A Woman of the Ice Age

by L. P. Gratacap

Now, it is a remarkable circumstance, strengthening the Doctrine of Intention, that the vast length of time involved in the progress of the Palæozoic Ages was employed in establishing the kingdoms of invertebrate life, and that as at its close, the vertebrate type was reached (in which resided the potential power of the highest development) the Supreme Will rose swiftly to its object—Man, his powers and destiny!

Resistance accumulated against the flow of that intention, and by obstruction attempted to close its exit into the pregnant channel of vertebrate forms. This resistance was slowly dissipated through the prolific avenues of invertebrate life. And the Intending Mind, having ushered in the vertebrates, thence proceeds with rapidity through its evolving phases to complete its organic purpose, creating Man, and pushing in upon the world’s stage the vast psychic consequences of this supreme result.

And Man is reached—When! How! Where! The figures of men are observed stealing along the banks of the swollen Somme, in northern France, in the twilight of an Arctic day. The river, exasperated by the continuous contributions of cold streams rushing from distant summits that still retain the remnants of the shrinking burden of the northern ice sheet, washes the high levels with its turbid waves. Squalid shelters hide the rude domesticities of these skin-coated and tangle-haired aborigines of the earth, these mysterious tenants of the unconquered virgin world in whose crania lies the potency of art and science. Through the long mist of time they move like spectral groups presented to us, as dumb figures mechanically manipulated upon a distant stage. They use the motions of men engaged in play, in fishing, in mending nets, in repelling enemies, in rude wrestling, in working points of stone, or carving ivory, in erecting low-roofed houses, in cleaning skins, in felling trees and engaging in rapid navigation on the calamitous and groaning stream before them. Women are seen here and there amongst them, and children; faces stir with laughter, gesticulation accompanies the dumb motion of their lips. It is an imaginative kinetoscope wherein sound has vanished, and motion only, articulate throughout with human adaptibility, remains before our eyes. We are watching the pre-Adamites.

Again we see men moving in scattered bands along the banks of the Delaware, in New Jersey. The river, widely extended, has invaded the outlying country in broad, lake-like arms, and only at narrowing throats between cliffs and resistant ledges does the confined flood raise a murmur of expostulation as it churns in flying spray against its gneissoid barriers. Ice, in broad, deep cakes, or low piled up hummocks, or occasional castellated ice hills carrying stones upon their surface, appear over the wave-scurried waters, and now and then from some concealed inlet, a rude dug-out moves cautiously, piloted by strong arms, crossing between the struggling fragments of ice to gain, in a series of hesitating advances, the opposite shore. Human figures disembark, they climb up the bank by a half-worn escalade of steps rudely dug into the frozen gravel and sand, and disappear in the black opening of a cave excavated in the cliff faces, and overhung by the projecting angles of an irregular boulder of rock, half imbedded and half exposed, in the morainal mass of earth and pebbles, sand and stone.

The country for leagues about is desolate; in its denuded state it exposes to the scowling sky its torn areas, furrowed with gulches, heaped up cairns, plains strewn with loosened stones, while stranded along a distant coast line and gleaming in titanic splendor, far beyond on remote terraces, are icebergs. They are tumbling in decay before a sun more southern than their origin, and contributing a hundred rivulets, spreading fan-like in lines of silver over the flat declines about them, meandering to the gray shores, deserted by an ebbing tide.

The rigors of the Ice Age in its extremest form have passed, and here, in its lingering epoch of control, man, inventive, apt, procreative and vocal, holding the augury of the civilized ages advancing towards him, is seen.

Seen amid a waste of which he is a part, but from which by no conceivable dream of transformation was he evolved. The moment of his birth on earth was more propitious. Nature cradled him somewhere beneath other skies, warmer suns and blossoming life. He has survived the Ice Age. His adaptive nature has met it, as it crept like some continental torpor over the fair world it supplanted. He has lived through and out of it. He has kept alive on earth in the awful desolation of this menace and assassination, his inherited flame of intelligence, and the primal instincts of man. Before the Ice Age, man was.

Again in the broad savannahs of the Mississippi Valley man is discovered, where its waters, confluent with the broad streams flowing from Missouri and Ohio, spread in sluggish lake-like expanses, stirred by the river flow into movement, around archipelagoes of low islands. The waves of this water met the retreating frontier of the ice-cap, vociferous with the fall of shivered icebergs, and washed on one hand the lowlands of Appalachia, yet glistening from snow-buried crests, and the emergent domes of the Rocky Mountains, on the other, yet flecked with scattered citadels of ice, resisting extermination in valley-bowls and precipice-lined declivities.

The scene wears a softened aspect. The low islands have retained a cheerful growth of trees, and amongst them flowering bushes and patches of keen-colored flowers invite rest and dreams. Glades pass across the larger domains of insulated land; white beeches shine beneath trees, whose shadows are thrown in meshes of crossing lines and figures upon them, and a blazing sun, set in the zenith, administers to the wide expanse a temperate splendor. And here man again moves across the foreground of our vision. He is less weirdly strange and aboriginal, less dumb and impenetrable, and, as he stands alone upon a projecting tip of sand, with an erect beauty, a touch of decoration in his dress shows he has outgrown the dogged stupor of animal life. The charms of emotion have also awakened him; we hear, over the waters, the long musical halloo of a calling voice, and somewhere rising from the tufted wilderness answering voices in sweet sopranos return the salutation.

He turns to the meridian sun, and fear clouds his face. Across the sunlight a darkening blot has arisen. Its whirling and tempestuous shapes change from second to second—a murmur in the air, made visible by a thousand increasing ripples on the blinded water, tells of some approaching storm. The man has dropped upon his knees, the struggling lines of his face, as he watches the black cloud, deepen into a rigid expression of terror. Now the waves roll heavily upon the beach, the light is extinguished, and there descends a rain of dust. It thickens until the air is impenetrable, the man, prostrate upon his face, is lost to sight. The verdurous islands disappear, and the descending Loess dust extinguishes the sun.