A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Her form bent forward. She was scanning the awkward gap, and some exclamation of apparent wonder escaped her. The last step, a conical and half sloping fragment of rock, which had usually afforded the final element in the chain of precarious footholds, had disappeared. Some dislocation had thrown it over, perhaps the assault of a heavy billow, and the distance between her position and the shore was uninterrupted by any intermediate break.

The woman was disconcerted for an instant. But that intuitive response of her muscular and trained body to each quick and adequate decision of her mind was instantly displayed. She flung from her the bundle of clothing, wrapped tightly around the basket of food, and shot the harpoon far off, aiming at a flat exposure of fine sand between the larger boulders. Both disappeared below her. She sank to the narrow shelf on which she had been standing, and with the keenest agility swung down below its edge, suspending her pendant body by her outstretched arms, and then began slowly to sway, each flexure of her back starting a wider amptitude of oscillation, until her feet alternately rose so far as to bring the axis of her body almost parallel with the edge of rock to which she tenaciously clung.

Her design was evident. Immediately below her the fallen boulder lying on its side thrust upward a comb of sharp edges treacherously marked by braids of green sea-weed. To have dropped upon these flinty serrations would have meant a serious injury. To escape it she now essayed to give herself propulsive power sufficient to pass to one side of this obstacle.

In another second of time she had loosened one hand, continuing with the other this supremely difficult exercise, which shot into her face tides of color, and revealed the superb physique, texture and power of her steel-like muscles. She suddenly released her hold when the wide swing had become most extended, and shot, half turning backward, far beyond the threatening boulder, falling with graceful recovery of her inclined body, as the arrest on the shore brought her head upward with the yet unexpended energy of translation. It was a skillful and dexterous feat.

For an instant she covered her face with her hands. The exertion had been significant and unusual. The bundle and harpoon, the latter fixed upright in the sand, were recovered, and with a relaxed, perhaps a slightly halting step, Lhatto made her way over the sea wall of rolled and polished pebbles to the less dismal and barren shores beyond, where a long beach passed upward into dunes, drifted into hillocks, and partially induced to support a scattered wood of dark, motionless, and elongated cedars.

The lonely woman, emblem and promise, stood a long time on that untenanted shore looking outward, the encroaching tide slowly encircling her feet with wavelets, while each advancing ripple bearing some bubble of foam bound her ankles with a ring of airy beads.

Before the ocean, whether in calm or in storm, youth feels the power of its silence and its immensity. The wind that moved over its passionless face when still, the wind that carries hurricanes over the same ocean when convulsed and dangerous, solicit the recreant passions of youth, aimless, boundless, and unfulfilled.

Though speechless its murmurs are the voices of sirens luring him with musical and seducing phrases to enter its green abyss and find delight. The horizon, a merely necessary optical limit, a mathematical certainty, a physical injunction upon eyesight, is to youth a line on the threshold of New Worlds, a doorway to all the pleasures that the leaping heart, with wise madness, craves incessantly.

To the Woman of the Ice Age, to Lhatto, still struggling with the youth of her own life, and struggling more profoundly but unconsciously, and forever inexplicably, with the youth of the race, at the birth of emotion, at the birth of thought, of worship, of sexual fruition, competency, and desire, this remorseless inspiration of the ocean smote upon her breast and mind like some vast magic magnetism, holding her senses in its irresistible blissful power. And Nature was Lhatto’s schoolhouse; perhaps more deeply than ever since amongst men she dwelt in Nature, nursing at its breast, and yielding, as a child should yield, terror to its imprecations, obedience to its prayers.

But Lhatto, though thus imperiously influenced, had no introspections in the matter. She simply turned her beautiful face to the sea, and somehow a voice from that great deep said to her “Come!”