Eden River by Gerald Bullet Read Free Book Online Page B

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 matterthat 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.

8
    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 woodenframe 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 whilein this state of brooding he came upon Kirith
    For days he had wandered in strange