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She was one of those beings, half-woman, half-animal, who are born to live by instinct. This ex-beautiful Arsene was disinterested; and the bequest left to her by the late Abbe Niseron would be inexplicable were it not for the curious circumstance which prompted it, and which we give here for the edification of the vast tribe of expectant heirs.
If it was really the dignified and divine thing that it would someday imagine itself to be, was it not uncanny that it should have come thus a nameless, half-human, half-animal thing, kicking inside the body of a woman? It was Being, in all its ineffable mystery, its monstrous and unendurable strangeness. They lived face to face with it, they saw a thousand aspects of it.
This was no fur-covered half-animal, nor was it one of the delicate-boned, decadent, painted creatures such as those who now ringed in their captive. Though the man had been roughly handled and now reeled rather than walked, Raf thought for one wild instant that it was one of the crew from the spacer.
French writers suppose that the minor nature-worship first sprang up of itself, half-animal man respecting the animals as rivals, the trees as fruit-bearers for his hunger, and so on, and that spirits were added to these beings when the great animistic movement of thought in which these writers believe took place, of course at a very early period. The Great Nature-powers came First.
It seemed without form, save for an unclean, half-animal face, that looked out, vilely, from somewhere about its middle. And then I saw others there were hundreds of them. They seemed to grow out of the shadows. Several I recognized almost immediately as mythological deities; others were strange to me, utterly strange, beyond the power of a human mind to conceive.
Then all at once the drums ceased; and through the night air drifted a minor chant; a wail, that rose, fell, died, and came again, lagging as many strange voices joined it. And from the square, below, a shrill, high-pitched, half-animal cry responded. Creeping shudders chilled the flesh along the engineer's backbone.
It all smelled of the stable, of milk, of hay and of perspiration giving off that half-human, half-animal odor which is peculiar to country folks. Maitre Hauchecorne, of Breaute, had just arrived at Goderville and was making his way toward the square when he perceived on the ground a little piece of string.
The connection of those mythologies with morality was comparatively slight. Dull and half-animal minds would hardly be conscious of the change which was partly veiled from them by the continuance of ritual and state creeds; while in the minds of Plato and Marcus Aurelius it made place for the development of a moral religion.
But the ordinary courage of the battle-field is largely an excitement half-animal, half-contagious, running often into savagery and insensate fury. In that situation the highest and lowest elements in man come into play. For the most part only the highest is portrayed for us by the historians and romancers, they keep the wild beast and the devil out of sight.
'Oh, this will never work. She sat there on the stony ground, angry and frustrated, sucking her finger and cursing this backward, half-animal world. But then an idea came to her. She tried to suppress it, but again the strange and uncharacteristic stubbornness crept over her. She moved to the dark fissure of the shaft and looked down, deliberating.
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