our high, inaccessible cave. And here
must have been born the child that inherited the stuff of my dreams,
that had moulded into its being all the impressions of my life--or of
the life of Big-Tooth, rather, who is my other-self, and not my real
self, but who is so real to me that often I am unable to tell what age I
am living in.

I often wonder about this line of descent. I, the modern, am
incontestably a man; yet I, Big-Tooth, the primitive, am not a man.
Somewhere, and by straight line of descent, these two parties to my dual
personality were connected. Were the Folk, before their destruction,
in the process of becoming men? And did I and mine carry through this
process? On the other hand, may not some descendant of mine have gone
in to the Fire People and become one of them? I do not know. There is no
way of learning. One thing only is certain, and that is that Big-Tooth
did stamp into the cerebral constitution of one of his progeny all the
impressions of his life, and stamped them in so indelibly that the hosts
of intervening generations have failed to obliterate them.

There is one other thing of which I must speak before I close. It is a
dream that I dream often, and in point of time the real event must have
occurred during the period of my living in the high, inaccessible cave.
I remember that I wandered far in the forest toward the east. There I
came upon a tribe of Tree People. I crouched in a thicket and watched
them at play. They were holding a laughing council, jumping up and down
and screeching rude choruses.

Suddenly they hushed their noise and ceased their capering. They shrank
down in fear, and quested anxiously about with their eyes for a way of
retreat. Then Red-Eye walked in among them. They cowered away from him.
All were frightened. But he made no attempt to hurt them. He was one
of them. At his heels, on stringy bended legs, supporting herself with
knuckles to the ground on either side, walked an old female of the Tree
People, his latest wife. He sat down in the midst of the circle. I can
see him now, as I write this, scowling, his eyes inflamed, as he peers
about him at the circle of the Tree People. And as he peers he crooks
one monstrous leg and with his gnarly toes scratches himself on the
stomach. He is Red-Eye, the atavism.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Before Adam, by Jack London

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