The Project Gutenberg EBook of Before Adam, by Jack London

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Title: Before Adam

Author: Jack London

Last Updated: 3 January 2009
Posting Date: June 29, 2008 [EBook #310]
Release Date: August, 1995

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK BEFORE ADAM ***

Produced by John Hamm

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."

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