Prehistoric Man

THE GOLDEN ROOMS--Vardis Fisher--Vanguard ($2.50).

The golden rooms were the firelit caves of men in the vast darkness of prehistoric night. When Harg discovered that by rubbing two sticks together he could make fire, he rose to his feet, trembling, and slipped away into the dusk. He thought: "You are the only one in the world who can make fire."

Harg, in this novel by Vardis Fisher, was one of several hundred squat, hairy, apelike men roaming the part of Europe that is now France. They were about 5 ft. 4 in. tall, and weighed about 200 Ibs.; they had huge heads, almost no necks, broad faces and pale brown eyes of metallic hardness. The women had a heavy thicket of black hair over back, chest and belly; a huge mane of hair hung from skull to waist.

Men & women alike were improvident, with little sense of the future, almost no memory of the past. The strongest male among them considered that all the women belonged to him, embraced them openly and frequently with the result that the weaker males were driven to sly and secret amours. These ape-men killed small animals, often went hungry, gorged themselves when they had food, froze in the winter, were among the earth's most hunted and vulnerable creatures.

Among them, Harg was a genius. He built fires, and arrogantly put them out. He took women away from other men, drove the men away with burning faggots. He became to his people the sorcerer, medicine man, curer of ills and conqueror of evils. But as they began to revere him as a supernatural being, to follow wherever he led, Harg thought they were trying to spy out his secret. He became unhappy, confused, resentful.

First War. The Golden Rooms is the second volume of Vardis Fisher's imaginative reconstruction of primitive human life. First: Darkness and the Deep. The work of an Idaho-born realist whose straightforward, unadorned stories of Mormon farm life were too bitter for many readers, The Golden Rooms is so different from his earlier books (Toilers of the Hills, In Tragic Life) that it might be the work of a different writer. They were heavily written, with occasional inspired passages. The Golden Rooms is simple, skillful, steadily interesting.

The story in it is the use that Harg makes of his discovery. Success inspired him; because he had made one discovery, the world became filled with possibilities where it had held only menace before. Because the women looked to him confidently, expecting him to save them in each crisis of attack or hunger, he was driven to superhuman feats of courage and ingenuity. To make a home, he drove a bear from a cave in the cliffs. He killed a mammoth caught in a pit by building a fire around it.

But fire also proved his undoing. The fleet, supple, Cro-Magnons--6 ft. tall, weighing 250 Ibs., hunting with arrows and lances, wearing clothing to protect them in winter and painting pictures on their cave walls--grew vexed when they saw Harg's imitation of their golden rooms. "For the first time in the history of the human race on this planet, men were ready to go to war." The Cro-Magnons wiped out Harg's people, one by one, with bow and arrow, usually without a fight.

Tale of the Present? Through the simple, subdued prose of Author Fisher's novel, some quietly ironic points appear, though not so plainly that readers can be sure of the author's intent. Harg's people, stumbling, awkward, terrified, sometimes brutal, are far more human and likable than the more civilized, capable Cro-Magnons. Here & there through the book some readers may suspect that Author Fisher is actually writing a modern allegory, placing his story in prehistoric times because its picture of humanity would be too harsh if laid in the here & now.

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