Journey to the Isles of Atlantis and Other Fanciful Excursions

by Brian Stableford

  Marcel affirmed that he was ready to set to work, and that another day of leave was unnecessary, but Blas replied: “Don’t worry, we won’t be wasting our time. It’s a most instructive spectacle that I’m going to show you. It’s indispensable that you have, at least in its broad outlines, and idea of the events that have taken place between the twentieth and thirtieth centuries. For that, we’ll go together to the Palace of Art and History, the sumptuous crimson and gold edifice that you can see from here.”

  Marcel accepted Blas’ proposal with enthusiasm, and the two friends went down to the subterranean station of the pneumatic line. They climbed into a carriage, and got down again at the Palace of Art and History, the vast buildings of which occupied the entire surface of the ancient hill of Ménilmontant.

  Its architecture was exceptionally majestic. The arcades and cupolas, in a severe style, were a crimson porcelain on which massive golden ornaments stood out.

  Marcel noticed that the exterior was not decorated by any statue, and that the very trees that surrounded the palace offered something grave and serious, in complete rapport with the majesty of history. Only laurels, oaks and palm trees grew around the palace. No flower cast a cheerful note into the severity of that somber verdure.

  “You see,” observed Blas, “that nothing has been neglected here to prepare the mind of a visitor for the meditations that the history of humankind ought to suggest to him.”

  Marcel and Blas went through a vestibule decorated with noble panoplies of weapons of all times and all nations.

  The stone axes of prehistoric man lay next to the arrows and javelins of Oceanian savages, the gilded armor of knights and the rapid fire rifles of modern times. One panel was entirely devoted to artillery; it presented in all parts the meaning maws of machine-guns and automatic cannons, mingled with the bombards and culverins of the late Middle Ages.

  Marcel perceived another host of engines that were unfamiliar to him, and which stood out by virtue of their extreme simplicity. They were aerial and submarine torpedoes, electric mortars, liquefied gas shells and other devices invented after the twentieth century.

  All those panoplies decorated the pedestals of smiling goddesses crowned with olive branches.

  “Here,” said Blas, “there is not only the museum of history and war, but also the temple of peace and art.”

  Marcel and Blas went through a lateral portico and into a gallery of mediocre dimensions, on to which opened, to the right and the left, rooms that contained the marvels of the painting, sculpture and furniture of times past.

  “You’ll find there,” said Blas, “the principal masterpieces of the ancient Louvre, the British Museum and the Uffizi Museum of Florence.”

  Marcel went into one of the rooms. He took pleasure in seeing, in rooms ornamented with furniture of the same era as the canvases, the taste and care with which the paintings had been disposed.

  “In my time,” he told Blas, “we had less respect for masterpieces. The paintings were piled up at random, tightly packed together, in galleries exposed to sunlight, which caused them to deteriorate. In that mass of canvases, it was impossible to find at first glance the one for which one was searching. A walk in a museum was a veritable torture for the eyes and the brain.

  Marcel would have liked to pause again in the rooms of paintings, but Blas dragged him away.

  “Many of these masterpieces,” he said, “are from your century. Later, you can study them at your leisure. For the moment, we don’t have time to waste, We’re going to go at this pace to the great central hall of historic cinematography.”

  Marcel and Blas arrived in an immense circular gallery with a ceiling in a cupola, and a mosaic pavement. All around the hall, broad arcades opened. There were a dozen of them, which served as frames for unpolished glass screens.

  “Each of these arcades,” Blas explained, “represents for us an interval of a hundred years. Here, we’re surrounded by all the centuries that have passed since the invention of cinematography, and we can evoke at will the events that have taken place in the last thousand years. It’s sufficient to spend a few hours here to take account of the evolution of the human race during that long span of years. Unfortunately, I can only show you the events that have occurred over ten centuries. Before then, cinematography, and even photography, had not been invented, and all we possess of those abolished epochs are statues, drawings—which constitute meager documents—or the accounts of historians, inexact, partial and deceitful.”

  “In that case,” exclaimed Marcel, enthusiastically, “I can contemplate with my own eyes all the memorable events that filled the ten centuries to have elapsed between my epoch and yours!”

  “All those you wish. Here, stop facing the arcade of the twentieth century. I’ll activate the mechanism of the cinematograph, and you’ll see filing before your eyes all the scenes of that historical panorama.”

  Marcel had approached the indicated arcade.

  “Would you like to see a battle?” Blas proposed.

  “Thank you, but I was too disturbed by the one that I saw in the history course. If it’s all the same to you, let’s begin with something more peaceful.”

  “As you wish,” replied Blas, starting the apparatus.

  Immediately, the mat pallor of the screen brightened. A landscape suddenly appeared. The sky and the sea had their natural color, and an immense crowd was gesticulating enthusiastically.

  In the foreground there was a seaport, from which departed the metallic arches of a gigantic steel bridge, boldly launched across the waves. The causeway was majestic in its width. Five rows of electric locomotives, decked with ribbons and flowers, were getting ready to depart.

  Suddenly, the immense crowd massed on the shore uttered a formidable acclamation. Flags were hoisted. The smoke of artillery salvos rose up. At the same instant, the five locomotives moved off. The port and the crowd were seen to decrease in the distance. And there was no more, after that, than a scene of sky, sea and metal.

  Soon, another city was designed at the opposite end of the bridge.

  The arrival of the locomotives was greeted with the same enthusiasm by another crowd, massed like the first on the quays and jetties of a port.

  “What am I seeing?” Marcel asked. “What is that bridge, the most immense that had ever been constructed, and between the arches of which steamships loaded with people are gliding like mere boats?”

  “The bridge that you have just seen connected Dover and Calais, France and England. It’s the Channel Bridge, which appeared to your contemporaries, for a long time, impossible to construct. The sea, since then, no longer separates the two peoples.”

  “An extraordinary spectacle!” murmured Marcel, who could not believe his eyes.

  “Now,” said Blas, “we’re going to jump forward two hundred years. You’re going to witness the great electric catastrophe to which the American city of Chicago fell victim in the year 2197. That city, completely industrial and commercial, had become the head of more than three hundred railway lines. It was entirely composed of buildings of between thirty and forty stories, all constructed of steel, aluminum and incombustible wood. Everything there was done by electricity, from the slaughter of livestock—for canned meats were the city’s principal commerce—to the automatic distribution of letters and aliments. Unfortunately, the engineers of those days did not know yet how to manage appropriately the mysterious and terrible power known as electricity, and they abused it in all sorts of ways.

  “The city of Chicago was furrowed by networks and bundles of cables of all dimensions, intersecting in all directions, under the ground as well as above the summits of the buildings. The city was, so to speak, saturated by electric fluid. A great storm, which occurred in the month of July, led to the catastrophe, which had been foreseen by a number of scientists. The insulation separating the various wires from one another melted; the millions of currents that were circulating in all directions were combined, and became one single mighty c
urrent. A kind of electrical aurora borealis, which illuminated the region with its sinister light for hundreds of leagues around, enveloped the city. Under the action of that inconceivable current, stone was charred and reduced to dust; metals burned and melted.

  “The inhabitants, almost all electrocuted before the commencement of the conflagration, perished instantaneously in hundreds of thousands. Only a small number of them, protected by the vicinity of the great Lake Michigan, were able to escape death miraculously. Of the splendid city, the pride of North America, which, by virtue of the number of its palaces, its theaters, its railways stations and its factories, was considered as the Queen of the New World, nothing remained but a vast circle, several leagues in extent, covered with ash and scoria, in which ingots of molten metal were mingled with vitrified sand and profoundly calcined earth...”

  While Blas was speaking, Marcel, trembling with fear, had followed all the phases of the cataclysm. He had seen the white aureole of electric fluid envelop the city like a shroud; then he had seen the gigantic forty-story buildings annihilated like wisps of straw in a furnace, launching jets of colored flame.

  The destructive power of the fluid having done its work it had slowly been reabsorbed in the sky, the earth and the water. The banks of Lake Michigan now appeared to Marcel’s eyes, as bare beneath their mantle of ash, and as sinister and desolate, as the edges of the Dead Sea

  After allowing his friend to recover slightly from his emotion, Blas continued, in a seemingly impassive tone.

  “That lesson was not lost on humankind. The Chicago catastrophe had an immense repercussion all over the world. For a long time, the dread of the electric fluid preoccupied everyone. Scientists set to work studying electricity with a new ardor. They discovered other laws, and they provided means of preventing the repetition of similar cataclysms. Now, we have almost entirely suppressed wires and conductors of all sorts; our transmitters and our receivers are stalled at such a height in the atmosphere or such a great depth underground, that the region in between, the inhabited terrestrial surface, is henceforth shielded from any catastrophe.”

  Marcel listened, marveling.

  Blas, however, had activated the trigger mechanism again.

  “In spite of your horror of blood and carnage,” he said, “it’s indispensable that you should again witness the spectacle of a war. Reassure yourself, however; it is the last that humankind sustained. Europe, Africa and Asia, organized in a confederation, fought America, allied with the Oceanian States. Never had such a massacre bloodied the world! But look, rather...

  On the screen facing him, Marcel saw horrible scenes appear.

  He thought he was in the midst of a nightmare.

  Flotillas of balloons and aeroscaphs were pouring torrents of shells over cities and over armies. Torpedoes charged with asphyxiating and poisonous gases were felling entire battalions. Giant machine-guns were launching cannonballs and shells instead of bullets, covering several square leagues of ground with projectiles, razing crops, destroying forests and cities.

  Set ablaze by powerful ardent mirrors, exterminated by torpedoes, fleets at sea burned and disappeared. Elsewhere, Marcel saw colossal automobile steel towers advancing slowly on their squat wheels, sowing death in all directions

  Those cinematographic views were assembled and grouped with so much artistry that they succeeded one another without any confusion.

  After the aerial war and the terrestrial war, Marcel witnessed submarine battles. He saw regiments of men in diving suits armed with electric rifles and broad-bladed daggers rushing upon one another, lying in wait for one another in the corners of forests of algae, and killing one another ferociously, in the vast prairies of fucus and wrack. Submarines passed by like huge blue-tinted fish, seeking to transpierce one another with their spurs, spitting torpedoes in all directions, and exterminating defenseless battalions of divers with their pneumatic artillery.

  Marcel felt cold sweat beading on his forehead. He was prey to an inexpressible horror.

  The cinematograph now represented views of landscapes devastated by the war. There were plains devoid of trees, without a single blade of grass, where bands of men, mutilated and in rags, dragged themselves along painfully.

  Blas, who had perceived Marcel’s terror and consternation, flicked a switch on the apparatus.

  “Enough horrors,” he said. “Enough carnage. Now you’re going to witness more consoling scenes.”

  Still under the influence of the anguish that was gripping him, Marcel gazed.

  In a vast arena that descended from the summit of a mountain covered with olive trees and oleanders all the way to the sea, a multitude of men clad in white and crowned with flowers were gathered. There were representatives of all nations and all races.

  Perhaps for the first time since the origin of the world, the Celts, the Anglo-Saxons, the Latins, the Negroes, the Chinese and the Oceanians were fraternizing sincerely. The universal pact was solemnly pronounced by the delegates of all the peoples.

  Marcel saw entire trains departing of cannons, swords and rifles, the metal of which was surrendered to industrialists, about to be transformed into agricultural implements, automobiles and tools of every sort.

  There was a general celebration throughout the world. The weapons, of which the soldiers of all nations hastened to rid themselves, formed gigantic heaps in public squares. Everywhere, people rejoiced. Setting off marvelous firework displays. The tables of Pantagruelesque banquets were extended over several kilometers. Diplomats were embraced and congratulated by women and children. A surge of fraternity caused the hearts of all humankind to beat in unison.

  Marcel thought he ought to ask Blas for some information about the political state of peoples in that epoch. He learned to his surprise that only two great republics existed in the world at that time: the United States of the Old Continent, which comprised Europe, Asia and Africa, with their fringes; and the United States of the New World, formed of Australia, North and South America and their fringes.

  It was those two demimondial republics that, by means of the solemn peace pact, had just sworn an indissoluble alliance between them.

  “My God,” cried Marcel, “how glad I am to have witnessed the proclamation of peace between men! I didn’t think that would ever happen...”

  “You’ll see now,” Blas continued, “what immense progress the state of peace permitted to be realized. Here’s one, among many others. But for that, let’s skip a number of years. We’re in the year 2450....”

  On the screen, a maritime scene now appeared, shaded by beautiful trees and animated by a host of busy people. A large number of parallel jetties advanced from the shore far out to sea. At intervals, they were covered by constructions.

  “What’s that?” asked Marcel

  “That’s the system of ‘wharfs’ equipped with turbines by means if which people were able to utilize the force produced by the flux and reflux of the tide. Those turbines powered dynamoelectric machines that furnished the power necessary for lighting, heating, transport and machinery of every sort. It’s since the installation of those wharfs that people began to abandon the exploitation of coal mines and oil wells, and that difficult and dangerous labor ceased to be carried out by humans...”

  When Marcel had contemplated the Atlantic wharfs sufficiently, Blas showed him a bird’s eyes view of one of the capitals of the year 2500, the city of Afrika on the shore of Lake Chad. Marcel saw before him an accumulation of palaces and gardens, ornamented with exotic trees, and he learned with surprise that the city of Afrika, founded only a few years before by a group of engineers and industrialists, was renowned for the number of its scientists and artists.

  “In that epoch,” Blas explained, “Africa was more knowledgeable, more civilized and better cultivated than the Europe of your epoch. One did not encounter desolate regions there like the steppes of Poland or Russia...”

  “What are you going to show me now?” asked Marcel, avidly.

&nb
sp; “This,” said Blas, modifying the scene abruptly. “A submarine view of the subatlantic railway. Thanks to it, one can go from Paris to New York in a day. That was already good for the epoch—which is to say, for the year 2700.”

  Marcel saw the subatlantic trains, like long metal snakes, traveling like flashes of lightning through the ocean depths, with their headlights illuminating the abysms of the ocean in the distance.

  Seized by a fever of curiosity, he did not pause for long on each scene, and the obliging Blas made new ones pass before his eyes continually.

  “What am I looking at now?” Marcel demanded, suddenly. “I can only see a severe monument of bronze and granite ornamented by urns and bas-reliefs.”

  “What you see is a tomb. It was constructed in 2817 in honor of several of the inhabitants of the planet Mars who had attempted to reach us and who were victims of their scientific audacity. The centrifugal nacelle that carried them deposited them, horribly wounded, on our soil. They died. That tomb, which can be seen on the shore of the China Sea, immortalizes their courage. It’s since their arrival among us that the initiative of scientists has borne them particularly toward interplanetary communication, which has finally yielded the marvelous result that you were able to observe yesterday.”

  Marcel remained silent, lost in his thoughts.

  “I’m a little tired,” he declared, finally. “So many vertiginous visions have just passed before my eyes that my brain hurts and my ideas are vague.”

  “Just look at this, though,” said Blas.

  Marcel saw, in the midst of a blue sky, high above the region of the clouds, a city that seemed to be floating in mid air.

  “You doubtless want to show me the effect of a mirage,” said Marcel.

  “Not at all, Meteorville, the city of aluminum and pegamoid, which you see before your eyes, really existed until the year 2910. It was inhabited primarily by scientists and invalids, who went there to observe atmospheric phenomena and to breathe the vivifying air of high altitudes. Flotillas of aeroscaphs put the city is communication with the regions beneath.”