Free The Cleft by Doris Lessing Page A

and pointed at the girls.
    In the records nothing much is made of this continual copulation, much more of how the young males tried to be close to the girls, nuzzling andhugging and even licking them, as they had watched the doe licking the babies – which was what their experience of mother love had been. All had been licked and nuzzled by the kindly does. None had ever been loved by a mother. They were hungry for touch and tenderness; and the girls, who on their own shore did not go in much for this kind of affection, were surprised and pleased.
    Apart from these scenes of … yes, let us call it love, were the very early Monsters, who had been badly hurt by the Clefts. They feared the females, and tried to keep away from them. The girls feared them, because of the emotions they felt. Shame? All they knew was that the hot dark stares of these damaged males, who might very well have been their own offspring, made them feel as if they were ill.
    And then, one morning, the two girls simply left. The same inner compulsion that had brought them here now took them away over the mountain and to their own shore.
    Their time for conception had come and gone – though of course they had no idea of that. This rider is often seen in our records: the males’ not the Clefts’. But when we say things like that now, ‘they did not know’, ‘they were so primitive’, ‘they were too ignorant’ – the gamut of dismissing phrases – well I, for one, wonder. How do we know what they knew, and how?
    So long ago it was, even if we do not know how long. ‘Ages’ – it will do. Ages ago, these primitive people, our ancestors, whose thoughts still live in us – we have their thoughts once spoken, now written – ages and ages ago they did this and they did that but never knew why. So we like to think now.
    We have a need to describe creatures other than us as stupid or at least as unthinking.
    The girls did not leave unnoticed. The young men stared after them, and if the girls had turned round the faces full of longing would have told them everything.
    Then the youths ran to the top of the mountain and watched how the girls went down the other side, past the Killing Rock – and then reached their shore.
    They had gone!
    When would they come again? When , oh when?
    Two young women stood at the top of a rock they had climbed so they could look down on their shore … their home … their people. They were Clefts … well, of course, but although they had been in the valley with the people they once called Monsters, their minds must have been full of like, unlike; same, other; – full of differences. Did they think of themselves as female, and other than male? Young females. They were not old, they were not Old Shes. They were of the people, at whom they were staring, impelled to do this because – precisely– their minds were full of differences. Without males, or Monsters, no need ever to think that they were Clefts; without the opposite, no need to claim what they were. When the first baby Monster was born, Male and Female was born too, because before that were simply, the people.
    Two young females stood on their rock and looked at the seashore where lolled their kin – themselves. But in those eyes of theirs (I shall make them blue because of the blue sky and blue seas that surrounded them) once so calm and unreflecting were shadows and, precisely, shadows of the young males they had just left (possibly their sons, but who knew?). Young males, but surely the people, just like the people they were looking at. How else, if the Monsters had been born of the people here, those bodies lolling about on the rocks.
    Monsters … these two had once thought like that because there was nothing else to think.
    They stood looking, contrasting what they saw with the vigour and movement of the valley over the mountain. How slow and quiet that scene down there.