by Edgar Quinet
VOICES IN THE UNIVERSE
Come, come.
V.
FIRST TRIBE
I choose, to guide me, the great river Ganges; it is the one that has the widest banks, and waves as profound as the sky.
SECOND TRIBE
I know what my guide will be: it is the gryphon. It is as strong as the lion, as swift as the eagle and it has a crown on its head; when it stops in the desert, all the lions fall silent.
THIRD TRIBE
I know a guide that runs faster than the river and is more knowledgeable than the gryphon: it is the ibis with the golden beak and feet of silver. When it is at rest under the palm-trees it foretells the future; when it is moving over a rock it recalls the past.
(They leave.)
FIRST TRIBE
River Ganges, you run faster than a gazelle. Halt your waves momentarily so that we might slake or thirst therein.
THE RIVER
Not yet, not yet; we are still far from the bank where you shall rest. With the current that follows me I am towing a white lily like as vase; in the white lily is the beverage of Amrita, which gives immortality. You can put your lips to it when we have arrived.
FIRST TRIBE
Tell us, at least, with your murmuring isles, tell us with your white foam, what the bank where we shall halt is like.
THE RIVER
Beneath the fig-trees and grapefruit-trees of India I have already hollowed out my valley in order for you to spread your waves there. As I fill it every day with the water of my source, you, in your turn, shall fill it with tears, sweat, hymns and tombs. Your name shall germinate in the centuries as the lotus germinates in my mud. Your gods shall be amassed around you like the shells on my banks. They shall spread out in your dreams like the fruit of the amla-tree on an autumn night.
FIRST TRIBE
Oh, how slowly your waves at moving at present beneath the vaults of savannahs! The branches of palms cover them with perfumed shade. In the crystalline dream that cradles you night and day, your weak and somnolent flux only rises up on occasion to say to you: “Carry me, carry me with your bank to where you are going.”
THE RIVER
Thus your days and your centuries shall pass, without being able to move away from our banks. Thus your future empires shall fall asleep in the shadow of your dreams.
FIRST TRIBE
Stop, river Ganges; do you not see the Ocean before you? It is immense; it is boundless. Go back, go back into your valley; you will be lost, lost forever with your waves the color of an antelope’s eye, in the sea that is spreading out before you.
THE RIVER
Thus you shall be lost one day with your tribes, you pearl necklaces, your embalmed centuries, your gods, your murmurs, your cities, in your ocean and your eternity.
SECOND TRIBE
A CHILD
Mother, Mother, this road is full of stones; a thorn has pierced my foot. Is this the land of Iran to which the gryphon is leading us?
THE MOTHER
Not yet—be brave! We’ll arrive soon.
THE CHILD
I can’t walk any further; the gryphon’s still racing; when its feet are weary, it uses its wings.
THE MOTHER
If you stop on the road, when everyone else has gone past, the black devas will carry you away into the sky where they hold their dances.
THE CHILD
I don’t want to be carried away by the devas, but my feet are bleeding. (He weeps). Am I going to die?
A PERI
Come, Ferdoun, suspend yourself from my neck; hide your feet in my long hair; I will carry you all the way to the land of Iran. You shall find crystal springs for your thirst, fountains of naphtha to warm you, fresh figs, dates in the leafy woods, coconuts and golden oranges for your hunger.
THE CHILD
Truly—golden oranges too?
THE PERI
You shall encounter, as you pass by, streaming with foam, on the shores of bays, avatars with the bodies of women who will beckon and call to you in order to cradle you in the watery depths. The rivers run over their sands there more rapidly than archers on horseback when they cause their quivers to resonate. The desert extends around with its perfume of myrrh, better than the linen girdle that your mother extends beside her by night. Snow whitens the mountain-tops there, better than miters on the heads of priests. For the thousand years, the lakes have been suspended there in their valleys, like kings dreaming their royal dreams beneath azure tents.
THE CHILD
Peri, good Peri, I want, on arrival, to awaken the lakes in their beds; I want to hear the quivers of the rivers resonating, to touch the snow whiter than miters, learn the song of the avatars.
THE PERI
How many cities shall be born of your caprice, in which you might rest at your ease! Babylon will bend down behind you like a thirsty lioness that has not found a spring all day. On the banks of the Euphrates, Bactra will flee over the mountain like a unicorn on its rock. Have you seen the reeds in the marshes? Marble columns will rise up like them in the marshes of Persepolis. Have you seen the colors of the rainbow in the rising sun? Ecbatana will gild its walls in order that you might count them as you pass through its gates. Gods, born yesterday like you, will salute you on your road; the young peris of Chaldea will read your horoscope in the stars of your age. Are there not already, in your dreams, phantoms crowned with miters, kings suspended from your name as that pearl necklace is suspended round your neck, centuries and perfumed cities that extend their carpets into the future beneath your feet, and birds with silver plumage that greet you beneath the palm-trees as you pass by?
THE CHILD
You’re carrying me too rapidly; I can only see the tops of the trees swayed by the wind, the glistening water of the lakes, the nests of the little birds shaking on the branches. Is Ecbatana or Babylon already there?
THIRD TRIBE
Look at the sinister shadow the ibis is casting on the sand; it is a bad omen; I wish that we had chosen a different guide.
A WOMAN
It has never stopped under the incense-trees, nor the gum-trees. Why did it not leave us in Arabia? Why did it not leave us on the grass of the oases? It has strewn us now beside the Nile, like ostrich eggs, on a muddy bank where the first tempest will break us. The river drags livid specters in its depths; the valley is hollowed out beneath our feet like a tomb; the ibis is folding its head beneath its neck and falling asleep on the summit like a hieroglyph of death. This land is full of funereal presentiments.
THE IBIS
If you had known where your long route leads, rather than setting forth, you would have stopped on its threshold. Born yesterday, are you not afraid of surrendering life too soon?
THIRD TRIBE
Yes, we are already weary of our task. A single day of life is enough for us. As we emerge from nothingness, the sun of the Orient dazzles and exhausts us. Like night-birds suddenly surprised by broad daylight, staggering and bewildered, we hesitate to follow you. Rather than pass the threshold of our life, let us return to the obscurity from which we came. Oh, give us, give us your wings, in order to return more rapidly to the eternal night.
THE IBIS
First, build pyramidal tombs to enclose you all, like the worm in its shell; you shall fall asleep in their shadow; I shall set myself at the apex, as the owl perches by night on the Arab’s tent. I shall wake you up when it is time to enter, people of Egypt. The desert lies motionless. Already your stone sphinxes are producing their litters in the sand. On your obelisks the hawk of the mountains is closing eyes of granite. And you too, hawk of the Egyptian valley, fold your head beneath your wing until the time comes. Your centuries shall pass, one after another, with less noise than the breath of a drowsy sphinx. People of yesterday, crouch down on the threshold of the void from which you came, like the lions at the gates of your cities. In your vicinity, everything shall fall silent. Babylon and Niniveh will get up barefoot in the darkness, for fear of awakening y
ou, and the mist of the nascent universe will envelop you in its shroud.
VI.
An Oriental Night
CHORUS OF STARS
The gryphon and the ibis have led the tribes through the valleys into the lands of their heritage. And a guide leads us, also, through the mountains and valleys of the firmament, over the cloud where we must sleep by night.
THE MOON
The patriarch of Chaldea, sitting before his tent, watches his flocks graze around him on the mountain-side. Graze too, my flocks of stars, bounding around my silver tent, which I have pitched on a spring cloud.
A STAR
Each tribe is asleep in its marble city, each star in its silvery robe. My rays dangle confusedly from the columns of Persepolis. Nineveh has crenellated towers, where they lean out of windows. But best of all I like the walls of Babylon; on its roofs they are amassed and quietly become drowsy, like snowflakes on mountain-tops.
ANOTHER STAR
Perhaps, my sisters, we are making the same voyage as the human tribes. As they wander, I would like to converse with them. I would gladly send them dreams with my golden rays. I would give my words to the wind, the wind would carry them to the flower of the desert, the flower to the river, and the river would repeat them as it passes through cities.
ALL
Yes, that is what we ought to do.
A FLOWER OF THE SYRIAN DESERT
My head bows down beneath the light of the stars; my calyx inflates with dew, as a heart fills with a secret that it would like to repeat. In the night, my flower has reddened with patches the color of blood, like the robe of a Levite on the day of sacrifice; the murmur of the stars has descended into my calyx and mingled with my perfume. I bear a secret in my calyx; I have the secret of the universe, which has escaped it in a dream during the night, and no voice with which to repeat it. Oh, tell me which is the nearest city. Is it Jerusalem or is it Babylon? Let passers-by come to collect the mystery that is charging my crown and causing me to lower my head.
THE EUPHRATES
Flower of the desert, curb your head a little further over my bed, that I might hear your murmur better; from wave to wave, endlessly bounding, I shall bear it to the walls of Babylon; tell me your secret; I shall deposit it on the silvery waves at the foot of the towers of the Chaldeans,
INHABITANTS OF BABYLON ON THEIR ROOFS
See how the Euphrates shines this evening beneath the willows, like the blade of a dagger fallen from a table at a feast. Its murmurs could not be softer if it were rolling sacred vessels of gold and silver along its bed.
A SLAVE
Or if an entire people leaning over its bank were letting tears fall into it one by one.
A KING
Or if an empire with the tiaras of its priests, the robes of its kings and its glittering gods had been swallowed up a thousand years ago by its gravel bed like a water-flower.
CHORUS OF PRIESTS
The light of the night illuminates the inscriptions of Semiramis engraved on the rock of the mountain of Assur. Every word shines here as if a fiery blade were writing the language of the firmament on the stone. As the lyre responds to the lyre, let the voices of the stars allow their mute will to burst forth among us with the voices of peoples and echoes that will last for a century.
The Orient has extended its peoples and its empires around it, as the night extends its robe embroidered with stars, in order that the gods might dress therein some day. But the universal dawn has only just broken, and the one who has warmed it with his breath holds it as a child holds a twig in his hand. While the footsteps of the God of gods pass over the grass of Eden and Kashmir, let us take note of his footprints on the mountain-tops. Neither the sun nor the human heart has drunk his breath as yet.
As the Arab gets up in the night to lick the dew of the desert before the daylight spreads, thus we get up in the first days of the universe to draw the thought of the Eternal from our urns, before its source dries up. Drop by drop, it falls from the stars and the vaults of heaven, and from every leaf of the palm-tree; let us intoxicate ourselves with its liquor, like a resinous wine.
O peoples of India, Chaldea and Egypt, in your turn, take up and drink from the cup of the Eternal, which he has left full in leaving his banquet. Let all the nascent peoples bear to their lips, without delay, the vessel in which infinity is fermenting to the brim, and after us our sphinxes, and after them our idols of granite and bronze. If the universe vacillates before our eyes, if it is divided into a thousand various gods, birds with human heads, serpents with women’s bodies, crowned unicorns, it is as it is at our feasts, when the heart is gorged with wines of Idumea, and every guest, with his pantler, sees the golden vessels totter, collide and shatter in his mind on a table of porphyry.
From India to Arabia, let us hasten; who knows whether the time will come when the universe, centuries hence, will be like a faded, withered flower in the evening of the Arabian sun, and whether human lips might not press in vain upon the cup from which we drink, and there will then be no more perfume, nor any eternal beverage.
VII.
CHORUS OF SPHINXES
1.
By Memnon, how good it is to lie down, all together, beneath the portico of Luxor, to catch our breath, to bend our knees beneath our breasts. In order to rest better, let us curl up, let us gather in our rocky rumps. Let us unwind our feminine necklaces and expose them to the four winds. With our claws, let us loosen the bandlets over our sibylline faces.
2.
Until now, disheveled, we have run without being able to find shelter. Eternity has employed us since its birth as messengers: Hola! handsome messenger with a woman’s breasts, take this news to the ends of my kingdom, without pausing.
“The ends of your kingdom are far away; one finds on the road neither shade nor posture, nor a fragment of wall on which to sit; what will you give me?”
For an awning over your head, my empty sky; beneath your claw, my chaos; for a lair, my black abyss.
3.
But Thebes, which has encountered me, has built me a temple roof, and has made my lair in the rock of Karnak. Every hundred years, if I am hungry, I chew the acanthus leaves, dates and pomegranates that she has carved for me on the capitals of her columns; if I am thirsty, I lick the sacrificial platter; the storm pursues me, I crawl into my stable in the great pyramid of Giza.
4.
In order to avoid boredom, we teach our little ones, while still at the breast, to read, while roaring, the hieroglyphs on our walls. By the apex of the obelisk, by the beak of the ibis, by the wing of the flying serpent, by the antenna of the scarab, by the two sculpted bowls in which souls are weighed, by the hawk sitting on the prow of the boat of the dead, yes, by the sign of the flail, by the sign of the owl and by the sign of the voracious crocodile, our wisdom is greater than the wisdom of the Queen of Sheba.
A SPHINX
How quickly the days pass when one is eternal! A thousand years have already gone by while we’ve been talking. Every word from our mouths takes a century to fall; every breath is a year. To tighten our bands around our foreheads we take the entire lifetime of a patriarch; to lie down on our lioness rumps we take the lifetime of an empire; and when the sands of the deluge cover us breast-deep, we shake them from our shoulders while shivering.
CHORUS OF SPHINXES
1.
Pass, pass before me without fear, centuries, ages of patriarchs, thousand-year days, times of gods, times of mysteries. Young years, which want to stay hidden with your ground-length veils, let me look at you all alone; walk barefoot over my steps; with my monstrous claws, let me attach your girdle of darkness to your robe. Pass too, chariots of war, which do not want to make any noise with your wheels. Armies, handsome horsemen, I shall shed my tresses of sand over your clothes. Pass without trumpets, nor heralds nor sandals, tribes, peoples, empires, mitered races who never fell me your names or where you are going. Pass, towers, old Babels, magical cities that hold your breath bene
ath our gates in order that the shepherd will not hear you. Pass, unknown kings who cover yourselves to the knees with your beards. Gods who veil yourselves in my shadow, write your mystery on my wrinkle-free forehead; I alone know whence you came, what your age is; but my lips shall not be unsealed, my mouth shall not name you. When a traveler asks me, have you seen them pass? I shall say: “Yes, your whinnying mares have gone to the field.”
2.
A thousand years, another thousand years, and as many days and nights have gone by. No, not yet; don’t awaken in their beds the cities that we guard. Let the kings sleep beneath their crowns, the gods beneath their palanquins. Look! All goes well. The rivers go forth, without murmuring in their valleys; the diligent stars light their lamps at dusk, on their tables, to thread their golden robes; the desert, without finding its road too long, only waits, in order to drive its sands, for us to bark around it; the Ocean, obediently, flows toward its shores without our having any need to bite its foamy breast. Let us rest; let us chew, let us ruminate our acanthus leaves and our pomegranates, ripened under our portico of Luxor.
