The Pale

“ Now as at all times I can see in the mind's eye,
In their stiff, painted clothes, the pale unsatisfied ones
Appear and disappear in the blue depth of the sky
With all their ancient faces like rain-beaten stones,
And all their helms of silver hovering side by side,
And all their eyes still fixed, hoping to find once more,
Being by Calvary's turbulence unsatisfied,
The uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor. ”

“ I moved on down the corridor, not so much mystified as annoyed. The whole mystery of the man's conduct is beginning to irk me. It is all so inane, so utterly lacking in motive.
I feel that I shall never meet the pale man. But, at least, I am going to learn his identity. Tomorrow I shall ask for the room clerk and deliberately interrogate him.
I know now. I know the identity of the pale man, and I know the meaning of his smile.
Early this afternoon I summoned the room clerk to my bedside.
"Please tell me," I asked abruptly, "who is the man in No. 202?" ”

“ THE NEW STONE AGE IN
NORTHERN EUROPE CHAPTER I THE COMING OF MAN
MAN has been described as a “walking museum of paleontology.” He is like a mountain whose foundations were laid in a time so ancient that even the paleontologist hardly finds a record to decipher; whose strata testify to the progress of life through all the succeeding ages; whose surface, deeply ploughed by the glaciers, is clothed with grass and forest, flower and fruit, the harvest of the life of to-day. ”

“ The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the redmen has not yet come again. ”

“ Men write of and wonder at the strange gap between what are called the Paleolithic and the Neolithic ages, that is, between the ages when the spearheads and ax and arrowheads were of stone chipped roughly into shape, and the age of stone even-edged and smoothly polished. ”

“ In June Kildare accompanied Henry to the Field of the Cloth of Gold, where he was distinguished for his gallant bearing. Fretting, however, under his detention, he seems to have entered into treasonable negotiations with the wild Irish to invade the Pale, but the charge was never brought home to him, and it ought to be noted that the chief witness against him, O'Carroll, was a kinsman of Ormonde's. ”

“ We were few when the paleface people came—scattered and few and afraid.
Fewer were they, but they brought the law, and the dark-skin men obeyed.
The paleface people drew a line that none by dark or day
Might cross with fell intent to hunt—capture or drive or slay. ”

“ The amount of positive knowledge in regard to the mysterious tribes of the older Stone Age, or the barbarians of the Neolithic period, or the struggling civilization of the early Metallic Ages, is lamentably deficient. On our Western Continent we have the mysterious remains in the gold-bearing gravels of the Pacific coast, the significance of which is yet in dispute. We have the Paleolithic Age of Europe, represented by the remains found in the gravels of the Delaware at Trenton, New Jersey. ”

“ The Paleolithic included objects found in caves and glacial gravels; the Neolithic, on the surface and in tombs. The first period ran from some vague beginning hundreds of thousands of years ago up to the advent of the Neolithic after the glaciers had melted. By definition, paleolithic man made chipped stone implements and no other kind. Neolithic man was supposed to be distinguished by the making of ground, or—as we usually say—polished, stone axes and of other tools shaped by rubbing instead of chipping; agriculture, pottery, and textiles came in as secondary traits. ”

“ The remains that we have gathered of primitive man are divided into paleolithic, or those belonging to the Old Stone Period, and neolithic, or these belonging to the New Stone Period. The paleolithic remains are characterized by the rudest kind of stone implements, implements merely chipped out of stone, without any attempt at finish, and from first to last there is no evidence of improvement in their make. ”

“ The man of the Paleolithic or Rough Stone Age was followed by the man of the Neolithic Age—the cliff dweller. He exchanged a home by the river for one higher up; secure in some elevated cliff, the Neolithic man lived, away from molesting beasts. ”

“ Meanwhile the siege of Drogheda had not been progressing as favourably as had been expected, and the gentry of the Pale, ‘being no longer able to conceal their engagement with those of the north,’ and perceiving the besiegers ‘to decrease daily, by reason that the soldiers, as soon as they were become masters of any considerable booty, stole from the camp with it, resolved at length to call upon Sir Phelim O'Neill, whose power they thought unresistible.’ Sir Phelim at once obeyed the summons, reaching the camp before Drogheda apparently about 10 Jan. ”

“ These closing essays have impressed on us clearly and distinctly the isolation of the Paleolithic Age. When we reflect on its prolonged duration, its remoteness in time, and its complete severance from the Neolithic and succeeding ages, we are almost ready to wonder whether they were indeed human beings. But beginning with the Neolithic Age, we come to our own era. ”

“ No doubt he acted for my best interests. The people who have dominated my poor life invariably have.
Oh, well, the summer's rest will probably do me considerable good. It is pleasant to be away from the university. There is something positively gratifying about the absence of the graduate student face.
If only it were not so lonely! I must devise a way of meeting the pale man in No. 212. Perhaps the room clerk can arrange matters. ”

“ The pale man must be difficult to please, for he has again changed his room. I am baffled by his conduct. If he is so desirous of locating himself more conveniently in the hotel, why does he not move to No. ”

“ If he wants to make me go all the way, he can go to the devil. I am not the sort to run after anybody. Indeed, the surly diffidence of the room clerk has been enough to prevent me from questioning him about his mysterious guest.
I wonder where the pale man takes his meals. I have been absenting myself from the hotel restaurant and patronizing the restaurants outside. At each I have ventured inquiries about the man in No. ”

“ What was this loosed titanic power that had done these things—that had brought this change in Helena; that had brought a change in the Flopper, transforming the miserable, pitiful, whining thief into a man reaching out for decent things; that had wrought at least a physical metamorphosis in Pale Face Harry—that had transfigured those three who, in their ugly, abandoned natures then, had hung like vultures on his words in the Roost that night! ”

“ The eternal silence of the great white desert. Cloudy columns of snow drift advancing from the south, pale yellow wraiths, heralding the coming storm, blotting out one by one the sharp-cut lines of the land. ”

“ The wind which filled the sails of the ship in which Kildare returned, blew into flames the fires of insurrection; and in a very Saturnalia of Irish madness the whole people, with no object that could be discovered but for very delight in disorder itself, began to tear themselves to pieces. Lord Thomas Butler was murdered by the Geraldines; Kildare himself was shot through the body in a skirmish; Powerscourt was burnt by the O'Tooles; and Dublin Castle was sacked in a sudden foray by O'Brien Oge. O'Neil was out in the north; Desmond in the south; and the English pale was overrun by brigands. ”

“ Queen Elizabeth might show clemency or policy by her treatment of Shane O’Neill, by ignoring Kildare’s intrigues and utilising him in her service, and by summoning Desmond and Ormonde to submit their controversies to her personal arbitrament; but she could not close her ears to the complaints which reached her as to the state of the English Pale. It was then, as it still is, the custom for Irish students to keep some terms in London, to study the common law at head-quarters, and to carry back legal traditions and modes of thought to their own country. ”

“ Only the Baron of Dungannon held out against him, and he, by his own account, was compelled to betake himself to the woods for safety. But with the south of Ireland in a blaze, it was impossible to do other than temporise with him. He petitioned to have the benefit of his letters as Earl of Clanconnell; to be re-established in the rights and privileges of his ancestors; to have one hundred soldiers in the pay of the state, together with the command of the fort on the Blackwater and a grant of lands in the English Pale. ”

“ PALAEOLITHIC (Gr. παλαιός, old, and λίθος, stone) , in anthropology, the characteristic epithet of the Drift or early Stone Age when Man shared the possession of Europe with the mammoth, the cave-bear, the woolly-haired rhinoceros and other extinct animals. The epoch is characterized by flint implements of the rudest type and never polished. The fully authenticated remains of palaeolithic man are few, and discoveries are confined to certain areas, e.g. France and north Italy. ”

“ Among the relics of the ancient cave-men of Europe are hollowed stones, which were their primitive mortars for grinding the ochre and other colours for painting themselves. Indeed, few habits mark the lower stages of human life so well as the delight in body-patterns of bold spots and stripes in striking colours, familiar to us in pictures of Australians dancing at a corroboree, or Americans working themselves up to frenzy in the scalp-dance. ”

“ On every side of the mountain, so fair to look on when peaceful, so terrible in its wrath, one may follow for miles on miles these ancient currents, radiating from the centre. Here the hard, dark rock rings, as iron would, under your horse’s hoof. There, what was once a death-bearing stream of lava has been covered by time with a rich soil, on which vines and olives flourish. ”

“ In this region of extreme temperatures with sudden changes—burning noons and frozen nights, torrid summers and winter snows, downpours of rainfall—the fire and frost, wind and cloudburst have done their secular work; they have stripped and pulverized the softer, outer rock shell, washed it down, blown it away, till the supporting granite and schist are bare to the bone. It is a skeletonized, worn land, all apex and débris; near objects have the form and aspect of ruins, the horizons are serried, the surfaces calcined. ”

“ Several large and ruinous excavations, which are seen in the way, may arrest the attention of a traveller who is interested by such objects, and has no notion of those, still concealed from his view by the curtain of rocks which extends before him; but at length the rock leads him to the heights above one more ravine; whence he discovers within his horizon the most singular spectacle, the most enchanting picture, which Nature has wrought in her grandest mood of creation; which men, influenced by the vainest dreams of ambition, have yet bequeathed to the generations that were to follow them. ”

“ We pass over vast treeless plains strewn in all directions, as far as the horizon, with huge broken masses and boulders of granite. A scene more expressive of gloom and desolation cannot be imagined. The huge fragments, scattered about as far as the eye can reach, are piled up occasionally into enormous heaps, which look like the remains of ruined cities of an unknown age ”

“ Under the earth and a layer of ashes the skeleton lies with its head covered by a little brazier of baked clay, and accompanied by arrows, fragments of double-edged knives, obsidian fragments, bird-bone necklaces strung on twisted bird-gut, smooth stones, some small semi-spheres of baked clay with a hole in the centre of each, and a few grotesque idols. ”

“ It was a battle between the heavens and the earth,—the stream of molten rock, blinding [Pg 57] hot from the caverns beneath the earth’s crust, meeting the sweet cool waters from the clouds that troop about the mountains or hide their tops in mist and snow. The life-giving flood prevailed over that which brought only defacement and death. The sullen lava flux settled, shrank, and hardened at last, fitting into the granite gorges as melted lead fits the mould into which it is poured. ”

“ But, to say all in a word, I state that on a late tour I examined the ground of Herculaneum, in the parts made accessible by excavation, with particular care. I could not find a square inch of lava! Every thing is ashes, nothing but ashes, and these ashes have been hardened by three agents—water, pressure, and time. It is exactly this hardness, which is not to be conceived of as very great, that has deceived visitors, particularly in the underground galleries dug out in exploring the theatre. ”

“ For as long as he could, he pretended not to recognize the ruins sparsely dotting the landscape—vast mountainous stumps of structures, buckled and tortured things, blackened and ice-streaked, surrounded by strange formations of rock that suggested lava ridges, as if the very ground had melted and churned and boiled when those ruins were made. ”

“ I yield myself to, but cannot account for the fascination of this vast field of desolation, this waste of crumbled limestone, gouged into ravines and hills, honeycombed with tombs and mummy-pits, strewn with the bones of ancient temples, brightened by the glow of sunshine on elegant colonnades and sculptured walls, saddened by the mud-hovels of the fellaheen. The dust is abundant, and the glare of the sun reflected from the high, white precipices behind is something unendurable. ”

“ The age which we thus reach is called the Palæolithic, or "ancient" Stone age, because men made use of stone, which they chipped into shape, but, unlike the Neolithic people, never polished it. We find enormous numbers of these rough or Palæolithic stone implements both in caves and in the gravels deposited in the ancient beds of rivers. They are so abundant as to prove the existence of a very considerable human population in the remote ages when they were fashioned and used. ”