wasn't for us to laugh at the savage for, so to speak, not having found
his earth-legs, since our quite recent ancestors had held comets and
eclipses to be menacing gestures of the stars. Some primitive suspicions
were reasonable, and chief among these the fear that man's ascendancy
over the other animals might yet be disputed. Early man sat by the camp
fire gnawing his bone and sneered through the dusk at the luminous,
envious eyes of the wild beasts that stood in the forest fringes, but he
was not easy in his mind about them. Their extreme immobility might be
the sign of a tense patience biding its time. Who was to say that some
night the position might not be reversed--that it would not be he who
stood naked save for his own pelt among the undergrowth watching some
happy firelit puma licking the grease of a good meal from its paws? That
was the primitive doubt. It's an attitude that one may understand even
now, he said, when one faces the spring of one of the larger carnivora;
and Ellen thrilled to hear him refer to this as Edinburgh folk refer to
a wrestle with the east wind. It's an attitude that was bound to
persist, long after the rest of Europe had got going with more modern
history, in Spain; where villages were subject on winter's nights to the
visitations of wolves and bears, and where the Goths and the Arabs and
the Christians and the Berbers proved so extravagantly the wrangling
lack of solidarity in the human herd. There had from earliest times
existed all round the Mediterranean basin a ceremony by which primitive
man gave a concrete ritual expression to this fear: the killing of the
bull. They took the bull as the representative of the brutes which were
the enemies of man and slew him by a priest's knife and with much
decorative circumstances to show that this was no mere butchering of
meat. Well, there in Spain it survived.... He had spoken confidently and
dogmatically, but his eyes asked them appealingly whether they didn't
see, as if in his course through the world he had been disappointed by
the number of people who never saw.