Eden River (5 page)

The sound of rustling footsteps and breaking twigs had already warned him of Abel's approach, and now Abel came within sight, a featureless dark shape coming, as it seemed, out of the sky. Is it you, Abel? Hullo, Caint I've been across the river again. It's different over there. And I came back without swimming—what do you think of that? But here, before he was properly launched on his fantastic story, Abel fell silent, seeing that his brother was not alone. This is a woman, said Cain: she is called Zildah and she will live with us. Abel and Zildah, saying nothing, exchanged a stare, frank and innocent; but in the dimness they could not see each other clearly. She will stay with us?
said Abel. That is good. But Zildah, her glance flashing from one to other of her hosts, said suddenly: I must find Larian. And before either of the men could intercept her she was away, lost in the shadow of the forest's verge.

Without swimming, repeated Abel, after a startled pause. The impetus of his first intention was not yet exhausted, though he had now something new to think about which conflicted with the memory of his day's adventures. How can that be? asked Cain. There was a great fragment of tree, said Abel. I dragged it into the water, and it swam instead of me. I sat on the swimming tree and pushed with my hands at the water, and so came back. Did this happen? asked Cain. It happened and it happened, said Abel. Despite this assurance Cain was still in two minds about it, not knowing whether his brother's exploit were fact or dream or prophecy. Nor, in truth, did it greatly exercise him, his mind being occupied with Zildah and with fear lest she should fail to return. Zildah, he said, she has come to be with us, Abel. She has come from the camp of Adam to be with us, to be our Eve. She has loved me and her love is pleasant. I am a man, Abel. I am greater than I knew. I pluck the sun out of the sky and squeeze it drop
by drop upon my tongue. Light flashes out of me, and the power of my belly flows into the earth like rain in flood-time and is given back in greenness. I'm a man: the woman has made me so. Cain made an end of speaking, but Abel offered no answer, for his brother's words had filled him with wonder and conjecture, and with an excitement that made speech impossible. Some time passed before either spoke again; for the most part they sat in silence, pretending to have forgotten the subject of Cain's eager discourse, yet waiting with strained expectation for the sounds that should tell them of Zildah's return; and the moon had moved to a high place in the sky, and was casting her light on the listening faces, when at last their patience was rewarded. They rose without noise and stood to face the approaching footsteps. Two shadows moved towards them out of the moon-spattered darkness. It is Zildah, said Cain, and another with her. The women drew nearer, and nearer still. They stood within the circle of the camp, two facing two, with only the veil of night dividing them. And Zildah, taking her companion's hand, joined it with the hand of Cain, saying: Here is Larian my sister. She too would be a woman. And seeing the two hand-joined she turned and looked gravely on the face
of Abel, as if searching his mind and her own; and the moon gave light to them both. You're Zildah, said Abel in a low voice. We'll go into the forest.

So Zildah, giving her hand to Abel, led him from the shadow of the great tree and they passed into the moonlight together. And Abel was astonished at her beauty, she alone seeming real to him in a night of hazard and conjecture. Her limbs, but for their animal fragrance, might have been modelled in moonlight itself; but there was warmth in her touch, and in her pulse the rhythm of the world. They walked slowly, and without speaking, till having crossed the open space lying between the camp and the forest proper they came into shadow again. There with a common impulse they stopped, loosed hands, and turned to look at each other, face to face, under cover of the darkness. And Abel stood entranced by the quality of this moment: the sighing forest, the sheen of the night sky filtering through rifts in the leafy roof, and, at the very heart of the mystery, a woman, a dream in being, warm and personal. She is herself as I am I, his mind said. She thinks as I do. She lives behind the eyes that I see shining upon me; she is the light of those eyes. And after a long silence he opened his mouth and said to her: We're alone, Zildah, even as Adam and
our mother Eve were alone in the first day. But that day is not: there's no time but this time, no place but here. We are the body of all life, and the life that is divided in us shall in us be joined. He spoke not from his mind but with the voice of prophecy, and Zildah answered him: Your words are strange to me; there's darkness in them. But when she came closer to him, putting her hands on his loins, her head on his breast, he came out of his still mood and embraced her; and night was heavy with their love.

Almond-Eyed Larian was more placid but not less enticing than her sister Zildah. Each in her own way was beautiful; each was generous of herself; and neither Cain nor Abel could have said which was the more dear to him. These four were careless and happy in their loves. Their affections were deep-rooted in the fact of a common life, a common enjoyment of earth and sun; passion was swift and light; and amorous pleasures, being undenied, held no greater room in their minds than any other good thing. During the later days of their virginity the matter had been much in the men's half-conscious thoughts, a nucleus of feverish conjecture and nagging ambition; but now it was as if that darkness had been cast out of them, so that they forgot it had ever existed. Larian had brought with her a knowledge of many new crafts. Her fingers were cunning in the manipulation of reeds and grasses; with a pointed stick she could make marks upon the sandy river bank at the ebb of the tide which would put you in mind at once of what she was
thinking—of antelope or lion or fruit-laden tree; she found new foods and mixed them in new ways; she had a quiet audacity in all her dealings with nature. Abel spent much time in her company. It was his pleasure in the early morning, even though his night had perhaps been spent in the arms of Zildah, to wander in the woods with Larian: in whose presence, whether by reason of her intimate contact with such things or for another reason, the trees and the grass and the cobwebs glistening with dew, last year's leaves elastic under foot, the smell of the soil, the hurrying insects, the birds and friendly beasts, all had a quality which they had lacked in her absence. It was nothing that she said, nothing indeed that she knew: it was simply that he lived, for the time being, with sharpened senses, looking no longer into himself, where much of his time had been spent in the days before the coming of the women, but outwards, upon the green and growing world. Zildah, with a look or a touch, could on occasion make his blood shout and the visible world dissolve in fire: that was her quality. Larian, by no visible devices, gave him the world in new colours. Either could release him from himself into a boundless country; and both, though in their absence he gave them
little thought, were precious to him.

Look, Larian, he said: there's a black cloud falling out of the sky. And Larian, looking in the direction of his pointing finger, flashed away from him without a word, to reappear presently with a couple of skeps which for some days past he had watched her making of dried reeds matter together. Where is your cloud now? she asked him. It has come to rest, he answered, in that tree: it's a swarm of little flying creatures. It's a swarm of bees, said Larian. We must catch them, and they'll give us honey. I shall need your help, Abel; so be ready, and do what I say. She took his hand and led him to the bee-laden tree. The branch is too high to reach, she said, so you must climb the tree. And when he was astride the branch she stood underneath it, with her two skeps ready, and said: Now shake the branch, but gently, or you'll frighten them. He did what was required of him, and did it precisely, less by the exercise of his private judgement than by yielding his imagination to hers, so that it was as if she herself unerringly controlled his every movement; and when the capture of the bees was effected she told him the story of how, in her home with Adam, she had first discovered the habits of these busy creatures, and of the
sweetness their labours yielded to careful hands. In the hive, she said, they build for themselves such beds as we have never built. There, even on the coldest night, even in the season of much rain, they live secure; and, when the sun is shining, all day long they fly to and fro gathering scent and sunshine out of the flowers. There's one greater than the rest who is the mother of them all, even as Eve is our mother. Have they, asked Abel, an Adam as well? What's Adam to us? asked Larian. This was a question that Abel could not answer; but it fell into the soil of his mind, and his eyes, withdrawn from Larian, followed it searchingly.

Perhaps it was Larian's account of the bees that turned Abel's thoughts on building again. He stared at the broad terrace which he and his brother called their bed and had shared for so many moons, and a sense of its inadequacy troubled him. The season of rain would soon be round again, and he remembered that the shelter of the tree had proved anything but sufficient on the last occasion: with every gust of wind those broad leaves had showered the water down. It was inevitable that Abel should plan his building in terms of beds: the more general notion of house was something that necessity had never persuaded him to conceive. What he and his
fellow-woodlanders needed was a shelter for the night: and that only at certain seasons, for in the long dry spells they slept in the open as a matter of course. If I could fix the body of a tree at each corner, he said to Larian, speaking his thought aloud, we could spread a canopy over their tops and lie dry in our bed. A canopy? said Larian: what is that? It is what I have in my mind, said Abel excitedly. I've seen and named it. Listen, Larian, and you, Zildah: listen. Where's Cain? I want to tell him my plan. We'll gather the largest leaves, very many; and we'll fasten the leaves together so that they are one leaf; and this shall be our canopy. How, asked Zildah, shall we fasten the leaves together?
I
shall do that, put in Larian. And this canopy, Abel continued, shall be raised above us on the bodies of four trees, and the rain won't reach us. After a silence Larian spoke. The canopy that
I
see, she said, is different from yours, Abel. But Abel was too full of his project to ask what she meant; and at that point in the conversation Cain arrived, and it all had to be expounded again from the beginning. Cain was not slow in catching fire from the general excitement. Moreover he had important contributions to offer. Cain, after countless experiments, had invented the flint-axe, which
he could use with astonishing effect; and he made short work of the first difficulty, that of providing the four posts. With graphic gestures he shewed his companions how that would be done, and at once, as by unspoken agreement, the others joined him in this game of anticipation. I'm scraping a hole for the tree to stand in, said Cain, with the appixjpriate pretended action. I am scraping another and another and another, said Abel. I, said Zildah, I am gathering leaves for the canopy. And I, said Larian (very busy with her fingers), I am making the canopy: but not of leaves. And now, said Cain, I am planting the tree in its hole. And I am planting, said Abel, another and another and another. Zildah said: I am standing on the shoulder of Cain holding the canopy by two corners. And Larian: I am on Abel's shoulders holding the other corners.

Between the four of them they made a song to this same effect. It was a typical performance: all their ceremonial pastimes represented something either experienced or hoped for, and childlike they spent much of their common leisure in this fashion. They had equally, however, an appetite for practical achievement. Once the use of the axe had been demonstrated to him Abel turned to a matter
that had lain dormant in his mind for a long time, and betook him to the river, axe in hand, in search of that floating log. He found it and communed with it, squatting on the ground before it as though in worship. In this posture he remained for a long while, entranced, with the sky darkening above him, and the sounds of the forest diminishing, and the voice of the river becoming more clear, more personal: till at last a light burst in his mind, the pulse of creation rippled through his limbs, and he leapt to his feet with a cry. In that flash of mind the seven seas were spanned, and Troy fell.

Abel was rapt in his work for many days. Meanwhile the building of the great bed went forward; and the shutter of night and day moved so softly on its hinges that Zildah, Larian, Cain, and even Abel the dreamer, had no sense of time passing and the world growing old.

In claiming to be a woman like her mother, Zildah had spoken more truth than she knew. And of Larian no less could have been said. Both were quick to conceive, and each, within an hour of the other, gave birth to a new man. The achievement made them for a while strangers to Cain and Abel, who, while admiring this proof of the women's creative power, were almost as puzzled as Adam had been on a like occasion, and disconcerted to find themselves set aside. This new distance between themselves and the women was as much spiritual as physical: the labours of maternity were alien to them, and they had no part in its rewards. The bed or sleeping-ground became for the time being a nursery, and when they had done—willingly enough—such fetching and carrying as was required of them, the men were glad to keep away from it. The great canopy, Larian's triumph and the work of her hands alone, was made of matted reeds, coated with clay and varnished with resin, and stretched over a large square wooden
frame that rested on the four corner-posts. It provided a shield against vertical rain, if no other, and it was a source of much pride and satisfaction.

From the moment of their first bleating cries the newcomers became, whether the men liked it or not, the centre of the communal life. This was a good deal more than either Cain or Abel had looked for when they so eagerly received the women into their camp: but though they were at one in their slight discomfiture they differed sharply in their reactions to it. Cain, wandering off on his own devices, gave the domestic situation no thought till his return at nightfall with or without food. But Abel had been presented with a problem, and his imagination could not rest till it was solved. It was no new problem, but it had now an emphasis, a sharp edge of disquiet, which had formerly been lacking. He went into the woods; he swam in the river; he made further audacious experiments with his dugout canoe and became expert in its management. But his mind was held in a brooding trance that took little or no account of these immediate things. It cannot be said that he was thinking: an event more momentous than thought was coming to birth in his mind. And while
in this state of brooding he came upon Kirith