Our Ancestors. (extract taken from Understanding the past, a school textbook by Prof. Mufudazi Flowers) "During your history studies you will be tempted to see your ancestors as human beings much like yourselves. I want you to put a stop to that right now. They were not like us at all. In fact, I am constantly astounded by how much we have changed in little over a thousand years. We're pretty wonderful, if I do say so myself. We ... (we skip ahead five pages and arrive at -) Chapter One. Our ancestors did not have one cohesive perception of time. Instead, they understood time in two different ways simultaneously. These two ways can be loosely labelled 'Interior time' and 'Exterior time.' Interior time involved everything that happened inside their heads, and it was roughly sequential. Memory, in other words, and thoughts and dreams. Exterior time was everything that happened outside. Exterior time passed in the physical world and it was not sequential. Each physical moment was, to them, pure essence of Time. They could not connect the events of one minute to anything that occurred in the minutes before or afterwards. Instead, they saw all exterior objects at every point in time simulataneously, and this clashed strangely with the movement that they dimly perceived to be going on outside their bodies. Without a sequential understanding of time, they saw the result of an action before it occurred and also while it occurred and what might have happened if it had occurred differently and what might have happened if it had never occurred at all. Each moment was a dazzling new experience. Or, perhaps, a confusing new experience. We don't know. They were entirely illiterate, so there are no descriptions of what their world was like. All of our information about them has been taken from scraps of information written down by early Umbagollians who had somehow adopted a sequential understanding of Exterior time, and who therefore could only guess at the experiences of their parents and grandparents. They were perfect slaves because they did not see themselves as slaves. Slavery existed in the exterior world, (which was transient and permanant at the same time and therefore confusing) while their cognitive abilities functioned only in the interior. Dreams were as real to them as the physical world is to us now. Professor Consuela Bowspeaker has described this as a 'life in reverse.' The most meaningful part of their lives happened when they were asleep and had uninterrupted access to dreams, while the waking world tossed them about in chaos. She has also pointed out that this may be close to the mental process of some of the Umbagollians whom we label 'mystics.' Perhaps our mystics are throwbacks to an earlier time and they see us in the same confused way that our ancestors saw their masters. She has suggested that the mystics may one day band together as our ancestors eventually did and travel to another country where they will found a civilisation of their own and tell their descendants stories of the time when they were harassed and kept as slaves by unnamed mysterious master-figures, who will have been ourselves. At some time, one or more of our enslaved ancestors began to understand the exterior world sequentially. We can imagine that this happened through the same processes that produce lunacy or mental retardation in our society. Now, lunatics on their own are not an uncommon thing, but a lunatic charismatic enough to mobilise a large group of individuals and convince them to follow her is not an everyday person. During our thousand-year history in this country we have never seen anything else like it. Whoever this lunatic, or lunatics, were, they assembled a following of about fifty people and convinced them to cross the Two Shows Ranges to reach the unexplored and unknown country on the other side. The journey took about a year. When you consider that the majority of the travellers were probably not fellow lunactics, but sane individuals who perceived the exterior world as a chaotic, changeless melange of nonsensical images, the achievement becomes even more impressive. That is the end of Chapter One. We do not know anything about our ancestors' masters, or what their country was like. Most of the refugees were incapable of comprehending the world, and those who comprehended were reluctant to write anything down. Not only do we not have any records of the refugees' homeland, we do not even have records of there being any records. " Go ahead to the next chapter, The Early Years of Settlement or back to the Timeline.