I didn’t meet Adder—to speak to personally—until a couple of weeks after he and Dawn had escaped from the volcano. I saw him distantly on the day of their escape, of course, as did everyone else in the village. No-one was looking in the other direction; you could hardly fail to notice that a stream of lava was rolling down the mountainside. It wasn’t rolling toward our homes, thankfully; but what did head towards the nearest houses were the two figures running ahead of it—running astonishingly fast. I don’t think I could have run that fast even at my fittest; but then, Adder and Dawn have always been the most remarkable pair of human beings.

The lava took us all by surprise. Some of the hunters had once seen an eruption of a volcano, on the far side of the big plain, when they were on a long antelope hunt a couple of years ago. So they warned us what we were seeing. But neither they, nor we, had ever realised that the mountain overshadowing our village might be an active volcano. And the fire seemed to come out of nowhere. I remember just one massive bang and shudder of the ground—for a moment, I thought someone had slammed a huge door directly behind me, it felt like a blow to the heart—and when we looked up, we saw almost the whole mountain had vanished inside a glowing cloud. At first, the fiery red of the lava was almost too bright to look at; and then we saw the two tiny figures racing down the thorny slope ahead of it. The lava was flowing in two tongues, but there was a clear space between them; the fugitives were never in danger.

I don’t know where they took refuge at first. Our village has several clusters of homes along the valley side, each surrounded by its own cleared patch of fields; the escapees headed towards some huts at the further end. Adder and Dawn obviously found someone to take them in temporarily—with their strong bodies they would be an asset to any farmer—and I heard that once the eruption was over they soon moved on to new land that no-one had claimed, and set up their own field there.

The eruption itself was a three day wonder; and we then fell to discussing it at such length that I forgot about the two runners for the time being. I say, three day wonder, because it was the most astonishing thing that has ever happened in the world, that I ever heard of. The glowing cloud covered the mountain all that day and the next day; and then on the third day there was a real earthquake. Not just a single shudder, this time, but a monstrous heaving and cracking open of the ground that killed no-one but left us all traumatised for a long time afterwards. That night there was an enormous roaring storm—again, we had never experienced the like before—and in the morning we stared up in wild astonishment. The glowing cloud had gone; but so had the mountain. It had collapsed in upon itself as if a trapdoor had opened under it, leaving nothing but a mighty heap of split-up rocks—in later years, my sons and I spent a long time hunting wild goats around those barren rocks—and our lovely mountain was no more. The only thing that recalled it to us later was that during thunderstorms the lightning sometimes played over those rocks until they looked like a mountain of fire, as the flashes shot up and down.

I say it was a lovely mountain, despite the fact that I never climbed it and nor did anyone else from the village that I know of; but it had been a beautiful sight, green and lush and pouring torrents of fresh water in a great river that turned and flowed down below our village. Adder once told me there used to be three other rivers flowing away on the other side of the hill. Since our river shrank it has left us thirsty; we have suffered drought and hunger and I-don’t-know-what since then.

And we miss its rich greenery. Everywhere that river touched in the old days seemed to fill with life. Adder told me that while he and Dawn were living up on the mountain they ate all sorts of wonderful fruit. Adder says that he has never tasted anything that seems like proper fruit since; I thought the fruit that grows wild near our village was nice, and Adder and Dawn lived on it until they were able to get themselves established; but Dawn in particular has a very low opinion of it indeed.

Then, a couple of weeks after the mountain collapsed, I met Adder himself. I liked him at first sight; I don’t know why, but we seemed to have personalities that fitted together well. That’s why I got to know him perhaps better than anyone else, in the years and decades that followed.

Of course, anyone might like Adder and Dawn on first sight, on first principles. They were, as I think I said earlier, the two most magnificent humans I ever laid eyes on. Their smiles light up everything, though they rarely smile. When you look at Adam directly, his face appears so perfect that it literally brings tears to my eyes. I seem to forget who I am and what I was about to do, and I feel terribly sad for a moment.

I don’t ever remember feeling sad like that in my life before. Until the day the volcano exploded, I had lived a life that was simply based on what seemed the most useful thing to do next, just like my father and grandfather and all their forefathers. I was as carefree as one of our rams, one that filled its belly with grass and its ewes with lambs, and pierced the other rams with its horns and slept while it was doing it; and my wife was as empty-headed as I was.

Then that glowing cloud seemed to penetrate my mind—or whatever strange power caused it did—so that I’ve never had a moment’s true peace since that moment. I seem to carry a burden now, an obstinacy, a hatred that destroys even when I want to heal. Once in a while the weight of existence makes me, for some curious reason, full of hate for Adder and Dawn. It must be jealousy, or envy. I like them normally; but life has a strange edge to it now, as though there is something I chose to do—or that someone acting for me chose to do—something that darkens my thinking and makes me long to be free of it.

Adder became a great friend, once I met him. He took a liking to me too, and when my wife persuaded me to move away from our overcrowded bit of the village down to near Adder and Dawn’s field, we became neighbours and started to grow old together. I say together; but we’ve been friends with them now for sixty years and I’m now weary and stooped, and my wife died last year and my children give me good food. Strangely, Adder and Dawn don’t seem to have aged, or hardly a day. Neither of them has a grey hair; they put it down to the water on the mountain that they drank when they lived up there—but I think that for some very strange reason neither of them is finding it easy to get old or die. It’s as if they don’t know how. I think they will long outlive me.

They had two sons like us. That was a terrible story, of course, about Kenny and Abe. I won’t talk about that, because the memory of it hurts us all so much; but after we had buried Abe and after Kenny had fled, Adder and I started to have conversations that were deeper and revealed more about his feelings to me than most of what he had said before. One day, I believe Adder and Dawn will have more children—you’d think they were too old, but they seem still to have all the youthfulness any parents could need. Mind you, they do find it oddly difficult to be around children. Perhaps that was went wrong with Kenny and Abe, for Adder and Dawn—did I say that Dawn is still the sexiest woman I ever laid eyes on?—Adder and Dawn are more clever and gifted in most ways than anyone I ever met, but neither Adder nor Dawn seems to understand children very well. Anyone would think they had never been children themselves.

It’s a strange name for him, Adder, because an adder is a viper, a nasty little snake; and I never knew anyone else in the whole wide world who hated snakes as much as Adder does. Once, I asked him why; but his eyes filled with tears, so I didn’t ask again. I thought they were tears of pain; but on reflection they were tears of anger. Adder has a deep anger from somewhere. I hope he doesn’t pass it on to any more kids that he has.

I asked Adder how it is that he seems to stay permanently young. He is the fittest and strongest person that I have ever encountered. And the most handsome—except for one thing. Adder has a deep healed scar across the left side of his chest. He says it happened some while ago, before he even laid eyes on Dawn. It must have been a shocking injury; it has tightened the skin across his stomach so that he looks as though he has no belly button. It’s a strange result of an accident that he doesn’t seem to remember much of. Perhaps he was unconscious afterwards and someone nursed him back to health. Maybe that was when Dawn met him.

I asked Adder many times how he and Dawn came to be living up on the mountain; but he only gave me an answer just once. That was on one day when we were both at our happiest, when Adder was still teaching Kenny to grow crops and while Dawn and my wife were teaching young Abe and our two sons all about lambing and sheep. It was as the sun was starting to drop one afternoon, just as the breeze was getting up. In summer here, that is the coolest part of the day. When I have threshed my corn, I use that breeze to blow the chaff away from the grain, which it does if you toss it high enough in the air. Adder was unusually pensive—for some reason, he seemed really sad whenever he felt that breeze. He let Kenny carry on weeding by himself and got up and started to walk away, a little jerkily; so I followed and walked alongside him.

I asked him yet again how long they had lived on the mountain. To my surprise he replied to my question for once, and said only a few months. So I asked him why and when they went up there; but he shook his head hard and didn’t answer beyond muttering some broken phrases. I gained the impression that he and Dawn had not had a settled home up in that lovely green mountain garden. Perhaps they had fled up there from some other tribe or village, and the tribe had followed him and he had turned on them; but that’s purely my speculation, for neither he nor Dawn ever mentioned any previous history of theirs, not even hinting of one. Probably the truth is very different and worse.

Something plainly went badly, badly wrong for Adder and maybe for Dawn too up there. I remember now—as I think about it—that about a day before the eruption I saw a dark cloud suddenly descend, over the volcano. Perhaps that was the moment when Adder did whatever it was, and so the Sun-God scowled and withdrew his sunny smile from them both, and the fires started to rise from below.

Yet could the actions of a single human being really turn all the powers of the gods against him? Could Adder alone have done something that changed the whole story of life—because it has plainly changed it for all of us. The world now is a colder, bleaker, thornier place—it’s strange how so many thorns have appeared in our fields since Adder started farming with us. And Adder is the coldest, bleakest thing of all. Frankly, Adder acts as if he is an escaped murderer with a past that will pursue him to his death. But who did he kill?

So Adder really unnerves me. He has a steely way of looking at you. A fixed look, as though someone even harder than him was looking out through his eyes. My wife laughed when I told her that I’d christened him The Adder. I’d never call him that to his face, of course. But I’m now convinced that he took a decision that had a disastrous result—but he doesn’t regret that decision and never will; he will go to his grave first.

But it may be a long, long time before he goes to his grave. There’s a freshness of life about Adam and Dawn that seems to come right out of the Sun-God’s face. They are physically flawless. One would almost think that they had stepped ready-made out of a furnace, like that amazing shining bronze blade that one of our hunters showed me one day, the one on the spear he found broken off in the rump of a running antelope that he killed. We’d never seen bronze until then.

I’ve wondered if there are two worlds living alongside each other. Our world, in which everything is natural and we simply act like animals that have grown up and learned sense; and a different world in which Adder appears from nothing, as inexplicably as if a virgin had had a baby. Of course, if a virgin had a baby—a stupid thought, that, I don’t know why I said it—then that birth would have to be a magical one-off; it wouldn’t change life or the way everything works. I suppose the baby might be an interesting person to meet, though.

It would be nice to have near-eternal youth like Adder and Dawn. But they will never be able to help the rest of us to possess it. I think the opposite will happen; any descendants they have will die sooner and sooner, until their line lives no longer than the rest of us. Then nothing will ever change again in the world—not unless the Sun-God Himself steps down to live among us. I suppose He could be born of a virgin if He chose—not that He has even the maddest reason to be.

But if ever the Sun-God walks among us, I hope He will not be as grim as the Adder, or take as dark a decision as I believe Adder once did and maybe Dawn did, up on that mountain that’s gone away now. Perhaps the Sun-God might even reverse Adder’s decision and make sorrow and pain and sickness and death all work backwards; or maybe He might remake the whole world so we could all start again. We need help; we have also been strangely troubled by snakes since Adder and Dawn arrived. It would be good at least to have our mountain back again, with its good, sweet water.

I have to believe that there is more goodness somewhere than any of us can see just now. There must be a perfectly Good One whom we should worship—the Sun-God or the Water-God or the Fruit-God or Someone else who we don’t know yet. I’m sure there is, in fact, and I think I believe in Him—while Adder never will, even though I suspect Adder knows a great deal more about Him than I do.

I see now that Adder and Dawn did something that changed everything. Adder in particular chose wrong, and did so in full knowledge of it; so he is bitter. If he had taken the opposite decision—whatever the decision was—then perhaps Adder could have grown to rule the whole world from the mountain, and to put it all under his and Dawn’s good dominion, getting rid of all the poisonous snakes that have appeared to trouble us, and leading us all into the Sun-God’s palace. Perhaps he was made to do that. But Adder refused to do what he was made for, and lost everything; and so we were robbed of the mountain and ruined too.

And not just as victims; I am as dark-hearted and guilty now as anyone; I think I would have done the same as he did, though without his advantages. And it did Adder no good either, for even the Adder will die one day. Death defeats us all in the end, unless Someone can come who can defeat death itself. I’ll put my hope in that Someone.

[George B. Hill (2019)]