The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Story of Mankind, by Hendrik Van Loon
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Title: The Story of Mankind
Author: Hendrik Van Loon
Release Date: July 24, 2014 [EBook #46399]
Language: English
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THE STORY OF MANKIND
By HENDRIK VAN LOON, AB. Ph.D.
Author of The Fall of the Dutch Republic, The Rise of the Dutch
Kingdom, The Golden Book of the Dutch Navigators,
A Short Story of Discovery, Ancient Man.
This book is fully illustrated with eight three-color
pages, over one hundred black and white pictures and
numerous animated maps and half-tones drawn by the
author.
THE SCENE OF OUR HISTORY IS LAID UPON A LITTLE PLANET, LOST IN THE VASTNESS OF THE UNIVERSE.
THE STORY OF
MANKIND
BY
HENDRIK VAN LOON
BONI and LIVERIGHT
First Printing, November, 1921
Second Printing, December, 1921
Third Printing, January, 1922
Fourth Printing, February, 1922
Fifth Printing, February, 1922
Sixth Printing, March, 1922
Seventh Printing, April, 1922
Eighth Printing, May, 1922
Ninth Printing, May, 1922
Tenth Printing, June, 1922
Eleventh Printing, July, 1922
Twelfth Printing, July, 1922
Thirteenth Printing, August, 1922
Fourteenth Printing, August, 1922
Fifteenth Printing, September, 1922
Sixteenth Printing, September, 1922
Seventeenth Printing, September, 1922
Eighteenth Printing, October, 1922
Nineteenth Printing, November, 1922
Twentieth Printing, December, 1922
THE STORY OF MANKIND
Copyright, 1921, By
Boni & Liveright, Inc.
Copyright in All Countries
Printed in the United States of America
To JIMMIE
“What is the use of a book without pictures?” said Alice.
FOREWORD
For Hansje and Willem:
When I was twelve or thirteen years old, an uncle of mine who gave me my love for books and pictures promised to take me upon a memorable expedition. I was to go with him to the top of the tower of Old Saint Lawrence in Rotterdam.
And so, one fine day, a sexton with a key as large as that of Saint Peter opened a mysterious door. “Ring the bell,” he said, “when you come back and want to get out,” and with a great grinding of rusty old hinges he separated us from the noise of the busy street and locked us into a world of new and strange experiences.
For the first time in my life I was confronted by the phenomenon of audible silence. When we had climbed the first flight of stairs, I added another discovery to my limited knowledge of natural phenomena—that of tangible darkness. A match showed us where the upward road continued. We went to the next floor and then to the next and the next until I had lost count and then there came still another floor, and suddenly we had plenty of light. This floor was on an even height with the roof of the church, and it was used as a storeroom. Covered with many inches of dust, there lay the abandoned symbols of a venerable faith which had been discarded by the good people of the city many years ago. That which had meant life and death to our ancestors was here reduced to junk and rubbish. The industrious rat had built his nest among the carved images and the ever watchful spider had opened up shop between the outspread arms of a kindly saint.
The next floor showed us from where we had derived our light. Enormous open windows with heavy iron bars made the high and barren room the roosting place of hundreds of pigeons. The wind blew through the iron bars and the air was filled with a weird and pleasing music. It was the noise of the town below us, but a noise which had been purified and cleansed by the distance. The rumbling of heavy carts and the clinking of horses’ hoofs, the winding of cranes and pulleys, the hissing sound of the patient steam which had been set to do the work of man in a thousand different ways—they had all been blended into a softly rustling whisper which provided a beautiful background for the trembling cooing of the pigeons.
Here the stairs came to an end and the ladders began. And after the first ladder (a slippery old thing which made one feel his way with a cautious foot) there was a new and even greater wonder, the town-clock. I saw the heart of time. I could hear the heavy pulsebeats of the rapid seconds—one—two—three—up to sixty. Then a sudden quivering noise when all the wheels seemed to stop and another minute had been chopped off eternity. Without pause it began again—one—two—three—until at last after a warning rumble and the scraping of many wheels a thunderous voice, high above us, told the world that it was the hour of noon.
On the next floor were the bells. The nice little bells and their terrible sisters. In the centre the big bell, which made me turn stiff with fright when I heard it in the middle of the night telling a story of fire or flood. In solitary grandeur it seemed to reflect upon those six hundred years during which it had shared the joys and the sorrows of the good people of Rotterdam. Around it, neatly arranged like the blue jars in an old-fashioned apothecary shop, hung the little fellows, who twice each week played a merry tune for the benefit of the country-folk who had come to market to buy and sell and hear what the big world had been doing. But in a corner—all alone and shunned by the others—a big black bell, silent and stern, the bell of death.
Then darkness once more and other ladders, steeper and even more dangerous than those we had climbed before, and suddenly the fresh air of the wide heavens. We had reached the highest gallery. Above us the sky. Below us the city—a little toy-town, where busy ants were hastily crawling hither and thither, each one intent upon his or her particular business, and beyond the jumble of stones, the wide greenness of the open country.
It was my first glimpse of the big world.
Since then, whenever I have had the opportunity, I have gone to the top of the tower and enjoyed myself. It was hard work, but it repaid in full the mere physical exertion of climbing a few stairs.
Besides, I knew what my reward would be. I would see the land and the sky, and I would listen to the stories of my kind friend the watchman, who lived in a small shack, built in a sheltered corner of the gallery. He looked after the clock and was a father to the bells, and he warned of fires, but he enjoyed many free hours and then he smoked a pipe and thought his own peaceful thoughts. He had gone to school almost fifty years before and he had rarely read a book, but he had lived on the top of his tower for so many years that he had absorbed the wisdom of that wide world which surrounded him on all sides.