Allan and the Ice-Gods

I, Allan, the man of to-day, looked upon this mighty savage, for mighty I could see he was – both in his body and, after a fashion, in his mind also – and in my trance knew that the spirit which had dwelt in him hundreds of thousands of years ago, mayhap, or at least in the far, far, past, was the same that animated me, the living creature whose body for aught I knew descended from his, thus linking us in flesh as well as soul. Indeed, the thought came to me – I know not whence – that here stood my remote forefather whose forgotten existence was my cause of life, without whom my body could not have been.

Now, I, Allan Quatermain, fade from the story. No longer am I he. I am Wi the Hunter, the future chief of a little tribe which had no name, since, believing itself to be the only people on the earth, it needed none. Yet remember that my modern intelligence and individuality never went to sleep, that always it was able to watch this prototype, this primeval one, to enter in to his thoughts, to appreciate his motives, hopes, and fears, and to compare them with those that actuate us to-day. Therefore, the tale I tell is the substance of that which the heart of Wi told to my heart, set out in my own modern tongue and interpreted by my modern intellect.

Chapter 3

Wi Seeks a Sign

Wi, being already endowed with a spiritual sense, was praying to such gods as he knew, the Ice-gods that his tribe had always worshipped. He did not know for how long it had worshipped them, any more than he knew the beginnings of that tribe, save for a legend that once its forefathers had come here from be hind the mountains, driven sunward and southward by the cold. These gods of theirs lived in the blue-black ice of the mightiest of the glaciers which moved down from the crests of the high snow mountains. The breast of this glacier was in the central valley, but most of the ice moved down smaller valleys to the east and west and so came to the sea, where in spring time the children of the Ice-gods that had been begotten in the heart of the snowy hills were born, coming forth in great bergs from the dark wombs of the valleys and sailing away south ward. Thus it was that the vast central glacier, the house of the gods, moved but little.

Urk the Aged-One, who had seen the birth of all who lived in the tribe, said that his grandfather had told him, when he was little, that in his youth the face of this glacier was perhaps a spear’s cast higher up the valley than it stood to-day, no more. It was a mighty threatening face of the height of a score of tall forest pines set one upon the other, sloping backward to its crest. For the most part, it was of clear black ice which some times when the gods within were talking, cracked and groaned, and when they were angry, heaved itself forward by an arm’s length, shaving off the rocks of the valley which stood in its path and driving them in front of it. Who or what these gods might be, Wi did not know. All he knew was that they were terrible powers to be feared, in whom he believed as his forefathers had done, and that in their hands lay the fate of the tribe.

In the autumn nights, when the mists rose, some had seen them: vast, shadowy figures moving about before the face of the glacier, and even at times advancing toward the beach beneath, where the people dwelt. They had heard them laughing also, and their priest, N’gae the Magician, and Taren the Witch-Who-Hid-Herself, who only came out at night and who was the lover of N’gae, said that they had spoken to them, making revelations. But to Wi they had never spoken, although he had sat face to face with them at night, which none others dared to do. So silent were they that, at times, when he was well fed and happy hearted and his hunting had prospered, he began to doubt this tale of the gods and to set down the noises that were called their voices to breakings in the ice caused by frosts and thaws.

Yet there was something which he could not doubt. Deep in the face of the ice, the length of three paces away, only to be seen in certain lights, was one of the gods who for generations had been known to the tribe as the Sleeper because he never moved. Wi could not make out much about him, save that he seemed to have a long nose as thick as a tree at its root and growing smaller toward the end. On each side of this nose projected a huge curling tusk that came out of a vast head, black in colour and covered with red hair, behind which swelled an enormous body, large as that of a whale, whereof the end could not be seen.

Here indeed was a god – not even Wi could doubt it – for none had ever heard of or seen its like – though for what reason it chose to sleep forever in the bosom of the ice he could not guess. Had such a monster been known alive, he would have thought this one dead, not sleeping. But it was not known and therefore it must be a god. So it came about that, for his divinity, like the rest of the tribe, Wi took a gigantic elephant of the early world caught in the ice of a glacial period that had happened some hundreds of thousands of years before his day, and slowly borne forward in the frozen stream from the far-off spot where it had perished, doubtless to find its ultimate sepulchre in the sea. A strange god enough, but not stranger than many have chosen and still bow before to-day.

Wi, after debate with his wife Aaka, the proud and fair, had climbed to the glacier while it was still dark to take counsel of the gods and learn their will as to a certain matter. It was this: The greatest man of the tribe, who by his strength ruled it, was Henga, a terrible man born ten springs before Wi, huge in bulk and ferocious. This was the law of the tribe, that the mightiest was its master, and so remained until one mightier than he came to the opening of the cave in which he lived, challenged him to single combat, and killed him. Thus Henga had killed his own father who ruled before him.

Now he oppressed the tribe; doing no work himself, he seized the food of others or the skin garments that they made. Moreover, although there were few and all men fought for them, he took the women from their parents or husbands, kept them for a while, then cast them out, or perhaps killed them, and took others. Nor might they resist him, because he was sacred and could do what he pleased. Only, as has been said, any man might challenge him to single combat, for to slay him otherwise was forbidden and would have caused the slayer to be driven out to starve as one accursed. Then, if the challenger prevailed, he took the cave of this sacred one, with the women and all that was his, and became chief in his place, until in his turn he was slain in like fashion. Thus it came about that no chief of the tribe lived to be old, for as soon as years began to rob him of his might, he was killed by someone younger and stronger who hated him. For this reason also none desired to be chief, knowing that, if he were, sooner or later he would die in blood, and it was better to suffer oppression than to die.

Yet Wi desired it because of the cruelties of Henga and his misrule of the tribe which he was bringing to misery. Also he knew that, if he did not kill Henga, Henga would kill him from jealousy. Long ago he, Wi, would have been murdered had he not been beloved by the tribe as their great hunter who won them much of their meat food, and therefore a man whose death would cause the slayer to be hated. Yet, fearing to attack him openly, already Henga had tried to do away with him secretly; and a little while before, when Wi was visiting his pit traps on the edge of the forest, a spear whizzed past him, thrown from a ledge of overhanging rock which he could not climb. He picked up the spear and ran away. It was one which he knew belonged to Henga; moreover, its flint point had been soaked in poison made from a kind of cuttlefish that had rotted, mixed with the juice of a certain herb, as Wi could tell, for sometimes he used this poison to kill game. He kept the spear and, save to his wife Aaka, said nothing of the matter.

Then followed a worse thing. Besides his son Foh, a lad of ten years whom he loved better than any thing on earth, he had a little daughter one year younger, named Fo-a. This was all his family, for children were scarce among the tribe, and most of those who were born died quite young of cold, lack of proper food, and various sicknesses. Moreover, if girls, many of them were cast out at birth to starve or be devoured by wild beasts.

One evening, Fo-a was missing, and it was thought that wood wolves had taken her, or perhaps the bears that lived in the forest. Aaka wept, and Wi, when there was no one to see, wept also as he searched for Fo-a, whom he loved. Two mornings afterward, when he came out of his hut, near to the door place he found something wrapped in a skin, and, on unwinding it, saw that it was the body of little Fo-a with her neck broken and the marks of a great hand upon her throat. He knew well that Henga had done this thing, as did everybody else, since among the tribe none murdered except the chief, though sometimes men killed each other fighting for women, of whom there were so few, or when they were angry. Yet, when he showed the body to the people, they only shook their heads and were si lent, for had not Henga the right to take the life of any among them?

Then it was that Wi’s blood boiled within him and he talked with Aaka, saying that it was in his heart to challenge Henga to fight.

“That is what he wishes you to do,” answered Aaka, “for being a fool, he thinks himself the stronger and that thus he will kill you without reproach, who otherwise, when he is older, will kill him. Also I have wished it for long who am sure that you can conquer Henga, but you will not listen to me in this matter.”

Then she rolled herself up in her skin rug and pretended to go to sleep, saying no more.

In the morning she spoke again and said:

“Hearken, Wi. Counsel has come to me in my sleep. It seemed to me that Fo-a our daughter who is dead stood before me, saying:

“’Let Wi my father go up at night to make prayer to the Icegods and seek a sign from them. If a stone fall from the crest of the glacier at the dawn, it shall be a token to him that he must fight Henga and avenge my blood upon him and take his chieftainship; but if no stone falls, then, should he fight, Henga will kill him. Also, afterward, he will kill Foh my brother, and take you, my mother, to be one of his wives.’

“Now, Wi, I say that you will do well to obey the voice of our child who is dead and to go up to make prayer to the Icegods and await their omen.”

Wi looked at her doubtfully, putting little faith in this tale, and answered:

“Such a dream is a thin stick on which to lean. I know well, Wife, that for a long while you have desired that I should fight Henga, although he is a terrible man. Yet, if I do, he may kill me and then what would happen to you and Foh?”

“That which is fated to happen to us and nothing else, Husband. Shall it be said in the tribe that Wi was afraid to avenge the blood of his daughter upon Henga?”

“I know not, Wife, but I know also that, if such words are whispered, they will not be true. It is of you and Foh that I think, not of myself.”

“Then go and seek an omen from the Ice-gods, Husband.”

“I will go, Aaka, but do not blame me afterward if things happen awry.”

“They will not happen awry,” answered Aaka, smiling for the first time since Fo-a died.

For she was sure that Wi would conquer Henga, if only he could be brought to fight him, and thus avenge Fo-a and become chief in his place. Also she smiled because, for reasons of which she did not speak, she was sure also that a stone would fall from the crest of the glacier at dawn when the sun struck upon the ice.

Thus it came about that, on the following night, Wi the Hunter slipped from the village of the tribe and, walking round the foot of the hill that ran down to the beach on the east, scaled the cleft between the mountains until he came to the base of the great glacier. The wolves that were prowling round the place, still winter-hungry because the spring was so late, scented him and surrounded him with glaring eyes. But he, the Hunter, was not afraid of the wolves; moreover, woe had made his heart fierce. So with a yell he charged at the biggest of them, the leader of the pack, and drove his flint spear into its throat, then, while it writhed upon the spear, gnashing its red jaws, he dashed out its brains with his stone ax, muttering: “Thus shall Henga die! Thus shall Henga die!”

The wolves knew their master and sped away, all save their leader that lay dead. Wi dragged its carcase to the top of a rock and left it there where the rest could not reach it, purposing to skin it in the morning.

This done, he went on up the cold valley where no beasts came, because here there was nothing to eat, till he reached the face of the glacier, a mighty wall of backward sloping ice that gleamed faintly in the moonlight and filled the cleft from side to side, four hundred paces or more in width. When last he was here, twelve moons gone, he had driven a stake of driftwood between two rocks and another stake five paces lower down, because of late it had seemed to him that the glacier was marching forward.

So it was indeed, for the first stake was buried, and the cruel, crawling lip of the glacier had nearly reached the second. The gods were awake! The gods were matching toward the sea!

Wi shivered, not because of the cold, to which he was accustomed, but from fear – for this place was terrible to him. It was the house of the gods who dwelt there in the ice, the gods in whom he believed, and who were always angry, and now he re membered that he had brought no offering to propitiate them. He went back to the place where he had killed the wolf, and with difficulty, by aid of his sharp flint spear and stone ax, hacked off its head. Returning with this head, he set the grisly thing upon a rock at the foot of the glacier, muttering:

“It bleeds and the gods love blood. Now I swear that, if I kill Henga, I will give them his carcass, which is better than the head of a wolf.”

Then he knelt down, as men have ever done before that which they fear and worship, and began to pray after his rude fashion:

“O Mighty Ones,” he said, “who have lived here since the be ginning, and O Sleeper with a shape such as no man has ever seen, Wi throws out his spirit to you; hear ye the prayer of Wi and give him a sign. Henga the fierce and hideous, who kills his own children lest in a day to come they should slay him as he slew his father, rules the people and does evilly. The people groan, but according to the old law may not rebel, and to speak they are afraid. Henga would kill me, and my little daughter Fo-a he has killed, and her mother weeps. I, Wi, would fight Henga as I may do under the law, but he is strong as the wild bull of the forest, and if he prevails, not only will he kill me, he will also take Aaka, whom he covets, and will murder our son Foh and perhaps devour him. Therefore, I am afraid to fight, for their sakes. Yet I would be revenged upon Henga and slay him, and live in the cave and rule the People better, not devouring their food, but storing it up for them; not taking the women, but leaving them to be the wives of those who have none. I have brought you an offering, O Gods, the head of a wolf fresh slain, which bleeds, the best thing I have to give you, and if I kill Henga, I will bring you a richer one, that of his dead body, because our fathers have always said that you love blood.”

Wi paused, for he could think of nothing more to say; then, remembering that as yet he had made no request, went on:

“Show me what I must do, O Gods. Shall I challenge Henga in the old way and fight him openly for the rule of the tribe? or, since if I fear to do this I cannot stay here among the people, shall I fly away with Aaka and Foh and, perhaps, Pag, the wise dwarf, the Wolf-man who loves me, to seek another home beyond the woods, if we live to win through them? Accept my offering and tell me, O Gods. If I must fight Henga, let a stone fall from the crest of the glacier, and if I must fly to save the lives of Aaka and Foh, let no stone fall. Here, now, I will wait till an hour after sunrise. Then, if a stone falls, I shall go down to challenge Henga, and if it does not fall, I shall give it out that I am about to challenge him, and in the night I shall slip away with Aaka and Foh, and Pag if he chooses; whereby you will lose worshippers, O Gods.”

Pleased with this master argument, which had come as an inspiration, since he had never thought of it before, and sure that it would appeal to gods whose followers were few and who therefore could not afford to lose any of them, Wi ceased praying, a terrible exercise which tired him more than a whole day’s hunting or fishing, and, remaining on his knees, stared at the face of ice in front of him. He knew nothing of the laws of nature, but he did know that heavy bodies, if once set in motion, moved very fast down a hill, going quicker and quicker as they came near to its foot. Indeed, once he had killed a bear by rolling a stone down on it, which overtook the running beast with wonderful swiftness.

This being so, he began to marvel what would happen if all that mighty mass of ice should move in good earnest instead of at the rate of only a few handbreadths a year. Well, he knew something of that also. For once, when he was in the woods, he had seen an ice child born, a vast mass large as a mountain which suddenly rushed down one of the western valleys into the sea, sending foam flying as high as heaven. That had hurt no one, except, perhaps, some of the seal people which were basking in the bay, because there was no one to hurt. But if it had been the great central glacier that thus moved and gave birth, together with the other smaller glaciers of the west, what would chance to the tribe upon the beach beneath? They would be killed, every one, and there would be no people left in the world.

He did not call it the world, of course, since he knew nothing of the world, but rather by some word that meant “the place,” that is, the few miles of beach and wood and mountain over which he wandered. From a great height he had seen other beaches and woods, also mountains beyond a rocky, barren plain, but to him these were but a dreamland. At least, no men and women lived in them, because they had never heard their voices or seen the smoke of their fires, such as the tribe made to warm themselves by and for the cooking of their food. It was true that there were stories that such people existed and Pag, the cunning dwarf, thought so. However, Wi, being a man who dealt with facts, paid no heed to these tales. There below him lived the only people in the world, and if they were crushed, all would be finished.

Well, if so, it would not matter very much, except in the case of Aaka, and, above all, of Foh his son, for of other women he thought little, while the creatures that furnished food, the seals and the birds and the fish, especially the salmon that came up the stream in spring, and the speckled trout, would be happier if they were gone.

These speculations also tired him, a man of action who was only beginning to learn how to think. So he gave them up, as he had given up praying, and stared with his big, thoughtful eyes at the ice in front of him. The light was gathering now, very soon the sun should rise and he should see into the ice. Look! There were faces, grotesque faces, some of them vast, some tiny, that seemed to shift and change with the changes of the light and the play of the shadows. Doubtless, these were those of the lesser gods of whom probably there were a great number, all of them bad and cruel, and they were peering and mocking at him.

Moreover, beyond them, a dim outline, was the great Sleeper, as he had always been, a mountain of a god with huge tusks and the curling nose much longer than the body of a man, and a head like a rock, and ears as big as the sides of a hut, and a small, cold eye that seemed to be fixed upon him, and behind all this, vanishing into the depths of the ice, an enormous body the height of three men standing on each other’s heads, perhaps. There was a god indeed, and, looking at him, Wi wondered whether one day he would awake and break out of the ice and come rushing down the mountain. That he might see him better, Wi rose from his knees and crept timidly to the face of the glacier to peer down a certain crevice in the ice. While he was thus engaged, the sun rose in a clear sky over the shoulder of the mountain and shone with some warmth upon the glacier for the first time that spring – or rather early sum mer. Its rays penetrated the cleft in the ice so that Wi saw more of the Sleeper than he had ever done.

Truly, he was enormous, and look, behind him was something like the figure of a man of which he had often heard but never before seen so clearly. Or was it a shadow? Wi could not be sure, for just then a cloud floated over the face of the sun and the figure vanished. He waited for the cloud to pass away, and well was it for him that he did so, for just then a great rock which lay, doubtless, upon the extreme lip of the glacier, loosened from its last hold by the warmth of the sun, came thundering down the slope of the ice and, leaping over Wi, fell upon the spot where he had just been standing, making a hole in the frozen ground and crushing the wolf’s head to a pulp, after which, with mighty bounds, it vanished towards the beach.

“The Sleeper has protected me,” said Wi to himself, as he turned to look after the vanishing rock. “Had I stayed where I was, I should have been as that wolf’s head.”

Then, suddenly, he remembered that this stone had fallen in answer to his prayer; that it was the sign he had sought, and removed himself swiftly, lest another that he had not sought should follow after it.

When he had run a few paces down the frozen slope, he came to a little bay hollowed in the mountainside, and sat down, knowing that there he was safe from falling stones. Confusedly, he began to think. What had he asked the gods? Was it that he must fight Henga if the stone fell, or that he must not fight him? Oh! now he remembered. It was that he must fight as Aaka wished him to do, and a cold trembling shook his limbs. To talk of fighting that raging giant was easy enough, but to do it was another matter. Yet the gods had spoken, and he dared not disobey the counsel that he had sought. Moreover, by sparing his life from the falling stone, surely they meant that he would conquer Henga. Or perhaps they only meant that they wished to see Henga tear him to pieces for their sport, for the gods loved blood, and the gods were cruel. Moreover, being evil themselves, would it not, perhaps, please them to give victory to the evil man?

As he could not answer these questions, Wi rose and walked slowly toward the beach, reflecting that probably he had seen his last of the glacier and the Ice-gods who dwelt therein, he who was about to challenge Henga to fight to the death. Presently he drew near to the place where he had killed the wolf, and, looking up, was astonished to see that someone was skinning the beast. Indeed, his fingers tightened upon the haft of his spear, for this was a crime against the hunter’s law – that one should steal what another had slain. Then the head of the skinner appeared, and Wi smiled and loosened his grip of the spear. For this was no thief, this was Pag, his slave who loved him.