Three years later, when all that he had attempted had prospered, when his old wife had found strange peace and understanding, when his son was well begun in life and his daughter happily pregnant, he would stand alone in a thicket of thorn and pistachio, trembling with a mighty terror that he could not even describe. It is with this man’s experiences in these three culminating years that the remembered history of Makor begins.
When he reached the well Ur bent down and splashed cool water onto his face. Taking a wooden cup which had been laboriously carved by flints, he drank the water and was about to put the cup aside when he saw his face looming up from the well. It was hairy, surrounded by a circle formed of hunched shoulders, small tight ears and drooping brow, but it was marked by two blue eyes that shone like little stars.
The light reflecting from his eyes fascinated Ur and he began to laugh, but as he did so a tiny pebble, scarce bigger than a bee’s wing, tumbled into the well and set up ripples which distorted the image of his face, and something in the way the water moved, taking his eyes and ears and mouth with it, frightened Ur and he drew back. But as quickly as the ripples had passed, the water restored his features to their proper place and he was once more Ur. He shivered to think that some unknown power could alter the essential he and smear it into a distorted form. Then he smiled at himself but he was not so free and happy as before.
Above his head he heard a soft whisper. It was surely a bee, and he dropped the wooden cup, staring here and there at the sky, and like the hunter he was he spotted the insect and saw its direction down the wadi in which, when rains accumulated, a muddy river roared briefly on its way to the sea. There were dead trees in the wadi where bees kept their homes, and Ur sprang to his feet, chasing after the insect, for if he could keep pace with it he might find his next cache of honey. With long-practiced eyes he followed the elusive bee until he was certain he had spotted the hidden tree. Motionless he sat on the ground, and after a while he saw where bees were flying in and out with whatever it was they stole from flowers to make their honey.
Ur’s lips began to drool. Slapping his face, to prepare it for the pain ahead, he pawed his powerful feet in the sand like an animal about to fight, and with a sudden rush he sprang at the dead tree, climbed far up its side before any bees detected him, and with strong hands began tearing away rotted portions of the trunk. The passionate sound of bees springing into action assured him that there was honey to be found, so before the bees could swarm to drive him from their treasure, he tore down into the heart of the tree until he felt the honeycomb.
Then the bees struck! Fifty, a hundred flew at his face, covered his hands, tried to find his soft parts. They stung him and died with their bodies distended. But his numb hands kept tearing at the comb, bringing out luscious chunks which he threw to the ground below. Finally, when he could scarcely see, he slid down from the tree, killing hundreds of bees as he fell. Only then did he start brushing the fiery creatures from his face, and when this was accomplished he took off the animal skin he was wearing and piled the chunks of honeycomb into it. Then, as quickly as his bandy legs would carry him, he ran from the wadi, smarting throughout his body with an exquisite pain.
When he reached the well his face had swelled like a mid-month moon and his eyes could hardly see, but a child from the cave spotted him coming and shouted, “Ur found honey!” And he was besieged by children, who led him up from the well to the cave, pointing at his distorted face and screaming with joy. With brave hands they touched his sack of honey and their mouths watered. But when Ur reached the safety of the cave and opened his sack to show the luscious hoard he had stolen from the bees, he found trapped in the honeycomb more than a dozen insects, and with his thick, hard fingers he picked them out and set them free.
“Make us more honey,” he told each one. “And do it in the same tree.”
The cave into which Ur retreated had only a narrow opening, perhaps twice the height of a man, but inside it developed into a dark, capacious room with space for many people. At the far end it narrowed into a tunnel which penetrated the earth beneath the rock, and in the ceiling there was a small opening which permitted smoke to escape, while from somewhere deep within the tunnel other fresh air entered, so that the cave was comfortable. In the center a smoldering fire was maintained, which women could feed with extra wood when a flame for cooking was required, and along the smoke-stained walls hung spears and clubs, animal skins drying for later use and baskets containing grain. It was a warm and comfortable refuge, a tight cocoon made of rock, and for more than two hundred thousand years it had provided shelter for the manlike creatures who had from time to time crept into it.
In Ur’s day six associated families lived there permanently, brothers of one group who had married sisters from another, strangers who had wandered in to marry extra daughters, all members of a common stock and all working together at the gathering of food and the maintenance of the community fire. The men were hunters, and they ranged far in search of animals, killing them with arrows and spears of high efficiency. They were no longer dumb brutes plodding after primordial beasts and stoning them to death; they were skilled huntsmen who took no unnecessary risks. Their women tanned the hides of the dead animals, making an excellent leather, and spent long hours garnering the wild grain that grew haphazardly in many fields. Holding a skin beneath the brown and ripened stalks, they would beat the heads with sticks and thus collect the precious grains which they ground in stone hand mills, making a flour that would keep throughout the winter. As for the children, they played upon the flat rock, tumbling and grunting like a pack of bear cubs delighted with the sun. And at night all gathered in the great cave, beside the flickering fire, as men recounted what they had done that day and women sewed.
When Ur appeared with his honey normal activity in the cave stopped and the inhabitants fell like a pack of animals upon the rare treasure, for honey was the only sweet the cave men knew, and for a few moments the smoke-stained room was filled with grunts and growls as each hand grabbed for its chance share of the sweet, waxy stuff. Children had a hard time getting their portion, but Ur helped them wedge their way among the elders, and their squeals of pleasure proved that their small hands were reaching the hoard. Two lesser hunters were absent trying to find deer, but no one thought to save them a share of the honey; and before long Ur’s bearskin was picked clean and people were spitting the wax into a bowl, where it would be melted down to treat the sinews used in sewing. And now that the honey was gone Ur could sit on a large stone while his wife put cold water on his puffed face and combed dead bees from his beard.
The Family of Ur formed a closer group than some. It was led by the bandy-legged old man who, having lived for thirty-two seasons, was now approaching the time when he must die. His elderly wife had survived thirty; she looked after the children, a son whose distaste for hunting worried Ur, and a lively daughter who, having lived through eleven seasons, was almost old enough to have a man for herself, except that she favored none in the cave and no stranger had yet come by in search of her. It was her mother’s hope that when one did, he would want to live with the family and in time take Ur’s place.
Old Ur was a man whom the cave people respected. He was five feet, four inches tall and weighed about a hundred and seventy pounds, a stocky figure with the huge shoulders that characterized his species. Above his beard gleamed his bright blue eyes and the ruddy cheeks that liked to wrinkle upward in a grin. He laughed a lot, and now that his own children were grown, played with the offspring of his neighbors as the little round ones scrambled across the rock in sunlight. Unlike the brutish creatures who had originally wandered to the well from Africa, Ur walked erect, lacked heavy bones over his eyes, and had a smooth skin that produced no great amount of body hair. He had acquired full dexterity in the use of his relatively small hands, although he never understood why his right hand remained more agile than his left and did most of the work and all of the throwing. His skin had a peculiarity which
surprised him: under his bearskin it remained a pinkish white, but where the sun touched, the coloring became dark brown, so that from a distance Ur and his partners looked like black men. In the last forty thousand years his throat, his tongue and lower jaw had been much modulated and were now flexible instruments adapted to the articulation of language; he had a vocabulary of more than six hundred words, some of which comprised three syllables and a few four or five. Every hundred years or so new experiences would accumulate, requiring the invention of new words; but this was a slow process, for Ur and his neighbors were extremely cautious and the utterance of a new word might upset the balance of nature and call into being strange forces that were better left at rest, so words tended to be restricted to the same sounds that time had made familiar. There was one other use to which the flexible voice of man could now be put, although not many used it in this capacity: men could sing—their women in particular—and sometimes in the early morning Ur would hear his wife and daughter making pleasant noises, using no words or made-up ones like “traaaaaaaa” or “sehhhhhhhhh.”
That night, when the two hunters returned with no deer and the fires were banked, when the roly-poly children slept like bear cubs and a cool breeze issued from the tunnel, the community sat in shadows as Ur with his puffed eyes explained how he had found the honey: “From the well Makor, from the depths of the water a single bee rose and called to me, ‘Follow, follow!’ I ran through the wadi till the sun was tired. Over rocks and trees where the deer feed and where the wild boar comes at night I ran. You would have fallen with cracked lungs, but I ran on, for the bee kept calling, ‘Follow, follow!’ And so I came to the hidden tree, which all have searched for but none found.” He told how he had climbed the dead trunk and, fearless of the attacking bees, had torn into the heart of their treasure, and as he spoke of the sweet burden that had filled his bearskin he threw back his head and cried in the ecstasy of the hunter who shares the spirit of the animals he tracks:
“Burning with pain, I brought the honey home.
My eyes closed with pain, I followed the voice.
For the bee flew before me singing, ‘Ur found our honey.
Ur, the great hunter, was not afraid.
I will lead him home, back to his cave.
Back to the well I will lead the brave hunter.’ ”
No sound came from the cave except the quiet sleeping of the children, and all could hear the voice of the bee leading the hunter home.
Ur would probably have lived out his life hunting animals and bees and telling about it at the fire if he had married an ordinary woman, but his wife did not come from the cave. Years ago, when Ur was just beginning to run with the hunters, his father had led an expedition into lands east of the Whispering Sea and had there come upon a strange people with whom he had naturally engaged in battle. The cave men were triumphant, but after the slaughter they found that one twelve-year-old girl was living and Ur’s father had brought her home.
She knew nothing of caves; the dark interior frightened her and she supposed when she was dragged inside, that it was to her death. Later, when she learned to speak the language of the cave, she explained to Ur that in her land families did not live underground; but he could not imagine how they did live, for her explanation of how men could use stones and walls of wood to build their own caves above the ground made no sense to him. “It’s a better way to live,” she assured him, but he could not understand.
Nor did he understand, when this strange girl became his wife, her preoccupation with gathering wild grain; but she knew that unlike raw meat it could be stored throughout the winter, and she would wander considerable distances to find the best stands of cereal. One day in an open field east of the great rock she found an accidental accumulation of wild grain, and she brought Ur to the spot, showing him how much easier it was to reap a concentration of stalks instead of searching far and wide, and she asked her husband, “Why don’t we make the grain grow where we can watch it? For if we do, when autumn comes it will ripen in fields that we remember.” Ur, knowing that if the wild grain had wanted to grow at man’s command it would have done so, ridiculed his wife and refused to help her dig out the grass and move it closer to the well. His wife, bending over the stalks, looked up and said, “My father made the grain grow where he wanted it to grow,” but Ur rejected the concept: “He also built caves on top of the ground.” And with amused tolerance he went off to hunt.
Nevertheless, for the first fifteen years of their married life, Ur’s wife went out of the cave in all seasons trying fruitlessly to tame the wild wheat, but each year it was killed either by drought or flood or too much winter or by wild boars rampaging through the field and rooting up all things with their tusks; and it seemed evident to Ur that the wild grass did not intend to grow where his stubborn woman dictated. In the meantime, the other families who shared the cave went about their business of tracking down the wild wheat where it chanced to grow; and they ate well. But two years ago Ur’s wife had found along the far banks of the wadi some young shoots of a vigorous emmer wheat and these she chanced to place in proper soil along one edge of the great sloping rock, so that throughout the dry season enough moisture drained off the rock to keep the grain alive; and although its yield in edible wheat was disappointing, the grain lived as she had directed, and in the spring it reappeared where it was wanted. Ur’s wife told her family, “We’ll see if we can make the wheat grow along the edges of the rock, because I think that in those places the soil helps us.” And as the determined woman had foreseen, here her wild grain prospered.
When her daughter had reached her eleventh year, Ur’s wife satisfied herself that she could make the emmer wheat grow where she wished and she felt it necessary to reopen another problem which she had been pondering for some time, hesitant about discussing it with her husband. Now, without warning, she told him, “We ought to leave the cave and live by the well. There we can watch our grain.” The bandy-legged hunter looked at her as if she were a child trying to steal his honey.
“Men should live together,” he said. “Around the fire at night. Telling stories when the hunt has ended.”
“Why are you always so sure that your way is better?” she asked, and Ur was about to mock the question when he saw her lively face. She was a delicate woman with long black hair and whenever Ur looked at her small, determined chin he could remember the joy he had known with her when they used to lie in moonlight on the rock, staring upward at the stars. As a wife she had been hard-working and as a mother, tender and responsive. But she had always possessed strong ideas—it had taken Ur’s father a hard fight to kill her family—so he did not laugh when she repeated her question, “Why is your way better?”
“Where would we live … if we did leave the cave?” he asked defensively.
“In a house,” she said. “With its own roof and walls.”
“The first storm would blow it down,” he predicted.
“Storms didn’t blow down my father’s house.”
“You don’t have storms over there the way we have over here,” he said, and that ended the discussion. He was therefore surprised some mornings later, as he was leading his hunters forth to track gray deer, to see his wife and son working at the flat area near the well.
“What are you doing with those rocks?” he asked.
“Building a house,” his wife replied, and he saw that she had laid out a circle of rocks some fourteen feet across. Shrugging his shoulders at her obstinacy, he went off to the swamp with his hunters, but at dusk when he returned to the cave he could see at the well a substantial pile of rocks and the beginnings of a solid structure. Four days later he came back from a hunting trip to find his son erecting upon the wall of rocks a palisade of tree trunks cut from the wadi.
“Now what are you doing?” Ur asked.
And his son replied, with words that put him into formal opposition to his father, “If the trees give us walls, we should use them.” And Ur saw that his wife was bringing
rushes from the wadi and reeds to be woven into a tightly matted roof, under which the family would find protection from the sun. And what he saw Ur did not like.
At nightfall he led his family back to the cave, where he recounted in vivid phrases the story of his hunt, but he ended the narration much sooner than usual, for he was worried about what his wife and son were doing. He loved this cave, so cool and convenient to the well. It bred lice, to be sure, and it smelled, but the fire was warm and the companionship a thing to be cherished. For the past seventy thousand years the cave had been continuously occupied by Ur’s ancestors, one generation after the other, leaving behind them brief mementos of their short and ugly lives. Ur could remember as a boy, in that far corner over there, finding a long-forgotten skeleton encased in hard rock which had formed when rainwater seeped down over the limestone, and later, back in the narrow part of the tunnel, he had come upon a hand axe, adroitly chipped from a core of flint by some brutish, stooped figure more than two hundred thousand years ago. On fleeting occasions in his life Ur had caught the inner spirit of the cave, that closed community which embraced its members and excluded all others. The cave lent strength to those who lived within it and the preposterous idea of his wife and son, to build a separate house for one small family by the well, was instinctively repugnant to him. Men should live together, smelling each other and bringing honey home to all.
He especially liked the moment when a dozen men surged out of the cave bent on hunting, twelve men guided by a single will, and that will most often his. He could remember how, as a boy, he had surprised the older hunters with his unusual feeling for the land and his ability to predict where animals would take cover. “Come along and show us where the lion is hiding,” they had often called, and he had led them westward as far as the Roaring Sea, clinging to the lion’s spoor until he could point to a thicket, saying, “He’s in there.” In the opposite direction he had scouted paths leading to the Whispering Sea and had taken his men along these paths in search of deer, who grew panicky when Ur and his team followed their trail, smelling them out with a canniness that was frightening. It was no uncommon thing, when the men of Ur’s cave spotted the track of a lion, for them to maintain the chase for three days or even four, driving the beast at last to cover where they could assault him with their spears and arrows.