“Speaking of the wind, a few months ago, Antonio had suggested that I pay attention to it, and not just to its ferocity or coldness, but to its musical qualities as well. At the time it caught me by surprise. I had never once thought of wind as music, but he did, and so I started trying to follow what he said. At first, I heard the wind as I always did: a whoosh, a hiss, a whine, a whistle, a rustle of leaves, followed by the groans and creaks coming from the house, but more and more I was beginning to appreciate what he told me: that there was more to the wind than met the ear.
It was Charles Darwin who first proposed that before speech, men’s early ancestors had produced musical cadences, in other words, some sort of music. Not only useful in courtship, he argued, but useful in expressing feelings, such as affection, success, and jealousy, besides also acting as a challenge and a warning to others. Some evolutionary scientist, hell bent on expanding the argument, say that musical sounds probably gave way to articulate sound which eventually became words. They point out that present day gibbon-apes use musical sounds for courtship and other things, plus the way they enunciate the sound gives the group cohesion, by basically having a distinct language and a different accent, from that of other groups. I could see the logic behind what Darwin and those that followed said: it made sense, and although the subject is still a hot topic debate among scientist, what wasn’t. It didn’t take much for scientist to argue, fight, and bicker, like the worst of jealous teenage gossips, and I suppose that was just part of being human; in other words, descendants from apes.”
From the sequel to In the Land of Fire (unpublished).