Allan and the Ice-Gods

ALLAN AND THE ICE-GODS

too many women in it for his liking. But what the dear chap really meant was that he preferred to return to die with me.” “Good old Pag!” ejaculated Moananga – I mean, Good.

“After that,” I went on, “the canoe ran into the spindrift which the wind lashed up, and the sea fog – “

“Always get it with thawing ice,” interrupted Good. “Once nearly lost in it myself off the coast of Newfoundland.”

“ – and for a moment Pag and I lost sight of it. It reappeared between two billows of fog a hundred yards or more away, and then – well, then we saw a tall woman spring suddenly from the canoe into the sea. But, as you will remember, both Aaka and Laleela were tall, exactly of a height indeed, and neither of us could tell which of them it was that the sea took. Next instant the mist closed in again.”

“Did you see the woman rise up in the canoe? Aaka was sitting down, you remember.”

“No, we only saw the spring.”

“That sounds like Laleela,” said Good, “for she was standing. And yet I do not think it can have been, for she was doing all she knew to try to bring the craft round, thinking to creep back to fetch you by the edge of the ice where the current did not run so fiercely. The last thing she said was to call to me to get out the other paddle and help. Indeed, I had it in my hand but, being a landlubber, hardly knew how to use it.”

“I don’t think Laleela could have done such a thing, Good. Suicide was against her principles. Indeed, she reproached me upon that very matter. Also, her own country was just ahead of her, and she would wish to reach it, if only to make sure that

Foh and Aaka – yes, Aaka – met with a good reception. Yet who knows?”

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“Aaka had a very bitter tongue,” remarked Good. “Also, by then, Laleela saw that we could never get back against that race, and she was mad with grief; so, as you say – who knows?” and he groaned, while I – well, never mind what I did.

For a time there was silence between us, a very depressing silence, because both of us were overcome. It was broken by Good asking humbly enough if I thought he might have some whisky now.

“I don’t know, and I don’t care, but for my part I mean to risk it,” I said, and going to the side table I helped myself freely, as did Good, only more so.

Teetotallers may say what they like, but alcohol in moderation often is a friend in trouble. So, at least, we found, for, as we put that whisky down, our spirits rose considerably.

“Look here!” said Good presently while he lit his pipe and I occupied myself in hiding away that confounded Taduki outfit, which I both hated and blessed. I hated it because it seemed to be possessed by an imp which, like a will-’o-the-wisp, led one on and on to the edge of some great denouement, and then, in the very moment of crisis, vanished away, leaving one floundering in a bog of doubt and wonder. I blessed it because these dreams it gave were, to me at any rate, so very suggestive and interesting.

“Look here!” repeated Good. “You are a clever old boy in your way, and one who thinks a lot. So be kind enough to tell me what all this business means. Do you suggest that you and I have been reading some chapters out of a former existence of our own?”

“I suggest nothing,” I answered sharply; “the thing is beyond me. But if you want to know, I don’t much believe in the

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former existence solution. Does it not occur to you that we must all of us, perhaps fifty thousand, perhaps five hundred thousand years ago, have had just such ancestors as Wi and the rest of them? And is it not possible that this drug may have the power of awakening the ancestral memory which has come down to us with our spark of life through scores of intervening forefathers?”

“Yes, that’s right enough. And yet, Allan, in a way, the thing is too perfect. Remember that we understood and used the language of those prehistoric beachcombers, although we have forgotten every word of it now – or at least I have. Remember that we saw, not only our own careers, but those of other people with whose ancestral memories we have nothing to do; moreover, that some of those people reminded us, or at any rate me, of folk whom I have known in this life; just as though the whole lot of us had reappeared together.”

“That’s the very point, Good. Men are queer bundles of mystery. For the most part, they seem quite commonplace, what might be called matter-of-fact, yet I believe that inside there are few who are not stuffed with imagination, as our dreams show us. Supposing that we are dealing with our own ancestral pasts; if that be so, we could quite well invent the rest, using the staff that lies to our hands, namely our knowledge of others with whom we have been intimate in life. These would be the foundation upon which the dreams were built up, the bits of glass that make the pattern in the kaleidoscope.”

“If so, all I have to say is that your kaleidoscope is an uncommonly clever machine, because anything more natural than those dirty people upon the beach I never knew, Allan. Still, one thing seems to support your argument. Wi, the great

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hunter of the tribe, who by birth and surroundings was a most elementary savage, showed himself much in advance of his age. He made laws; he thought about the good of others; he resisted his perfectly natural inclinations; he adopted a higher religion when it was brought to his knowledge; he was patient under provocation; he offered himself up as a sacrifice to the gods in whom he no longer believed, because his people believed in them and he thought that his voluntary death would act as a kind of faith cure among them, which is one of the noblest deeds I have ever heard of among men. Lastly, when he saw that a confounded hollowed-out log, which by courtesy may be called a canoe or a boat, was overcrowded and likely to sink in a kind of ice-packed mill race, he thrust it out into the stream and himself remained behind to die, although it contained all that he cared about – his wife, another woman who loved him, his son, and perhaps, I may add, his brother. I say that the man who did these things, not to mention others, was a hero and a Christian martyr rolled into one, with something of the saint and Solon, who I believe was the first recorded lawgiver, thrown in. Now, I ask you, Allan, could such a person by any possibility have existed in paleolithic or pre-paleolithic times at that period of the world’s history when one of the ice ages was beginning? Also the same question may be asked of Laleela.”

“You must remember,” I answered, “that Wi was not such a hero as you suppose. He offered to sacrifice himself chiefly in order to save his family, or one of them, just as most men would do in like circumstances. As regards Laleela, she and everything about her were mysterious – her origin, her noble patience, and especially her selfcontrol. But it is quite obvious

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that she belonged to another stratum of civilization, I presume that which we call neolithic, since she told me – I mean Wi – that her people grew crops; kept cows, with other domestic animals; had some advanced form of religion with a divinity that was symbolized by the moon; and so forth. Well, there is nothing strange about all this, since now we know that in prehistoric days races in very different stages of advancement existed in the world at the same time. It is quite possible that Wi and his company lived in their paleolithic simplicity, let us say somewhere in Scotland (those red-headed wanderers who descended upon them suggest Scotland), while Laleela and her people existed perhaps in the south of Ireland or in France, where the climate was much warmer and the ice did not come.”

“Probably; Wi and Co. might have lived anywhere in a cold district and gone to any warmer shore – perhaps one washed by the Gulf Stream,” answered Good. “At any rate, one thing is obvious. If there is anything in this dream of ours, it tells of a tragedy that must often have happened in the world. I mean, the coming of an ice age.”

“Yes,” I said. “All about the northern shores there must have been little collections of miserable people like to those over whom Wi ruled, each of them perhaps thinking itself alone in the world, and time on time the ice at intervals of tens or hundreds of thousands of years must have descended upon them and crushed them out, except a few survivors who fled south. Doubtless, the tragedy of Wi was common, though nobody thinks of such things to-day when, for aught we know, we may be living in an interval between two ice ages. Not long ago, I was reading of the flint pits at Brandon in Norfolk, where

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it is said that, in the far past, lived tribes of flint-workers. Then, it seems, came an ice age, and after it was over appeared other tribes of flintworkers, separated from the first by untold epochs of time. But one might talk of such things all night.”

“And all to-morrow, Allan. But you have not answered my question. How do you account for a man like Wi at that period of the world’s history?”

I took a little more whisky and soda to give myself time to think. Then I answered easily enough, at least to my mind.

“The world they tell us now has probably been inhabitable and therefore inhabited by man for millions of years. Now, Wi, if he ever existed, by comparison lived quite recently, for he knew how to make fire, how to trap beasts, and many other things. I suggest to you, my dear Good, that we have not really advanced very much since the days of Wi. The skulls that are found of people of or before his period have the same, or sometimes an even larger, brain capacity than our own. All the first and more essential developments of the human race took place infinite ages before the birth of Wi. Some outstanding individuals must have conceived the idea of making and enforcing necessary laws and of putting a stop to infanticide. Why should not Wi have been one of these? He may have gone ahead too fast – as, in fact, he did – but perhaps the memory of his laws survived through his wife Aaka, or his brother Moananga, or his son Foh, if they escaped, and were repeated and improved upon by future generations of his blood. In short, Good, although I think that men have grown cleverer as a race, I do not believe that the high-water mark of individuals among them has advanced greatly since the times of such as Wi, which, after all, in the history of the world, and indeed

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of the human race, are but yesterday. For the rest, in my own life I have known many who are called savages in Africa who knew as little or less than Wi and yet, in similar circumstances, would have done all that he did, and more.”

“That’s a new idea,” said Good. “Perhaps we civilized people vaunt ourselves too much.”

“Perhaps,” I answered, “for civilization as we know it is very young and a great sham. I don’t know and it isn’t worth bothering about. All I know is that I wish I had never dreamed that dream, which has given me a new set of sorrows that cannot be forgotten.”

“That’s the point,” exclaimed Good. “Now there was Tana. She was a jealous sort of woman, and we quarrelled often, especially when I began to make up to Laleela. And I, well, I was a natural man, much as I am to-day, so, as I say, we quarrelled. Yet, after all, I was very fond of Tana; she was my wife for many years, and she bore children whom both of us loved, children that died, as most children died among the tribe. As for the rows between us, what do they matter? Now that I have come to know her, I can never forget Tana.”

“It is the same here,” I answered. “That boy Foh, and his sister Fo-a whom you remember that brute-man Henga murdered – for example. Well, they may be but dream children, but henceforward they are mine. At this very moment I tell you that I could burst into tears over the murder of Fo-a, and that my heart aches over the loss of Foh, and yet I suppose that they are only fantasies, drug-born fantasies. See what this cursed Taduki has done for us! To the bereavements and miseries of our own lives, it has added another series. It has suggested to us that we have endured other lives, other losses, and other

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miseries, and yet it has not helped us to solve their problems. Shall we ever see any of these people again? We who seemed to mix with them still exist. Do they exist also, and if so have we any hope of finding them?”

“Are you quiet certain, Allan, that we haven’t found some of them already, although it was but to lose them once more. Now, although I never saw him, you have often told me of the Hottentot called Hans who served you from your youth until he died, still trying to serve you by saving your life. Well, isn’t there some resemblance between that Hottentot and Pag?”

“Undoubtedly there is,” I answered, “although Pag the Wolfman was a bit more primeval.”

“Then, as regards Laleela – how about that Lady Ragnall who left you the fortune which, like a donkey, you refused? Do you see any connection between them?”

“Not much,” I answered, “except that they were both priestesses of, or at any rate in some way connected with, the moon. But, of course, I know very little of Laleela’s life. She appeared from a southern land, but exactly why she left it, I cannot tell, because she never told me. At that time her age must have been, well, what do you put it at, Good?”

“Anywhere between twenty-eight and thirty-two, I should say.”

“That’s about it. Well, in those days, a woman of her beauty and station must have had lots of private history behind her at, let us say, thirty. Indeed she hinted as much more than once. But as she never stated what it was, there is very little to go on, and identification becomes impossible.

“Look here, let us stop this before we go cracked. Under the influence of an African drug, we have seen strange things,

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or think that we have seen them. We have seen an ancient, barbaric tribe living at the foot of the glaciers upon a desolate beach, collecting their food from year to year as best they could with their primitive weapons, and evolving a kind of elementary civilization. Thus they were ruled by a chief who might be killed when any stronger man appeared, as in a herd of game the old bull is killed by the young bull. We have seen a man of strength and ability arise who tried to make new and better laws and to introduce justice, and who, under the influence of a foreign and more advanced woman, ultimately turned from the worship of fierce fetish gods supposed to dwell in the ice they dreaded, to a purer if still elementary faith. We have seen the fate fall upon him that overtakes almost all reformers, also that this ice was not feared in vain, since it swept down and destroyed his people, as indeed it must often have done in the history of the world, and perhaps will do again in the future.”

“Yes, we have seen all that,” said Good, “but if it wasn’t real, what is the use of it? Dreams have not much practical value.” “Are you sure about that, Good? Are you sure that Life, as

we know it, is anything more than a Taduki dream?” “What do you mean, Allan?”

“I mean that perhaps already we may be plunged into and be a part of immortality, and that this immortality may have its nights as well as its days – dream-haunted nights of which this present life of ours is one.”

“Steady, old fellow. You are running full steam into strange waters and without a chart.”

“Quite true,” I answered. “Let us get back into the channel between the lighted buoys. To my mind our experience

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