Before Adam

CHAPTER I Pictures Pictures Often, before I learned, did I wonder whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams for they were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake- a-day life. They tormented my childhood, making ofmy dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was dif ferent from my kind, a creature unnatural and accursed. In my days only did I attain any measure of happiness. My nights marked the reign of fear and such fear I make bold to state that no man of all the men who walk the earth with me ever suffer fear of like kind and degree. For my fear 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 supreme in that period Mid-Pleistocene. known as the What do I mean I see explanation is necessary before I can tell you of the substance ofmy dreams. Otherwise, little could you know of the meaning of the things I know so well. As I write this, all the beings and happenings of that other w r orld rise up before me in vast phantasmagoria, and I know that to you they would be rhymeless and reasonless. What to you the friendship of Lop-Ear, the warm lure of the Swift One, the lust and the atavism of Red-Eye A screaming incohe rence and .- no more. And a screaming incoherence, likewise, the doings of the Fire People and the Tree Peo ple, and the gib bering councils of the horde. For you know not the peace of the cool caves in the cliffs, the cir cus of the drinking-places at the end of the day. You have never felt the bite of the morning wind in the tree-tops, nor is the taste of young bark sweet in your mouth. It would be better, Idare say, for you to make your approach, as I made mine, through my childhood. As a boy I was very like other boys in my waking hours. It was in my sleep that I was different. From my earliest recollection my sleep was a period of terror. Rarely were my dreams tinctured with happiness. As a rule, they were stuffed with fear and with a fear so strange and alien that it had no ponderable quality. No fear that I experienced in my waking life resembled the fear that possessed me in my sleep. It was cf a quality and kind that transcended all my experiences. For instance, I was a city boy, a city child, rather, to whom the country was an unexplored domain. Yet I never dreamed of cities nor did a house ever occur in any of my dreams. Nor, for that matter, did any of myhuman kind ever break through the wall of my sleep. I, who had seen trees only in parks and illustrated books, wandered in my sleep through intermi nable forests. And further, these dream trees were not a mere blur on my vision. They were sharp and distinct. I was on terms of practised intimacy with them. I saw every branch and twig I saw and knew every different leaf. Well do I remember the first time in my wak life ing that I saw an oak tree. As I looked at the leaves and branches and gnarls, it came to me with distressing vividness that I had seen that same kind of tree many and countless times in my sleep...