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Before Adam
by Jack London
1906
“These are our ancestors, and their history is our history. Remember thatas surely as we one day swung down out of the trees and walked upright, just assurely, on a far earlier day, did we crawl up out of the sea and achieve ourfirst adventure on land.”
Contents
CHAPTER I
Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence camethe multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they were pictures thelike of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life. They tormented mychildhood, making of my dreams a procession of nightmares and a little laterconvincing me that I was different from my kind, a creature unnatural andaccursed.
In my days only did I attain any measure of happiness. My nights marked thereign of fear—and such fear! I make bold to state that no man of all themen who walk the earth with me ever suffer fear of like kind and degree. For myfear is the fear of long ago, the fear that was rampant in the Younger World,and in the youth of the Younger World. In short, the fear that reigned supremein that period known as the Mid-Pleistocene.
What do I mean? I see explanation is necessary before I can tell you of thesubstance of my dreams. Otherwise, little could you know of the meaning of thethings I know so well. As I write this, all the beings and happenings of thatother world rise up before me in vast phantasmagoria, and I know that to youthey would be rhymeless and reasonless.
What to you the friendship of Lop-Ear, the warm lure of the Swift One, the lustand the atavism of Red-Eye? A screaming incoherence and no more. And ascreaming incoherence, likewise, the doings of the Fire People and the TreePeople, and the gibbering councils of the horde. For you know not the peace ofthe cool caves in the cliffs, the circus of the drinking-places at the end ofthe day. You have never felt the bite of the morning wind in the tree-tops, noris the taste of young bark sweet in your mouth.
It would be better, I dare say, for you to make