ncorruptible history of life from life's beginning. This history is
written in our tissues and our bones, in our functions and our organs, in
our brain cells and in our spirits, and in all sorts of physical and
psychic atavistic urgencies and compulsions. Once we were fish-like, you
and I, my reader, and crawled up out of the sea to pioneer in the great,
dry-land adventure in the thick of which we are now. The marks of the
sea are still on us, as the marks of the serpent are still on us, ere the
serpent became serpent and we became we, when pre-serpent and pre-we were
one. Once we flew in the air, and once we dwelt arboreally and were
afraid of the dark. The vestiges remain, graven on you and me, and
graven on our seed to come after us to the end of our time on earth.

What Pascal glimpsed with the vision of a seer, I have lived. I have
seen myself that one man contemplated by Pascal's philosophic eye. Oh, I
have a tale, most true, most wonderful, most real to me, although I doubt
that I have wit to tell it, and that you, my reader, have wit to perceive
it when told. I say that I have seen myself that one man hinted at by
Pascal. I have lain in the long trances of the jacket and glimpsed
myself a thousand living men living the thousand lives that are
themselves the history of the human man climbing upward through the ages.

Ah, what royal memories are mine, as I flutter through the aeons of the
long ago. In single jacket trances I have lived the many lives involved
in the thousand-years-long Odysseys of the early drifts of men. Heavens,
before I was of the flaxen-haired Aesir, who dwelt in Asgard, and before
I was of the red-haired Vanir, who dwelt in Vanaheim, long before those
times I have memories (living memories) of earlier drifts, when, like
thistledown before the breeze, we drifted south before the face of the
descending polar ice-cap.

I have died of frost and famine, fight and flood. I have picked berries
on the bleak backbone of the world, and I have dug roots to eat from the
fat-soiled fens and meadows. I have scratched the reindeer's semblance
and the semblance of the hairy mammoth on ivory tusks gotten of the chase
and on the rock walls of cave shelters when the winter storms moaned
outside. I have cracked marrow-bones on the sites of kingly cities that
had perished centuries before my time or that were destined to be builded
centuries after my passing. And I have left the bones of my transie