132 FOLLOW THE WHALE 



same area — the so-called Azilians and others — while these in turn 

 may have evolved from the palaeolithic Magdalenians and these from 

 the still earlier Aurignacian culture of Cro-Magnon Man. Now, Cro- 

 Magnon Man was the first true or modern man that we know of, 

 and we certainly don't know where he came from. He just sud- 

 denly popped up in the midst of the primitive Neanderthal Apemen, 

 complete with a culture, including magnificent art — that of the 

 famous cave paintings — and a religion that must have taken untold 

 ages to develop. What is more, Cro-Magnon Man first appeared on 

 the extreme western fringes of Europe around the area where the 

 Basques still live, and nothing like him or his culture before his 

 arrival there has ever been found north, east, or south of that area. 

 It does, in fact, look very much as if he came out of what is now the 

 Atlantic, and thus from some land mass therein which has now sunk 

 below its waters. However this may be, there is no possible doubt 

 that the Basques have been dwelling somewhere around the limited 

 area they now occupy on the northeast coast of Spain and the 

 extreme southwest coast of France since the end of the Stone Age. 

 The Basque language tells us quite a lot about the history of its 

 speakers. First, it is written quite differently from the way it is 

 spoken; then, it has a perfectly ghastly syntax that requires thinking 

 quite alien to our own. One French cleric writing three centuries 

 ago recorded, "The Basques speak among themselves in a tongue 

 that they say they understand but I frankly don't believe it." But its 

 most interesting feature is its actual words, and especially their roots: 

 for instance, the sound which is expressed in writing by the syllable 

 aitz, which means a stone. We find that the word for a knife is aitztto, 

 or "small stone," for a dart, aitzkon, or "stone point," a pick, aitzkor, 

 or a "raised stone," while for scissors their word is aitzttur, which 

 means "two small stones for tearing." From these samples alone it will 

 be seen that this language quite obviously originated before the dis- 

 covery of metal. It also has a number of enchanting side lights, such 

 as that there are words for numerals from one to a hundred but none 

 for a thousand, and words for dozens of various kinds of animals and 

 plants but none for "animal" or "plant." The Basque word for God 

 is Jinkoa, meaning "the Great One on High," from which we get 

 "by jingo," originally "High Jinko." But there is one of their ancient 

 Stone Age words that must interest us above all others, and this 



