The Eternal Adam and other stories (36 page)

Some had reviewed its history, which was
that of all mankind. They had described the Mahart-Iten-Schu, the Land of the
Four Seas, as divided at first between an immense number of savage peoples who
knew nothing of one another. It was to them that the most ancient traditions
went back. As to what had gone before, nobody knew anything, and the natural
sciences had hardly begun to throw a gleam of light into the impenetrable
shadows of the past. Certainly those far-distant times evaded critical history,
whose earliest vestiges consisted of vague notions regarding these age-old
scattered peoples.

For more than 8,000 years, the history of
the Mahart-Iten-Schu, gradually getting more complete and more exact, described
only conflicts and wars, at first of individual against individual, then of
family against family, then of tribe against tribe. Each living creature, each
community, small or large, had throughout the course of the ages no other
objective than to ensure its own supremacy over its competitors and to strive,
with varying and often contradictory fortunes, to subject them to its laws.

After these 8,000 years, human memory had
become somewhat more precise. At the opening of the second of the four great
ages into which the annals of the Mahart-Iten-Schu were commonly divided,
legend had begun appropriately to merit the name of history. None the less,
history or legend, the subject-matter of the story hardly changed at all:
always massacres and slaughters – no longer, admittedly, of tribe by tribe but
henceforth of people by people – so much so, indeed, that on the whole this
second period was not so very different from the first.

And it was still the same with the third
period which, after having lasted nearly six centuries, had ended hardly 200
years ago. More atrocious still perhaps, this third period during which,
grouped into countless armies, mankind, with its insatiable rage, had watered
the earth with its own blood.

Somewhat less than eight centuries, indeed,
before the day on which Zartog Sofr was following the principal street of
Basidra, humanity had been rent by vast convulsions. Then weapons, fire,
violence, having already accomplished much of their inevitable work and the
weak having succumbed to the strong, the people of the Mahart-Iten-Schu had
formed three distinct nations, in each of which time had lessened the
differences between the conquerors and the conquered of the past.

Then it was that one of these nations had
undertaken to subdue its neighbours. Situated near the centre of the Mahart-Iten-Schu,
the Andarti-Hai-Sammgor, the Men of the Brazen Face, had struggled mercilessly to
enlarge their frontiers, within which their spirited and prolific race was
being choked.

One after the other, at the cost of
age-long wars, they had overcome the Andarti-Mahart-Horis, the Men of the Snow
Country, who inhabited the southern lands, and the Andarti-Mitra-Psul, the Men
of the Motionless Star, whose empire was situated more towards the north and
the west.

Nearly 200 years had elapsed since the
final revolt of these two peoples had been drowned in torrents of blood, and
the land had at last known an era of peace. This was the fourth period of its
history. One solitary empire having replaced the three nations of olden time,
and the law of Basidra having been enforced everywhere, political unity had
tended to merge the races. No longer was anything said about the men with the
Brazen Faces, the men of the Snow Country, the Men of the Motionless Star. The
earth now bore only one unique populace, the Andart’-Iten-Schu, the Men of the
Four Seas, which in itself included all the others.

But now, after these 200 years of peace, a
fifth period seemed to be opening. For some time disquieting rumours, arising
nobody knew where, had been going the rounds. They suggested that certain
thinkers were trying to arouse in the human heart ancestral memories long believed
to have been abolished. The ancient emotions of the race were being revived in
a novel form characterised by newly coined words. People were now speaking of
‘atavism’, ‘affinities’, ‘nationalities’, and so forth – all recently created
terms which, answering as they did to some new need, had now gained
recognition.

Based upon common origin, physical
appearance, moral tendency, mutual interest, or simply upon district or
climate, groups were appearing, and they were obviously getting larger and
showing signs of unrest. Where would this growing evolution lead? Would the
empire, scarcely formed though it was, start falling to pieces? Would the
Mahart-Iten-Schu be divided, as of old, between a large number of nations? Or
would it, to maintain its unity, have to seek recourse to the frightful
hecatombs which, lasting for thousands of years, have turned the earth into a
charnel-house?

With a shake of the head Sofr cast off
these thoughts. The future was something which neither he nor anyone else could
possibly know. So why depress himself by the prospect of uncertain events? This
was no day to brood over these sinister possibilities. Today everybody was in a
cheerful mood, and nothing was thought about except the august grandeur of
Mogar-Si, twelfth emperor of the Hars-Iten-Schu, whose sceptre was leading the
universe to its glorious destiny.

What was more, a zartog by no means lacked
grounds for rejoicing. Not only had the historian retraced the pageant of the
Mahart-Iten-Schu; a constellation of savants, to mark this grandiose
anniversary, had, each in his own speciality, drawn up the balance-sheet of
human knowledge, and had announced the point to which its age-long efforts had
brought mankind. And if the former had to some extent aroused distressing
thoughts by recalling by what a slow and tortuous route it had freed itself
from its bestial origin, the others had stimulated their hearers’ legitimate
pride.

Yes, in very truth, it was bound to inspire
admiration, the comparison between what man had been when he arrived naked and
helpless upon the earth and what he was today. Throughout the centuries, in
spite of discords and fratricidal hates, never for one instant had he
interrupted his struggle against nature; ever had he increased the scope of his
victory.

At first slow, during the last 200 years
his triumphant march had been astonishingly accelerated; and the stability of
political institutions and the universal peace which this had produced had
stimulated a marvellous advance in science. Humanity lived not only by its
limbs but by its mind; instead of exhausting itself in senseless wars, it had
thought, – and that was why, in the course of the last two centuries, it had
advanced ever more rapidly towards knowledge and the taming of material nature.

So, as beneath the scorching sun he
followed the long Basidran street, Sofr mentally sketched in bold outline the
picture of the conquests man had made.

First of all – though this was lost in the
darkness of time – mankind had invented writing, so as to perpetuate his
thoughts. Then – the invention went back more than 500 years – he had found a
method of spreading the written word far and wide in an endless number of
copies by the aid of a block cast once and for all. It was really from this
invention that all the others had sprung. It was thanks to this that so many
brains had come into action, that the intelligence of each had grown from that
of his neighbour, and that discoveries, both theoretical and practical, had so
greatly multiplied that they could no longer be counted.

Man had penetrated into the bowels of the
earth and had extracted its coal, the generous donor of heat; he had liberated
the latent power of water, so that steam now drew the heavy trains along the
iron rails or drove a host of machines, as powerful as they were delicate and
precise. Thanks to these machines, he could weave the vegetable fibres and do
what he pleased with metal, marble or rock.

In a realm that was less concrete or at all
events of less direct and immediate utility, he had gradually unravelled the
mystery of numbers and entered ever more deeply into the infinity of
mathematical truth. By this means his thought had penetrated into the sky... He
knew that the sun was nothing but a star gravitating through space according to
rigorous laws, dragging with its flaming orb its escort of the seven planets.
^[vi]
He understood the art both of combining certain natural bodies into new
substances with which they had nothing in common, and of dividing certain other
bodies into their constituent and primordial elements. He had subjected to
analysis sound, heat and light, and was beginning to realise their nature and
their laws.

Fifty years ago he had learned how to
generate that force whose most terrifying manifestations are lightning and
thunder, and he had at once made it his slave. Already that mysterious agent
transmitted the written thought over incalculable distances; tomorrow it would
transmit sound; and next day, no doubt, the light
^[vii]
... Yes, man was great, greater than the immense universe of which, on some day
yet to come, he would be the master...

But for him to possess the truth in its
integrity, one last problem remained to be solved. ‘This man, master of the
world, who was he? Whence came he? To what unknown ends did his tireless
efforts lead?’

It was precisely this vast subject that
Zartog Sofr had just discussed during the ceremony from which he had emerged.
Admittedly he had done no more than to skim over its surface, for such a
problem was at the moment insoluble and would no doubt long remain so.

Yet a few vague gleams had already begun to
throw light upon the mystery. And of all these gleams was it not Zartog Sofr
who had thrown the most powerful when, by systematising and codifying the
patient observations of his predecessors and of himself, he had arrived at his
law of the evolution of living matter, a law universally accepted and which had
found nobody whatever to contradict it?

This theory rested upon a threefold base.

First there was the science of geology
which, born on the day when the bowels of the earth had first been dug into,
had reached perfection through the development of mining technique. The earth’s
crust was now so perfectly known that they had dared to fix its age at 400,000
years, and that of Mahart-Iten-Schu, as it was now, at 20,000 years. This
continent had formerly slept beneath the waters of the sea, as was testified to
by the thick layer of marine silt which interruptedly covered the rocky beds
immediately below. By what force had it been lifted above the waves? Doubtless
by the contraction of the cooling globe. But whatever the truth about that, the
elevation of Mahart-Iten-Schu from the sea must be regarded as proved.

The natural sciences had furnished Sofr
with the two other foundations of his system, by making clear the close
interrelationship on the one hand of the plants, on the other of the animals.
He had gone still further: he had proved from the available evidence that
almost all the plants still in existence were connected with their ancestor, a
seaweed, and that all the animals of earth or air were descended from those of
the sea. By a slow but incessant evolution, they had gradually adapted
themselves to living conditions at first resembling, then more distant from,
those of their primitive life. Thus, from stage to stage, they had given birth
to most of the living beings which peopled earth and sky.

But this ingenious theory was unfortunately
not unassailable. That living beings of the animal or vegetable orders had
descended from marine ancestors, that seemed incontestable for almost all of
them, but not for all. There still indeed existed a few plants and animals
which it seemed impossible to connect with the aquatic types. That was one of
the two weak points of his system.

The other weak point – and Sofr never
concealed this – was mankind. Between man and the animals there was no point of
union. Certainly their primordial functions and properties – such as
respiration, nutrition, and movement – were similar and were obviously carried
out or showed themselves in a similar manner, but an impassable gulf existed
between the exterior forms, the number, and the arrangement of their organs.
If, by a chain of which few of the links were missing, the great majority of
the animals could be associated with their ancestors from the sea, no such
affiliation was admissible as regards man. To preserve the theory of evolution
intact, the truth of a hypothesis had to be assumed gratuitously, that of a
stock common to the inhabitants of the waters and to man, a stock of which
nothing, absolutely nothing, demonstrated the former existence.

At one time Sofr had hoped to find in the
ground the arguments that favoured his predilection. At his instigation and
under his direction, digging had been carried out over a long succession of
years, but only to lead to results diametrically opposed to those he had hoped
for.

Below a thin layer of humus formed by the
decomposition of plants and animals like or similar to those of every day,
there had come the thick bed of silt, and in this these vestiges of the past
had changed in nature. Within this silt, no more of the contemporary flora or
fauna, but a quantity of fossils exclusively marine resembling types which were
still living, most of them in the oceans surrounding the Mahart-Iten-Schu.

What was to be inferred from this, if it
were not that the geologists were right in stating that the continent had once
served as the floor of those same oceans? And that neither had Sofr been wrong
in affirming the marine origin of the contemporary fauna and flora? Since, but
for exceptions so rare that they might rightly be regarded as monstrosities,
the aquatic and terrestrial forms were the only ones of which any trace had
been found, the latter must necessarily have been engendered by the former...