Mara and Dann: An Adventure

422 Pages·1999·1.14 MB·English

by  Doris Lessing

MARA
AND
DANN
AN ADVENTURE
Doris Lessing

Contents
Map v
Author’s Note vii
1
The scene that the child, then the girl, then the… 1
2
On the low hill overlooking the village was a tall… 55
3
It was almost dark in the room, because the door… 64
4
The two stood at the door and looked into the… 82
5
She walked away from the house, and never in her… 115
6
Now they began walking down a steep slope of chalky… 134
7
Now Mara spent her days in the fields with Meryx… 153
8
Mara set off for the centre of Chelops watched by… 176
9
In the running chair, Mara held her sack, Dann his,… 204
10
This wide river did not have the force of its… 229
11
Most evenings Shabis was not there; on reconnaissance, he
said,… 254
12
Michael opened his eyes and listened hard. There was a… 262
13
At first they marched through grasslands broken by clumps
of… 271
14
Then, unexpectedly, since no one had believed the rumours,
a… 277
15
Mara and Dann, each with a sack over a shoulder,… 284
16
It was past midnight when the girl gasped, “Here it… 290
17
In the street a couple of men strode fast towards… 300
18
Mara was falling asleep, and she was thinking, not of… 325
19
On this last night before the river, Daulis said they… 356
20
It was only just light. They were walking east, returning… 386
About the Author
Other Books by Doris Lessing
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map

Author’s Note
One day last autumn my son Peter Lessing came in to say that he had just
been listening, on the radio, to a tale about an orphaned brother and sister
who had all kinds of adventures, suffered a hundred vicissitudes, and
ended up living happily ever after. This was the oldest story in Europe.
“Why don’t you write something like that?” he suggested. “Oddly enough,”
I replied, “that is exactly what I am writing and I have nearly finished it.”
This kind of thing happens in families, but perhaps not so often in
laboratories.
Mara and Dann is a reworking of a very old tale, and it is found not only
in Europe but in most cultures in the world.
It is set in the future, in Africa, called Ifrik because of how often we may
hear how the short a becomes a short i.
An Ice Age covers all the northern hemisphere.
I cannot be the only person who, hearing that the most common condition
for the northern parts of the world is to be under—sometimes—miles of
ice, shivers, not because of imagined cold winds, since every one of us is
equipped with that potent talisman for survival, It can’t happen to me,
making it impossible for us to weaken ourselves by brooding on possible
calamities, but from the thought that one day, thousands of years in the
future, our descendants might be saying, “In the 12,000-year interval
between one thrust of the Ice Age and the next, there flourished a whole
story of human development, from savagery and barbarism to high cul-
ture”—and all our civilisations and languages, and cities and skills and
inventions, our farms and gardens and forests, and the birds and the beasts
we try so hard to protect against our depredations, will amount to a sentence
or a paragraph in a long history. But perhaps it will be a 15,000-year inter-
regnum, or less or more, for our
viii / Doris Lessing
experts say that the next Ice Age, already overdue, may begin in a year’s
time or in a thousand years.
Mara and Dann is an attempt to imagine what some of the consequences
might be when the ice returns and life must retreat to the middle and
southern latitudes. Our past experiences help to picture the future. During
the hardest of previous periods of ice, the Mediterranean was dry. During
warmer intervals, when the ice withdrew for a while, the Neanderthals
returned from exile in the south to take up life again in their still chilly
valleys. If they did not see their sojourns south as exile, why did they always
return?
Perhaps it is the Neanderthals who will turn out to have been our truest
ancestors, having bequeathed to us our amazing diversity, our ability to
live in any clime or condition and, above all, our endurance. I like to imagine
them, with their great experience of ice, posting a watch for the advancing
white mountains.
April 1998