a diary
Our assignation in Bordeaux, or more precisely in Arès thirty miles away on the coast at the Arcachon Bay, was another disaster. The deal with the Algerians went sour at once when they turned out to be zombies. We escaped from the beach on a pedalo, with Mr Sole perched precariously on the back aiming a blunderbuss at the undead.
Monkfish fulminated like a grumbling volcano. Candidly, I was quite short with him in return, incensed by the loss of yet another valise.
"Revenants? Again? Explain this to me, Monkfish: why does this keep happening?"
"Fashion," he spat back like a curse. "Zeitgeist. The madness of masses."
"They are, uh-huh uh-huh, all too common a trope, these days," added Mr Sole as he shouldered his armament. He no doubt thought he was being helpful.
"In the 'Seventies you can't move for vampires," snarled Monkfish. "And the 'Fifties are thick with robots. But now, the vogue is all for shambling death. 'Give the people what they want' – if I could but find the half-breed son of a dog and a demagogue who first put tongue to that, I should... hooo. It must be something post-Millennial."
His mood seemed to lighten a little and he began to expound: "I've felt it myself, of course. A sensitive such as I was bound to, naturally. You cannot deny, my mood has moved towards the morbid – you said as much yourself in Paris.
"And hence, our path is strewn with these wretched hazards in abundance."
"Mr Monkfish," I said, as calmly as I could. "Once again, I have no idea what you are talking about and once again, thanks to you, I have literally not a thing to wear. What are you going to do about this?"
Being Mr Monkfish, he of course responded with a story.
"My dear, you asked for an explanation, I will give it."
"Excuse me?" How easily one falls into this modern idiom.
"You asked me to explain. The Argai and the Trinomans and the Fallen."
I recall staring at him quite blankly.
"That was... days ago. And in Paris. Is this entirely the right time?"
"An explanation you are owed. And a Monkfish always pays his debts."
Dignity prevented me from spluttering.
From the inner pocket of his linen jacket, he took out his tarot deck.
"Five of coins, ten of swords, yes, yes, yes, very predictable… Ah! Ah ha! The Hidden Gate."
He showed it to me.
"Mr Monkfish," I chided, "I am familiar with the Major Arcana; that is not one of them."
"Is it not?" he twinkled enigmatically, and he shushed me with a finger gently pressed to my lips.
I looked again – the image appeared to be of a hedge maze, and the number XXII – but, before I could see more, he took it and with a flourish, a conjurer's act of prestidigitation, transubstantiated it into a carved ornament: a lion-headed figurine, of mammoth ivory turned treacle-dark with age.
"This," he said cautiously, almost worshipfully, "is one of the Aurignacian Lion Men."
He passed it to me, and I held it with great care, deeply aware of the irregular rocking of our wave-swept transport, further hazarded by the occasional report and kickback from Mr Sole's weapon. It felt cool, smooth, but somehow heavy with history.
"To my knowledge," Mr Monkfish continued, "there are only two others in all the World. The second is on view to the public in the museum of Ulm in Germany. The last is in the private collection of a gentleman of German parentage now living in a secluded ranch in the Argentine. They are the oldest Human works of art still in the World, at least twice as old as your daubed caves at Lascaux."
Reverently, I returned the lion figure to him.
"The Aurignacian culture were the first sophisticated people, the first people who cared to make their tools fine as well as functional. Their arrival in Europe marks the start of what modern science calls the Upper Palaeolithic and their success and their spread would eventually spell the end of the Neanderthal who had lived there for many ages before.
"I should like, if I may, to take you back twice as far again.
"You have heard, perhaps, of the supervolcano brewing under the great caldera of Yellowstone National Park. If and when it erupts it will certainly erase America and almost certainly be the end of your civilisation. Seventy-five millenniums ago, a similar colossal paroxysm, a hundred times more explosive than legendary Krakatoa, blasted a hole through the Island of Sumatra a hundred miles long and fifty miles wide.
"A thousand cubic kilometres of ignimbrite ejected into the atmosphere triggered what that modern science would call a 'nuclear winter', a decade without the sun and the start of a thousand years of cooling, the beginning of the last Ice Age.
"As the glaciers rolled forward once more, fresh water become scarce, locked up into the mountains of ice, and drought ravaged the ancient African homelands.
"Human populations crashed. Consider this, for all our differences humans are one of, perhaps the least genetically diverse species on the planet. Study of our DNA, microbiological archaeology, suggests a time, at about the time of the super-eruption, when numbers fell to maybe fewer than two thousand breeding females. An 'evolutionary bottleneck', they call it. A pretty euphemism for near extinction.
"So, picture this: the desert landscape of Africa, dusty rock and scrub, the occasional thorny tree. Picking their way across this parched, despoiled landscape, comes a tribe of naked apemen, seeking the last remaining rivers and pools. Hunters sent out in small parties spend days, even weeks, walking down prey animals, ibex and antelope, to carry the spoils back to the tribe. Children too small to keep the pace are borne by their mothers. Tribal elders live among their offspring to pass on the sing-song half-language of the people and the talents of making with stone or bone, though few enough of them still live to be old under the harshness of their circumstances. The old mother, a clever matriarch, directs this pre-Biblical exodus.
"And they meet an angel.
"It stood, or maybe hung in the air, at a place where a 'scarpment blocked the path of the tribe. It hung – or stood – at a place where a cleft cut the ridge and opened onto a valley beyond.
"One moment shining like fire, wings like an eagle, neck like a swan; the next as dark as nightfall, feathers of raven and cruel beak of a gigantic crow, it was nothing they could ever have understood. It was the first 'foreign power'.
"And it spoke to them. It said: 'People, I see you in great distress and I think that you may die. Tell me: what do you want?'
"Of course, the tribespeople cowered down, because they were in fear and awe of this strange angel-thing.
"The matriarch came forward and challenged the angel.
"'I am the Old Mother of this tribe. What should we call you, creature of fire, creature of darkness?'
"'I am one who watches, Old Mother. Tell me, what do you want?"
"'Very well, one who watches' said the old mother, 'We want food, for the prey animals have all gone away; and we want water, for the rivers have all dried up; and we want shelter from the burning sun and the hunting beasts; and we want places to sleep that are safe for our children.'
"So the angel said: 'Let me show you a doorway, a passage that will take you to a garden rich with milk and honey, where you will find ease, where you and your children will thrive. I ask only that you tend to the garden, for I am in need of a servant. If you will trust and serve, then you shall be saved.'
"'Show me this garden,' she said, 'and then we will decide whether it is safe for our people to follow.'
"And the angel agreed. And it took her down, into its valley and it showed her the doorway, the gateway, a hole in the World.
"It is a fact that our word 'chasm' has the same etymology as the word 'chaos', being both derived from the Ancient Greek 'chairon' meaning to open wide, to gape. In old English this also gave us to 'yawn'. So, when the Greek cosmogony begins with Nox born of Chaos, we must not think of that Primordial Chaos as we do today, disorder and randomness – the undistinguished clouds of dusty gas, even though 'gas', via the Dutch, comes also from chaos. Think instead of a gap, a cleft, an opening, a universal vagina giving birth to the grandmother of all gods: Night ex nihilo, created from nothing.
"Our earliest legends, then, gods and men born into our World through a gap, an opening, a gateway...
"Beyond the gateway there was a new World, where the sun was cooler and the wind fresh, and it was as green and lush as the angel had promised, abundant with fruit and animals and all manner of things to eat.
"And the angel said: 'Now you have seen, Old Mother, will you lead your people into the land that I have promised? Will you serve and trust, as I have asked? Will you obey me?'
"'One who watches, this is too big a decision for just me to take by myself. I must ask my daughters in the tribe.'
"And the two daughters of the matriarch did not agree. For the first time, they argued.
"'We are clever and we are strong,' said the younger. 'We survive by our own wits and labours. Today we hunt and find the food we need.'"
"'Yet why should we not take what is offered?' answered the elder. 'We have food today, but in this garden we have food for tomorrow, and tomorrow and many more tomorrows.'
"'No good can come of a thing we have not striven for.'
"'No good will come of dying.'
"'Then we must disagree. We must return to the people and tell them and ask them: 'what do you want?' and 'will you obey?' and they must each choose for themselves.'
"And so that is what they did.
"Many of the people chose to go with the elder sister into the valley and through the gateway and into the garden. But more than a few, especially among the young and the fierce, chose to remain behind with the younger sister. And after their kin had passed away into the gate, they said to the angel: 'We now shall make our own way.'
"And the angel wielded a flaming spear and sealed up the gateway and closed the cleft into the valley and said, 'You have chosen to remain behind – you shall not henceforth enter into the garden!' And it drove them away. And in fear and shame they went."
As often happened, I found myself breathless at the end of Mr Monkfish's circumlocution, all thought of fury dissipated.
"What..." I asked, "what happened to those people?"
"The sister who went with the angel was known as Gai or Gan. From which we get Gaia and Garden. And those who went with her called themselves the people of the Garden, the Gardeners, the Argai; but those who stayed, they call Fallen. And the name of the sister who fell behind was Cheva, which just means 'alive', but who we call..."
"...Eve," I finished for him.
