Chapter 132: Noah and the Crossing

Ten generations from Seth, the line had kept Its patient eastward drift through the vast plain Of eastern Africa. The tribes had slept And waked a thousand times, had borne the strain Of droughts and floods and migrations and raids, Had seen the slow erosion of the ice In the north, had felt the seasons change like blades Of light across the grasslands, the price And the reward of generations. And then— In the ten-thousandth season, give or take— In the line of Seth through Enosh, the fen And marsh-dwelling Enosh, and Kenan, the ache And joy of the settling tribes, and Mahalalel, And Jared, and Enoch who walked with God And was taken, and Methuselah, whose bell Tolled nine hundred sixty-nine, the rod And staff of the longest-lived of the patriarchs, And Lamech, the father—there was born A son. Noah. The comfort. The name that remarks On the easing of the curse upon the thorn And thistle of the ground. Noah means rest, Or comfort, or easing. A boy named for relief From the long labor. A boy born in the nest Of his people's exhaustion, named for the brief And needed respite. And he grew. And while he grew, The land where his people lived was changing. The rain That had fallen was less. The grass where the few Remaining game animals grazed was dry. The plain Was not the plain it had been. The deep And patient eastward drift of the generations Had brought Noah's people to the very steep And coastal edge of the continent. The stations Of their wandering had run out of land. They had walked to the sea. To the east: water. The Red Sea. The Bab al-Mandab. The strand And narrow strait where the continent's daughter Stretches her fingers toward the Arabian coast. Twenty-odd kilometers across. A swim No human would survive—but a small host In a boat, with the right winds, with a trim And purpose-built hull, could make the crossing. And Noah built the boat. Not the great ark Of the standard telling. Not the tossing Animal-laden vessel of the dark And global flood. There was no global flood. The flood that came was local. The monsoons Had failed. The rivers had dried. The stud And patient pastureland had become the dunes Of encroaching desert. His people were starving. The water that came was not rain. The water That came was the sea itself, the carving Edge of the ocean, rising as the slaughter Of the ice sheets' slow retreat raised the level Of every coast. The sea advanced. The camps Were pushed inland, and inland, and the revel Of the ancestors' long grasslands dimmed its lamps. Noah understood that the land would not return. He built a boat. He put his sons upon it— Shem, Ham, Japheth, and their wives, the stern And patient men and women who would fit Themselves into the vessel and survive. He did not save the animals. The animals Were not his to save. He crossed, alive, With his people, across the strait. The canticles And songs of the long prior wandering Were brought into the boat, and across the water, And into the new land on the other side of the thundering Waves, and the shore of Yemen, and the daughter And son lineages that would now unfold On a new continent. This is the great migration. The out-of-Africa event of which we are told In the bones and in the genes, the situation That demographers and geneticists have read From the clade-branching and the mutation rate: Sometime between eighty and sixty thousand years Ago, give or take, a small group crossed the gate Of the Bab al-Mandab and entered the wider world. A small group. Perhaps a few hundred. Perhaps A single extended family. The unfurled Y-chromosome lineage of those who made the laps Across the strait was CT. Haplogroup CT. The carrier lineage. The trunk out of which C, D, E, F, and everything downstream, will eventually fit. CT is the Y that crossed. The line whose niche And seed was the small boat, whose grandchildren's Descendants would in time fill Europe, Asia, Australia, the Americas, and the glimmerings Of the Pacific islands. CT is the scope Of the out-of-Africa event. And Noah Is its mythic bearer. Not a historical man In the strict sense. The Gaiad does not show a Wooden ark with lions and zebras and a plan For two of every kind. The Gaiad shows a boat, A small boat, a survival boat, a family boat, With a few human passengers and the wrote And memorized knowledge of the prior host, Crossing a strait in a drought. The animals Were left behind. They would cross, eventually, On other bones—the lions and the canals Of migration would carry them. But initially The boat was human only. The boat was small. The boat was real. The strait was twenty kilometers. The water was rising. The land was losing its thrall. And Noah, or the man Noah stood in for, maneuvers His people across the Red Sea onto the Arabian Peninsula, where the wetter climate of that age Made the peninsula livable—the verdant savannah And seasonal rivers of pre-desert Arabia, the stage For the next fifty thousand years of human history. Shem, Ham, Japheth. Three sons. Three branches Of the crossing lineage. In the later registry And memory of the biblical redactors, the launches Of the world's three great race-divisions— Semitic, Hamitic, Japhetic—would be grounded In these three. But the Gaiad knows the rescissions And problems of the old racial groupings. Not bound By the three-race frame, the Gaiad reads Shem And his brothers as three branches of the CT clade, Which will in time become C, D, E, F and the stem And trunk of every non-African lineage that has stayed Across the generations on foreign soil. The three sons are the beginning of the fan. The delta opening of the migration. The coil Of the great unfurling that is the human plan. Noah built the boat. Noah made the crossing. Noah's sons began the dispersal. And the line Of Seth that had walked for ten generations, embossing The African soil with their patient sign, Now stood on the other side of the water. And the continent they had left behind Was, for the first time, no longer the mother Of the whole human species. The mankind That had been one was now, in the smallest degree, Two: the staying and the gone. The line Of Abel and the un-migrating sons of A, free And home in Africa—and the restless sign Of Noah and his sons, newly arrived On the shores of Yemen, at the beginning of the road That would take them, in time, to every contrived And inhabited corner of the continental code Of the rest of the planet. This is the hinge. The crossing. The before-and-after of our species. Every non-African descends, in some fringe Or major proportion of their Y, from the specie And individual passengers of Noah's boat. One crossing. Twenty kilometers. A small vessel. And every continent thereafter, every moat And mountain, every language, every pestle Of every mortar of every kitchen of every Human settlement outside of Africa—all of it Descends from the decision of Noah's every Crossing family member to step into the fit Of the boat that day. The great migration is not metaphor. It happened. It is in the bones, in the genes, in the frost Of every mitochondrial and Y-chromosomal score That modern genetics has read. The count and cost Of the event is burned into our DNA. And the Noah story, long divorced from its origin, Preserved the memory of the crossing, the way A myth preserves a real event—through the long bin And corridor of oral transmission, across Ten thousand years of retelling, the story Survived. The boat. The flood. The crossing. The loss Of the old country. The arrival in glory Or in exhaustion on the shore of the new land. The Gaiad honors the story by returning it To the thing it remembers. Not a global and grand Deluge. A local crossing. A small kit Of people who survived because they built a boat. And from them—and only from them— Every man of Europe, Asia, Australia, the remote Pacific, the Americas, the polar rim And every elsewhere that is not Africa, Descends. Every one of us who is not of the San Or the Mbuti or the deep inland holds of the massive And diverse African continent, is a descendant of the plan And the choice and the boat of this one Noah. Honor him. For he was not the founder of the flood, He was the father of the crossing. The glow And ember of the human species' first blood On foreign soil. The ancestor of all of us Who stand on land that Adam never saw. The small-boat-builder. The un-Atlas of the plus And carrying hero of the line. The maw And mouth of the strait closes behind the boat. The passengers disembark. The continent behind Is, from this moment, no longer the coat And cover of the human species. The kind That would become us has split into two. The African line, staying. The line that has crossed. And the second line—the restless—is not through. It has not yet begun. But the crossing is not lost. Yemen. The dry hills of Arabia. The sun Over the Red Sea, rising on the far And foreign shore. The day the crossing was done. The day the species became what we are.