A Primitive Apologue
When Man showed up on Earth, the animals had been living there for centuries without number, each according to its customs, and recognized no master.
The year in those days had only one season, and it surpassed in sweetness even the loveliest springs now. The whole Earth was covered with trees all covered with flowers for the butterflies, and fruit for the birds of the sky, four times a year. On the ground beneath them, broad fields spread out, infinitely far, always lush and green. The quadrupeds, great and small, cropping this luxuriant abundance, could hardly keep it short.
The ground was perfectly smooth and even, as if it had been turned and polished on a wheel. It had never yet been shaken by tremors of the Earth, nor overwhelmed by volcanoes, nor ravaged by floods. Ugly places, where sad thoughts are born, did not exist, nor were there the devouring needs that develop into savage passions. There were no ferocious, evil-doing beasts of any species. If anyone found anything in his heart, it was the pleasure of living. The world was so beautiful before Man got there!
When Man arrived on Earth, naked, restless, fearful, but already ambitious, greedy, eager for change and power, the animals looked at him with surprise, scattered before him and let him pass. When night fell, he searched out a solitary place. The old stories tell that there was a single woman, who was given to him while he slept. An entire race was born, then, jealous and timid, being so weak, crowded into their domains, and disappeared for a long time.
A day came when the space that they occupied no longer was enough to feed them. They made quick raids beyond their borders to trap the birds in their nests, the hares in their dens, the goats in their thickets, the deer in the depths of the shadows. They carried the trembling beasts off to the heart of their lairs, slit their throats without pity, and ate their flesh and drank their blood.
The mothers realized it first. For the first time there was heard in the forests an immense noise, groans like nothing they knew, for there were then no tempests.
Man was endowed with a particular talent, or to express it more precisely, God had burdened him, out of all His other creatures, with a weakness suited to his miserable species. He was intelligent. He soon sensed that the angry animals were going to become a danger to him. He invented snares to entrap the reckless and the clumsy, negotiations to fool the weak, and weapons to kill the strong. As he especially wanted to defend himself, he surrounded himself with palisades and ramparts.
With the number of his children increasing every day, he thought of raising buildings up from the surface of the ground beneath. He constructed tier upon tier, and so built the first houses. He founded the first city, which the Greeks called Byblos, alluding to the word Biblion, which was their name for a book, and it is probable that they did so to represent by a single word the origin of all the calamities of the world. This city was the queen of all nations.
That is all we know of its history, except that it’s where the first dancers were seen, the first butchery set up, and the first gallows erected.
The animals took fright at the growth of the species, their enemies, who had invented death. Until then, the end of existence was considered only—as it really is—as a kind of sleep, longer and gentler than the other kind, coming when it was its time, to be felt by each type in its turn, in some secluded spot, on the day chosen by nature.
Since the arrival of Man, it was quite another matter. The ewe would bleat, calling for her lamb, but the lamb did not answer. The ewe would go looking, following the track of bits of fleece, and she would smell the blood on the grass in the spot where the lamb had grazed its last.
She would say to herself: “Man has been here.”
The animals called a meeting to find a cure for the evils which this new visitor to creation had brought with him, destined by a fatal instinct to spoil their harmony. And, as the most forgiving interpretations always prevail in the wise councils of innocent peoples, they decided to send ambassadors to Man, chosen from among the most intelligent and dignified animals, the elephant, the deer, the horse, the ox, the falcon, and the dog. These notable representatives were to offer to the newcomers dominion over half the world, on condition that they stayed there, with their families, and that they stopped frightening the rest of the living creatures with their menacing looks and their bloody attacks.
“Man can live,” said the lion, “but he must respect our rights and our freedom, unless he wants me to do by him, as he does by us, and try the power of my claws and my teeth! That’s the best decision he can make, if I know my own strength. The cowardly advantages he has usurped until now rely on tricks unworthy of true courage.”
And with that the lion began to roar, and lashed his tail against his flanks.
“There’s nothing he can do that we can’t do better,” said the doe. “He gets tired out trying to chase down even the smallest of my fawns, the one whose head hardly reaches above the smallest briars. I’ve seen him collapse, panting and far behind, after his clumsy attempts.”
“I can build like him, when I like,” said the beaver, “houses and forts.”
“I have armor that withstands any of his blows,” said the rhinoceros.
“If I feel like it, I can carry off his newborn children, snatching them out of their mothers’ arms,” said the vulture.
“He can’t catch me in the water,” said the hippopotamus.
“Or me, in the air,” said the wren. “I’m small and weak, but I can fly.”
The ambassadors, sure of their supporters’ agreement, went to the home where the Man was waiting for them, and had taken steps to be ready for them.
He welcomed them with that affectionate and treacherous manner that since then has been called politeness.
The next day, he put a hood on the falcon, a bridle and bit on the horse, a yoke on the ox, ankle-chains on the elephant, and set about building a tower to go on the elephant’s back to use when he went to “war.” That was the day when that damnable word was invented.
The dog, who was lazy, gluttonous, and cowardly in character, lay down at Man’s feet and, to his shame, licked the hand that chained him. The Man decided the dog was contemptible enough to make a good accomplice. But, as the last and the worst of the animals created, he at least had in him some vague awareness of good and evil, and so he associated the name of his vile slave with an eternal odor of infamy that the dog has never lived down in any language.
As he had succeeded in conquering them, he became even bolder in his crimes, finding it was so easy to commit them. He made hunting and warfare his professions. He flooded the pleasant fields and pastures with the blood of the animals. In his rage, he didn’t even spare his brothers and his children. He took metal and worked it into a deadly weapon that pierced and gashed the flesh. He added wings to it, made out of the bird’s feathers. He didn’t forget, during this time, to surround himself with new fortresses, and the children born of this monster went even further in building cities and spreading havoc around them.
And, everywhere that Man went, all creation, devastated, howled in sorrow.
Even inorganic matter seemed to feel the frightful distress of the creatures. The elements raged against Man with all the fury they could bring. The Earth, which until then had looked so peaceful and so magnificent, burst into flame from subterranean fires. Meteors fell through the air, blasting the ground, and waters fell from the sky to drown it.
But when these wonders came to an end, Man was still standing.
There were a few animals who managed to avoid these disasters and who were not among those who had been forced into submission by their common enemy. They didn’t hesitate to avoid Man’s dangerous neighborhood by every method their instincts or their wits could find. The eagle gladly saw inaccessible rocks tower up out of the ground, and was quick to build his aerie on the summit. The panther took refuge in impenetrable forests; the gazelle in the quicksands that easily swallowed up those with feet less light and swift; the chamois on the blue fringes of the glaciers; the hyena in the graveyards. The unicorn, the hippogriff, and the dragon fled so far that they’ve never been seen since. The general rumor in the Orient is that the griffin took flight and hid in the famous mountains of Kaf, which circle the edge of the world, and where explorers still search for them.
Man thought he had subdued all the rest. He was content.
One day, he went out walking in the pomp and splendor of his insolent pride (for he was a god in those days). On that day, feeling tired out by his carnage and glory, he sat down on a fairly big cone-shaped mound. It seemed to have been built up by its workers on purpose above the level of the plain. The construction was regular, solid, compact enough to resist the hammer, and had every quality befitting the master of the world.
“Well, now!” he said, “what has become of the animals my fathers encountered? Some have fled from my wrath, not that I care! I’ll hunt them out with my dogs and my falcons, with my soldiers and my ships, when I find that I need their down to stuff a quilt for my couch, or their fur for a coat. The rest have submitted with a good grace to the power of their legitimate master. They plough my furrows, draw my chariots, or serve my pleasures. They provide their soft fleeces for my clothes, their bright feathers to decorate me, their blood for my thirst, and their flesh for my hunger. I really can’t complain. I am Man, and I rule. Is there a single living being, in all the territory where I deign to extend my empire, who refuses to give me his faithful submission?”
“Yes,” said a voice that was thin, but sharp and sibilant. The speaker rose up before him, as high as a grain of sand. “Yes, tyrant, you have never subdued the Termite-ant, who laughs at your power, and who may force you tomorrow to flee from your cities, and surrender yourself, as naked as the day you were born, to the Nubian flies! Take care, king of the animals, for you have forgotten about the fly and the ant!”
In fact, it was an ant, and the Man sprang forward to kill it, but it disappeared down a hole. For a long time, he dug around with the point of his sword, but it did him no good to stir up the sand deeper and deeper. The underground tunnel kept going on and growing larger, and he stopped short with horror, feeling the ground about to give way under his feet, and ready to plunge him into a horrible abyss to become fodder for the family of the Termite-ant.
He called his guards and his slaves. He had already acquired these, for slavery and inequality were the first things he had invented for his own benefit. He set them to work digging up the ground and plowing openings. With hard work, he got them to overturn those little artificial mountains, on one of which he had seated himself. Spades and mattocks revealed to him everywhere holes like the one the Termite-ant had darted into before his very eyes. He calculated, quivering with fear, that the number of his rebellious subjects was infinitely greater than the grains of the desert sands, since there was not a grain of sand that didn’t hide a hole, not a hole without an ant, and not an ant without a family. No doubt he asked himself, with bitter resentment, why the vanquisher of the elephants had no power at all over the vilest of the insects in nature! But he was already too far advanced in being civilized to be able to assign a natural solution to a simple idea.
“What does it want of me, after all,” he cried, “this Termite-ant who abuses its lowness and its obscurity to insult me and my just domination over everything that breathes? Why should I care if it grumbles in its lairs, where it takes refuge from my wrath, and where I can scarcely be bothered to follow it? Every time it comes out and gets in my way again, I can crush it beneath my heel. The world belongs to me.”
The Man went back into his palace. He had perfumes scattered around him and, with his women singing him lullabies, he fell asleep.
Woman is another matter.
The female of the male was an artless creature, lively and delicate, irritable and changeable. She was an animal full of charms. The mind of the creator, instead of strength, had given her grace and subtlety. She could caress the Man without loving him, because she believed she would come to love him. She was a tender and credulous sort. God had purposely shut her out of the natural destiny in order to test as far as possible her devotion and her purity. She was an angel who fell out of too much love and completed her expiation by an alliance with Man, so as to undergo all the misery of his offense. The love of a woman for a man—God himself doesn’t understand it! But out of the ironies of his great wisdom he trifles with—by deceiving—a heart which he had made to let itself be fooled by beautiful looks, or the reliability of a promise, or the hope of a false happiness.
Woman wasn’t part of this material world—that was the first fiction Heaven told the Earth
The Man succeeded in distracting himself in this way, dividing his life between soft and sensual pleasures and cruel amusements, from his regret over not having bent the ant to the power of his will. If he ever reproached himself for it, it was only a passing twinge of grief, a weakness unworthy of his sovereign majesty.
During this time, the Termite-ant, having gone down into its hidden tunnels, called together all its people. With tireless persistence, it went on extending a thousand pathways, all converging on the city of Man. At last, followed by the whole ant-world, it came to the foundations of the city’s buildings, and a hundred thousand black legions, crowded together more closely than flocks of sheep, worked their way in to every part of the framework, or went burrowing through the soil around the bases of the columns. When the cornerstones of the buildings could no longer support themselves on the tilting planes of a treacherous, shifting terrain—when the beams and the joists, eaten away from the inside, leaving only surfaces as empty as the withered stalks of dry straws, had nothing left but their empty husks—the Termite-ant suddenly pulled back with its army of sappers in good order.
And the next day, all Byblos collapsed on top of its inhabitants.
The Termite-ant then carried out its plans, directing its troops of pitiless workers to every point where Man had built his cities. While he fled in confusion before his invisible conqueror, every one of his cities fell, as Byblos had done. After that, Man’s empire was nothing but a wilderness. All that was left were some small remnants of buildings, rising up here and there, to show where the home of the master-conqueror of the Earth had been. This great destroyer of towns, this formidable invader, who still claimed, by the royal right of having been the last possessor, the ownership of the immense territories that it had over-run, was not Lord Belos or the Pharaoh Sesostris—it was the Termite-ant.
The feeble fragments of the human family who had escaped from the ruined cities, and from the stubborn determination of the homicidal insects and the fury of the Simoon were only too glad to take refuge in the undesirable lands where the sun’s rays fell aslant, dimmed by incessant fogs, and to build miserable, stinking cities out of mud, or out of burnt-up bones mixed with blood. They prided themselves, as the whole of their glory, on some ignoble monuments that betrayed in every part their arrogance, their greed, and their misery.
God doesn’t get annoyed, except through the language of some orators and some prophets. Sometimes he allows them to interpret his thought. He smiles at mistakes he scorns and rages he would know how to mend, for nothing at all that has been has ceased to be except in appearances, and he doesn’t believe that creation needs any avenger beyond a poor little ant. “Be patient—the ant is eternal.” He waits for the Termite-ant to hollow out roads beneath the sea and to open up abysses under the towns he himself disdains to hate—for God is incapable of hatred—but he believes they are punished enough by their madness and their rages.
Man still builds, and the Termite-ant keeps coming.