the trembling man of the forests, the Outside lay unveiled. At his feet, the mountain plunged down into unknowable, smoking depths; opposite him, a craggy mountain chain sprang up, glittering like rosy jewels. To his side, the dark sea lay distant and immense; its coast was white and frothy, and the tiny trees that lined it nodded toward him. And over all this, over these thousand, strange, new, powerful forms, the sun rose and poured a glowing stream of light on the world, which took fire in laughing colors.

Kubu was not able to look the sun in the face. But he saw its light streaming in colorful torrents around the mountains and cliffs and coasts and distant blue isles. And he sank to his knees, bent his face to the earth, bowing down to the gods of this radiant world. Who was he, Kubu?! Only a small, dirty animal who had spent his whole musty life in a darkening bog hole deep in the forest, timid and gloomy, paying homage to obscure gods. But here was the world, and its supreme god was the sun. The long, ignominious dream of his forest life was behind him; now it began—like the sallow image of the dead priest—to be extinguished in his soul. On hands and feet, Kubu clambered down the steep abyss, toward the light and the sea. And his soul trembled in a fleeting transport of joy with the dreamlike surmise of a bright earth—an earth ruled by the sun, where bright, free beings lived in light, subject to no one but the sun.

The Dream of the Gods

Preliminary Remark

T
EN YEARS
have now passed since the beginning of the Great War. Among all the memories of that time, there exist in every part of the world numerous instances of presentiments, prophesies, prophetic dreams, and visions which relate to the war. These experiences have resulted in a good deal of humbug, and nothing is further from my intention than to count myself among the ranks of the many clairvoyants and prophets of the war! In August of 1914 I was as shocked and terrified as any man by the course of events. And yet, just like thousands of others, shortly before the onset of the catastrophe, I, too, had a presentiment. At least I had, some eight weeks before war broke out, a very remarkable dream, which I wrote down before the end of June of that year. To be sure, this sketch no longer is an authentic, literally faithful account of the dream; for at that time I made it into a small fiction. But the essential point, the appearance of the God of War and his retinue, was not a conscious invention; rather, it was true to the experience of the dream.