Jack London. Before Adam -
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yet man. I fail to describe him. There is nothing like him
to-day on the earth, under the earth, nor in the earth. He was
a large man in his day, and he must have weighed all of a
hundred and thirty pounds. His face was broad and flat, and the
eyebrows over-hung the eyes. The eyes themselves were small,
deep-set, and close together. He had practically no nose at
all. It was squat and broad, apparently with-out any bridge,
while the nostrils were like two holes in the face, opening
outward instead of down.
The forehead slanted back from the eyes, and the hair
began right at the eyes and ran up over the head. The head
itself was preposterously small and was supported on an equally
preposterous, thick, short neck.
There was an elemental economy about his body--as was
there about all our bodies. The chest was deep, it is true,
cavernously deep; but there were no full-swelling muscles, no
wide-spreading shoulders, no clean-limbed straightness, no
generous symmetry of outline. It represented strength, that
body of my father's, strength without beauty; ferocious,
primordial strength, made to clutch and gripe and rend and
destroy.
His hips were thin; and the legs, lean and hairy, were
crooked and stringy-muscled. In fact, my father's legs were
more like arms. They were twisted and gnarly, and with scarcely
the semblance of the full meaty calf such as graces your leg
and mine. I remember he could not walk on the flat of his foot.
This was because it was a prehensile foot, more like a hand
than a foot. The great toe, instead of being in line with the
other toes, opposed them, like a thumb, and its opposition to
the other toes was what enabled him to get a grip with his
foot. This was why he could not walk on the flat of his foot.