I perceived that I was in a crouching posture. Crouching? On what? On an immaterial and yet solid platform—immaterial, and yet real; unreal and yet material: a flat surface that did not exist, and which, even so…yes, which was vibrating! Impossible to move to check the instruments I was carrying—a barometer among others. Impossible.
Nevertheless, I succeeded in reasoning in my immobility. I managed to listen. The hum persisted in the vicinity. There was also the noise, the wind, of my ascension: ssssssss…. But I felt no breeze. Then I thought of being in an ascending air current, in the bosom of a vertical column of artificial wind, which was lifting me up as rapidly as it flowed toward the zenith itself…but that did not explain the solid contact of my point of support.
At that moment, I still had the conviction that the ascent was only the first phase of the voyage, that I would soon reach the machine where the pump or magnet was located, and that that machine would carry me through the ether, doubtless to some heavenly body—for my default assumption was still that the sarvants were the inhabitants of some other planet, their actions having seemed to me to be extraterrestrial: marvelous, one might say. So I watched out for the appearance on high of that machine, which did not show itself.
And I continued to rise. The Earth’s disk comprised an immense extent of regions, already much less rich in colors, and blurred. Mont Blanc was a dazzling projection leveling off increasingly. I had far surpassed its height.
What? I thought. Here I am at more than 4810 meters, and I’m not cold!
I estimated the altitude I had reached at 6000 meters. Temperature declines by approximately one degree per 515 meters, so I should have been covered in ice; my respiration should have generated a thick vapor; I should have been shivering; I should have been suffering mountain sickness, to combat which I had brought an oxygen cylinder. Probably, all that was about to happen. I observed my breath, which would become awkward, accelerated, labored, and my heart, which would beat precipitately. I watched out for a sensation of plenitude in the vessels, the pulse of the carotid. I expected my nose to start bleeding at any moment. My head would ache, certainly; I struggled in advance against sensory numbness, somnolence, mental prostration. It seemed to me that I already felt the characteristic thirst, the desire for cold drinks—nauseated, tongue dry, belches, aching knees and legs, as if after a long march, exhaustion…but, save for the stomach-ache due to vertigo, there was none of that—none of the symptoms that I had studied carefully in books.
And yet I was still rising, and I was certain that if I had been able to pick up the thermometer and look at it, I would have seen that it stood at between 16 and 18 degrees below zero. In sum, it was quite comfortable—and yet I was at least 9000 meters above ground—higher than Gaurisankar, where the thermometer would have marked 35 below zero! I remembered, with amazement, that without oxygen, no human being had ever attained those regions without losing consciousness. Berson and Süring had reached 10,500 meters, but with oxygen respirols.34 Besides, was I not higher now? It was a dream! I had to check…
I made an effort, which succeeded; the vertigo was diminishing as I drew away from the Earth. I was able to grab the oxygen cylinder behind my back and hold its mouthpiece close to my lips, in case of emergency. Then the thermometer: + 18°C! And the barometer: 760 millimeters! Exactly the same pressure as that at ground level! The mean pressure of terra firma! Was I really still on Earth? I thought I was an idiot. My state of mind was somewhat different from the heroic one that I had anticipated!
Naturally, one page of this notebook represents one minute. I listened harder. It seems that I perceived…and I perceived quite clearly a soft double flapping sound, which made a muffled clip clop, clip clop, and so on. Being alone—and what solitude!—I attributed the noise to myself. Was it not some effect of altitude on my physiology?
By means of my watch, and assuming that I was still rising with the same velocity, I made approximate calculations of height. Soon I was certain of having reached 30,000 meters—and the record of unmanned balloon-probes! But there I had the illusion of being motionless, because my continued movement away from the too-distant Earth was no longer sensible at a glance. On lifting my eyes, however, I could see the sky losing its blueness, darkening. Then, suddenly, above me and to my right—which is to say, to the south of the point toward which I was rising—I perceived a blackness that was visibly growing. It seemed to me that it was falling, but it was me who was rising toward its fixity.
I was about to look through my binoculars, but an unexpected sick feeling took hold of me. A buzz in my ears beat an incessant drum-roll. It seemed that the clip clop had stopped abruptly. I was gripped by an intense cold; my arms and neck-muscles stiffened, spontaneously and progressively. I experienced incredible difficulty in breathing, my eyes clouded over and I was scarcely able to observe that the thermometer had dropped, plunging terribly to -22°, and that it was continuing to fall. I was unable to search for the barometer in one of my pockets. Even so, my failing eyes thought they discerned a form that was emerging everywhere, on all sides at the same time. It seemed to me that the air was growing dark…but was that not a result of the onset of fainting?
The instinct of self-preservation found me the mouthpiece of the bladder full of oxygen; then, immediately, I recovered my senses. All weakness was dissipated,
I was imprisoned in a tall and vast cylinder of ice, a kind of sealed turret. I was crouching on the bottom of a jar of ice whose thickness was increasing continuously, gradually attenuating the daylight. And it was snowing inside the cylinder. My clothes were covered in frost, my breath condensed into sleet; it was as if I were imprisoned in a frosted-glass jug.
Suddenly, the soft flapping resumed, with greater rapidity—should I say liveliness, or even eagerness?—as if to make up for lost time. I think it was behind my back. That magical sound was accompanied by a sort of draught of warmth and dryness. The temperature rose again; the light brightened again; the refrigerated jar melted. Soon, no more remained of it than a thin cylindrical sheet of frost, and that sheet—that tube—disappeared in its turn, as if wiped away. With it went the last hint of sickness, as if it too had been wiped away…
I found myself alone in the midst of immensity, still rising. The mirage had lasted a few seconds. The sky was visibly less blue than before, however, and the black dot, increasingly large, had become a square spot.
It was then that I tried to take up my binoculars in order to observe that spot—but I recalled that they had slipped out of my hands in the first moments of my fainting fit. I felt a keen irritation when, to my profound amazement…
At this point, Monsieur Le Tellier ceased reading from the red notebook. An immense clamor had distracted his attention.
The automobile emerged into the Place de l’Opéra. A cannon-shot had just announced the start of the race, and it reverberated around Paris in glorious and enthusiastic echoes.
X. The Famous Friday, September 6
For the first time, the sky of old Lutèce was about to serve as the arena for an aerial regatta.35 It was a festive blue.
The entire city was seething, half its people having invaded the roofs. Since early morning, its edifices had been crowned by a swarming mass of human beings. Skylights had been rented out like the front seats at a première. Overloaded with spectators, several balconies had already collapsed. Certain houses seemed to have come to life, so extensively covered were their façades and terraces with agitated humankind. The thick tide of the crowd moved in slow eddies through the rivers of the streets, the pools of the squares, especially in the quarters cut through by the course of the race. That imaginary line, drawn between the Invalides and the Cathedral of Meaux, traversed the Carrefour de la Rue Louis-le-Grand, the Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin, the Boulevard des Italiens and the Boulevard des Capucines; there, more than anywhere else, the buildings half-disappeared beneath a living carapace. The prodigious city served as a grandstand for everyone. It was filled by the inf
inite rumor of a titanic Coliseum. A menagerie odor mingled with cooking smells rising from the ground dulled the warmth of the fine late-summer day.
No one was talking about the Peril anymore; people were only talking about the race. The two competing machines gave rise to intense chatter. No one had seen them as yet, and yet everyone had his favorite, some preferring the lighter-than-air craft to the heavier-than-air craft, others wagering against the State or against Capital, while many others based their opinions on the more-or-less irresistible sympathy they felt with regard to the pilots.
The pilots—the gods of the moment—were the Duc d’Agnès, the jockey of the Epervier, and Captain Santus, mahout of the Prolétaire. News-vendors were selling their portraits and biographies. They held them up on the ends of poles to the curiosity-seekers on the balconies, and jumped aboard carriages that were trying to reach the suburbs in the direction of Meaux.
As time advanced, the heaped-up public quivered with excitement. Circulation in the main streets increased, as in the arteries of a fever-victim. At the Carrefour Louis-le-Grand, the effervescence attained its maximum at about 9:45 a.m. From then on, those lower down, not being able to see anything, shouted to those higher up, behind the monstrous letters of billboards, among the advertising-hoardings and the chimney-pots: “Can you see them? Have they taken off?”
From the balcony of the Pavillon de Hanovre, the roofs of the Vaudeville and the summit of every roof, the reply came back: “No!”
Gibes followed. That produced a jolly confusion of invective—and those lower down continued to gaze at those higher up, who were all gazing at the distant dome of the Invalides, where the sunlight gilded, even more than its bronzes, two shining granules: two little captive balloons, maintained at an interval of 100 meters, determining the starting-line, which was also the finish-line.
Down below, underneath the little balloons, there must have been a considerable deployment of rostrums, bands and flowers. The national pomp draped its crimson velvet there upon golden rods. The Marseillaise, inevitably…
But at 9:50 a.m., the audience on the roofs became agitated, like a crop-field stirred by the breeze. It was like a profound, tremulous and gigantic sigh of delight, and the same phrase was repeated hundreds of thousands of times: “There’s the Prolétaire going up!”
They could see it. It was a long tapering cigar, yellow and red. It rose up, glossy with reflected morning light. The propeller, rotating with a lightning glimmer, was visible through opera-glasses.
“Here’s d’Agnès! Here’s the Epervier now!”
“Eh? So small? That little thing flying back and forth?”
“It’s him—but you can see that it’s describing spirals around the dirigible.”
“Ah! They’re level!”
“Level with the little balloons!”
“Beyond the little balloons!”
The evolutions of the airplane and the aeronef were followed excitedly. The Prolétaire came about majestically and directed its prow toward Meaux. It was no longer seen in profile, but head on. It resembled, thus, a sphere of paltry dimensions. The Epervier, next to it, extended its rigid wings, in order that they would pass the starting-line together; that was understood.
Then the cannon-shot thundered, a signal fired by one of the Invalides’ pre-Montgolfierian culverins, now twice historic. The pathetic, sumptuous, solemn cannon-shot was met with the response of an immense popular clamor, which reverberated around Paris in glorious and enthusiastic echoes.
Santus and d’Agnès were off.
An enormous joy filled the leaden terraces. They came straight toward the Carrefour. Parasols snapped shut and, higher up than anyone else, the cinematographs picked out their expected silhouette. Opera-glasses rigged out the people with the long eyes of black lobsters, showing them the Prolétaire and the Epervier side by side, growing larger and larger, the Prolétaire yellow and the Epervier…ah! blue! The Epervier was blue! The news ran through the crowd like a sonorous ignis fatuus. Blue! The monoplane was blue! They had not expected that, and they were not pleased to discover that the bird was blue, the color of the Heavens and the Peril, like a little bit of sky elegantly materialized. The bird was blue! It was like something from the Thousand-and-One Nights, with a suggestion of fairy-tales!
“Fly to me promptly!” said the multitude, laughing incontinently.36
The cinematographs began to function, zoom lenses came into play…
They were flying at an altitude of 100 feet. In the calm air, they approached silently, in a whirlwind. The airplane, equipped with its electricity-extractor, was not making the usual racket. Its two propellers were visibly turning, like two nebulous suns, and their double throb was audible, like two high-pitched sirens, setting up a sort of irritating resonance, that grated on the nerves like the highest-pitched strings. The Epervier’s slender stabilizing antennae became visible, as slender as a cat’s whiskers—or the legs of a giant gnat—all around the apparatus.
A trail of ovations followed them. When they reached the Carrefour, there was an explosion of cheers so frantic that it was comparable to a firework display. It was a concert of shouts, in which everyone cried out the name of his favorite at the top of his voice, concurrently: “Bravo, Santus! Bravo! Go on, d’Agnès! Go on, then!”—because the Prolétaire, to the right and above the Epervier, had a slight lead.
Hearts palpitated to a chauvinistic rhythm. The crowd waved handkerchiefs and hats frenetically. Captain Santus raised his kepi; his aides gave military salutes; the Duc d’Agnès gestured with his hand.
You might have thought you were seeing a copper shell pursued by a steel eagle. The two tempests that they provoked shook the oriflammes at the tops of the flag-poles. A gust of pride and intoxication swept over the pale faces, and on the roof of the Vaudeville a well-known actress, addressing the universe, proclaimed in her beautiful voice: “It’s chic, all the same, to be French!”
Suddenly, though, the great crowd became alarmed; the ocean of human beings swelled with anxiety.
Just as the rivals were passing over the Pavillon de Hanovre, the Prolétaire’s poop had dipped. Its cruciform fins jerked downwards, and further downwards, and its unbreachable envelope suddenly caved in, as if someone were pulling at it obstinately from the interior of the balloon itself…
Slowing down, the dirigible reversed its engines desperately…but the gasbag reinflated in the same way that it had deformed, unexpectedly; the aeronef pitched, leapt up, restarted…and…
And it was the Epervier’s turn-which, without any apparent cause, heeled over in an alarming manner, its left wing lifting...
The Duc d’Agnès could be seen operating his controls at top speed, veering in spite of his best efforts and unable to straighten up. The monoplane listed; it was about to fall into the gulf carpeted with living beings. The army in the gulf moaned in agony…then howled victoriously! The Epervier was on the move again; a diabolical roll swayed its blue wingspan—but it was no longer listing. A second swerve righted it, and launched it into the contest again, in pursuit of the Prolétaire.
The acclamation that they had sewn as they passed by died away. People turned round to follow them until they were lost to sight. The women, however, were breathing in their smelling-salts. God, what a fright they had had!
The automobiles were roaring, sounding their horns, sirens and whistles, impatient to get beyond Pantin.
What had happened? Had the backwashes of the propellers interfered with one another? An atmospheric current?
The comments were in full flow when muffled and sinister sounds broke out: groans, collisions; a tumult of horror. All eyes turned toward the terrace of the Pavillon de Hanovre. A commotion there was throwing people into one another. Frightened eyes were upraised; telegraphic cables had broken spontaneously, and their fall had provoked the disorder. The stone balustrade held back the mob, while the sculpted groups that decorated it supported clusters of panic-stricken individuals in search of a refuge. T
he left-hand sculpture suddenly collapsed with its howling cargo. The block fell on to the pedestrians on the pavement, amid blood, fear and amazement. There were too many people on the statues, damn it! The others were also about to fall…
But no. What fell was rubble, which continued to crumble away from the wall at the same place, showering the breathless wounded with further blows. Emerging from the breach in the gallery, an infernal stream of ruin and demolition descended along the old grey wall: a slow thunderbolt worked its way along the masonry, eating out a white, deep and cruel crack…
And the crowds that thronged the area, seized by panic, watched that frightful fraying extend. It continued to descend, stripping the rotunda, splintering its façade, shattering the windows, fracturing the ironwork, stoning the dead and the dying. As it reached the height of the nearby chestnut-tree, the tree shuddered and split…that flameless, noiseless, lazy thunderbolt crumpled the leaves and broke the branches from top to bottom…
And then the indescribable itself occurred.
A terrible crash like two colliding trains was abruptly heard, in the very center of the crossroads, and a catastrophe unfolded unequalled in the centuries of history: a fantastic tohu-bohu of telescoped carriages, stricken horses, livid coachmen, demented chauffeurs and bloodied individuals fleeing insanely in every direction, howling: “The Blue Peril!”
Lined up on the steps of the plaza, the surrounding crowd had started as one man. Here and there, people were gesticulating like fanatics, but the others, breathless, remained rooted to the spot by fear and stupefaction. None was in mortal terror, but even so, a groan ran through the multitude like a simoom through a forest of baobabs. From further away, feminine lamentations arose.
What did they think was happening? Nothing, for the moment. After a few seconds of panic, a number of witnesses had the curious impression of a “hardening of the air” or a “magnetic barricade”, or a thick wall of crystal—superlatively pure crystal—slowly descend across the boulevard, as a theater curtain descends. To either side of it, the circulating traffic was colliding with that strange portcullis, which flattened against the wooden pavement those unlucky enough to be directly beneath it. What they were able to imagine—the certainty—was that some diabolical sluice-gate had blocked the way.
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