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Before Adam

Jack London

Before Adam

by Jack London

1906

“These are our ancestors, and their history is our history.

Remember that as surely as we one day swung down out of the

trees and walked upright, just as surely, on a far earlier day, did

we crawl up out of the sea and achieve our first adventure on

land. ”

Before Adam

CHAPTER I

Pictures! 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 of my

dreams a procession of nightmares and a little later convincing me

that I was different 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 known

as the Mid-Pleistocene.

What do I mean? I see explanation is necessary before I can tell you

of the substance of my 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 world 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 incoherence

and no more. And a screaming incoherence, likewise, the doings of

the Fire People and the Tree People, and the gibbering councils of

the horde. For you know not the peace of the cool caves in the cliffs,

the circus 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, I dare 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.

Jack London - Before Adam # (keep).pdf