Before Adam
by Jack London
1906



"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."



CHAPTER I


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