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Jack London. Before Adam

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    (1907)
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CHAPTER I

        "These are our ancestors, and their history  is  our
history.

        Remember that as surely as we one day
        swung down out of the trees and walked upright,
        just as surely, on a far earlier day,
        did we crawl up out of the sea
        and achieve our first adventure on land."

     Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did
I wonder  whence  came the multitudes of pictures that thronged
my dreams; for they were pictures the like of which I had never
seen in real wake-a-day  life.  They  tormented  my  childhood,
making  of  my  dreams  a procession of nightmares and a little
later convincing me that  I  was  different  from  my  kind,  a
creature unnatural and accursed.

     In  my days only did I attain any measure of happiness. My
nights marked the reign of fear--and such fear! I make bold  to
state  that  no  man  of all the men who walk the earth with me
ever suffer fear of like kind and degree. For my  fear  is  the
fear  of  long  ago,  the  fear that was rampant in the Younger
World, and in the youth of the Younger  World.  In  short,  the
fear   that  reigned  supreme  in  that  period  known  as  the
Mid-Pleistocene.

     What do I mean? I see explanation is  necessary  before  I
can  tell  you of the substance of my dreams. Otherwise, little
could you know of the meaning of the things I know so well.  As





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