Dark Is Before the Dawn 3 5 1 



thing of what the Africans call the first times, for what we saw that 

 day, passing quietly along in the shallow waters below the forest, 

 going about their own gentle business, was a small school of boutu. 

 We saw nothing but a small portion of their heads above the water, 

 but the outlines of their slender bodies were clear below. They were 

 pink, like newborn Caucasian babies, or white pigs. The true sig- 

 nificance of this strange sight will become apparent a little later. 



We started to follow the whale from a rather vague and in some 

 ways arbitrary date in Late Palaeolithic times, namely 16,000 b.c, be- 

 cause certain Stone Age men, living on the coasts of Portugal, were 

 then using harpoons of such size that they would appear to have 

 been useless for taking anything but whales. We have now followed 

 the whale from that point to the present day. But this is only one 

 side of the story, and we must now turn about and tell what is known 

 of the other side by returning to that date and then following the 

 whale to his beginnings. This will take us back in time some seventy 

 million years to an age named by geologists the Cretaceous. If we 

 were to omit this, our story would not be complete in many respects. 

 This procedure may appear rather like putting the cart before the 

 horse, or, we might say, the chaser before the whale, but had we 

 begun in a tropical forest some seventy million years ago, the whole 

 of what followed might well have become incomprehensible. Only 

 after a rather profound introduction to the whales now living could 

 anybody be expected to understand their real place in the scheme of 

 life, and thus their humble beginnings. Our travel into the past will 

 be rather rapid and will proceed with gargantuan strides in time. 



The first step takes us to a point in what is called the Pliocene (see 

 Appendix B) before our current ice age began. From the record of 

 the rocks formed under the sea in that period, we know that many 

 of the whales that live today were already around, though most of 

 the actual species were different. Then, as now, they were clearly 

 divided into baleen whales and toothed whales, and most of the 

 subdivisions of both were already present, like rights and rorquals, 

 on the one hand, and sperms, ziphioids, dolphins, and platanistids, on 

 the other. So far none of the narwhal-beluga family or of the gray 

 whales has yet been found in rocks of this age. In the later phases 



