The World of the Variants

by J. -H. Rosny aîné

  In order to excite less suspicion, I observed the rituals strictly; I did not forget to render the mammoth the same homage as my hosts; I even exaggerated that homage slightly.

  In parallel with this work, I learned to make use of primitive implements. My secret objective was to build a sled. Two or three preliminary experiments gave me considerable hope. In the month of December, I set to work in earnest.

  Needless to say, I continued to make progress in the prehistoric language. I even succeeded in getting a few simplifications adopted, and a few new terms that rendered conversation less difficult. The women helped me in my efforts and understood the novelties better than the men; contrary to the norm of ultra-civilized societies, they seemed less neophobic than their masters.

  By February, the sled was beginning to take shape. I wanted it to be spacious, in order that it might accommodate all my companions and considerable food-supplies. At first, Awah had looked at the unprecedented object with hostile suspicion, but in the end he became used to it, to the point of no longer even looking at it. He had become placid—the season that rendered him aggressive would not reappear for many months—and slept for ten hours a day, as did all the others.

  In January, the temperature decreased to a low level, although it remained far superior to polar temperatures, but in the caverns we did not suffer from the cold at all. Magnificent aurora illuminated the domain; I delighted in taking solitary walks.

  Then an ominous event occurred.

  VIII.

  On the day in question, there was a particularly spectacular aurora borealis. Immense sparkling arcs and jets of light like fountains of luminous water lit up the landscape. At the base there was a scarlet blaze, torrents of rubies and carbuncles; at the zenith, a delicate aurora of beryl and aquamarine, which blotted out the petty stars and only allowed the regal stars to shine through. The air and ground were still; all life was concentrated on high, mysterious and tremulous.

  I was thinking about the innumerable energies of which we would never know anything, which might perhaps nourish worlds as complex as our own, without anything advertising their presence to us. I have always thought that there is an infinity of coexistences everywhere, that where we only see one Sun and planets there are millions, trillions of systems different from one another, which intersect as if each system were a mere absence so far as the others are concerned.

  I was, therefore, thinking about these things while walking on the plain with Namhâ, when we felt a shock so violent that we lost our balance. It only lasted for two or three seconds, and was not repeated—but we felt that it was a redoubtable circumstance.

  “Our ancestors perished thus!” said the young woman fearfully. “Mountains fall in that manner!”

  I remembered then the tormented locale that I had passed through while fleeing from the polar bears.

  We headed back to the caverns; the mammoths had come out, the old one torpid, as usual, the other very nervous, agitating its ears with a mixture of fear and menace. My presence calmed it down; it put its trunk around my body—which was a kind of caress—and gradually resumed its customary attitude.

  We went into the caves warily; they did not exhibit any damage. It was only several days afterwards that Touanhô, Awah and Wanawanoûm noticed a few fissures.

  While we were examining the ground and the walls, Touanhô came in with her little daughter and the old woman. They were still very frightened. The old woman mumbled incoherent words relating to similar shocks, several of which had occurred in her lifetime.

  As Awah and Wanawanoûm had not come back we went to look for them, Touanhô toward the north and the old woman toward the east, while Namhâ and I headed westwards.

  Namhâ had become insouciant again—her mentality scarcely took account of anything beyond the present moment—while I remained anxious. My mature civilized imagination painted the future for me in colors that became blacker as my cogitation became more abundant. Similar accidents had evidently reduced that human tribe that had maintained itself in the region since the Tourassian Epoch to a handful of individuals.

  We had been walking for about an hour when there was a bellowing to our right, and a large red deer stag was silhouetted by the boreal light. It was a magnificent ten-pointer with a broad breast and a solid and supple back. Its agitation was visible, causing its slender legs to tremble—and it had lost the instinct of self-preservation momentarily, since, instead of running away from us, it seemed to be waiting for us.

  My first impulse was to reach for my harpoon, but I remembered immediately that we had sufficient meat in the caves, and it would have been ridiculous to sacrifice so beautiful an animal, not only for its own sake but that of the generations that it might father.

  Suddenly, the stag charged, at lightning speed.

  “It’s furious!” Namhâ cried.

  I grabbed my harpoon again, and waited for the animal while Namhâ ran sideways. She was the one the animal went after. In a few bounds, it was close. She fled, but the outcome of the pursuit was certain.

  I threw my harpoon, which grazed the animal, and then I drew my revolver—and just as the girl was about to be overtaken I fired twice. The stag reared up convulsively on its hind feet, turned, and collapsed.

  Bewildered, joyful and amazed, Namhâ exclaimed: “Alglâ has killed the great stag!”

  Soon an anxiety appeared on her face, mixed with admiration. She realized that I had employed a method of combat unknown to the Sons of the Mammoth; she looked fearfully at the weapon I still held in my fist.

  “The stag would have killed Namhâ,” I murmured. “Namhâ must not tell the Sons of the Mammoth about the fire-axe. If Namhâ mentions it, the fire-axe will no longer be able to save anyone.”

  “Namhâ will not speak of it!” she exclaimed.

  I sensed that she would hold her tongue. The neophobia of Awah and Wanawanoûm had caused me to keep the properties of my rifle and revolver secret; Awah especially might have taken exception to them. I had decided only to make use of the weapons in case of extreme necessity.

  “That’s good,” I said, supportively. “Namhâ will thus be the friend of the fire-axe.”

  We walked on for another hour. Finally, Namhâ, whose hearing was as delicate as a she-wolf’s, put her ear to the ground.

  “I can hear Wanawanoûm’s footsteps,” she said.

  Several minutes passed before I heard them in my turn; then the silhouette of the old man appeared on top of a rise. He had seen us; he allowed us to come closer, and then pointed westwards. “The mountain has fallen in the caves that are under the ground!” he said, hoarsely. A deep sadness appeared in his face.

  He led us to the boundary of the territory. An entire section of granite ridges had disappeared; the harsh polar landscape was visible through a gap; a glacial wind chilled us to the bone. “It’s the end of the Sons of the Mammoth!” the old man added.

  And we returned to the caves in a melancholy mood.

  Gradually, the excess of my anxiety had disappeared. I told myself that, all things considered, many years might pass before the annihilation of our habitat—and, as is my nature, I formulated projects and conjectures. The sled, which I had hitherto considered as a simple instrument of exploration, became a potential means of salvation. If I could domesticate the mammoth to the point at which I could persuade it to render the services of a draught animal, I could attempt to cross the distance separating us from the nearest Eskimo tribes. If that adventure proved impossible, at least I would be able to place markers in the surrounding wilderness that would enjoin some future polar expedition to reach the territory. Such expeditions could only increase in number; eventually, one of them was bound to follow the route that my own expedition had taken.

  I devoted the rest of the winter to finishing the sled and solving the problems of provisioning it. Accumulating the supplies necessary to humans was nothing, but the mammoth required a more considerable volume of food for itself than all of us put together, b
ecause that nourishment had to be exclusively vegetal. I imagined various combinations, including a sort of biscuit made from a wild cereal, fairly similar to barley, which my hosts did not exactly cultivate, but the growth of which they favored by ripping out rival plants. I resolved to cultivate it, to the extent that that was possible.

  Daylight returned to shine on these enterprises: a pale and chilly daylight that scarcely elevated the temperature for a fortnight. I worked stubbornly. Gradually, I forced the idea of a possible salvation into the heads of my companions, in case further cataclysms threatened our existence.

  The women, even the old one, allowed themselves to be convinced, but the men were extremely reluctant to abandon their ancestral land. Awah, especially, listened to me with a discontent that went as far as anger.

  IX.

  The Arctic spring grew warmer as the Sun rose higher into the sky. Beyond the habitat, the wilderness remained glacially white and sinister. Since the earthquake, it was constantly visible through the breach made in the granite ridges, as one sees a landscape through a window. A keen wind often penetrated from that direction, making the temperature we enjoyed all the more welcome. Its nature remained completely mysterious; it was an emanation from the ground, whose constancy over the millennia far surpassed the thermal constancy of radium.

  Aided by the women, I cultivated the species of barley I mentioned as best I could. Our work consisted of strewing seeds on favorable ground and extirpating harmful plants. No further accident having occurred, I became more confident. Primitive life recovered its sweetness.

  Touanhô and Namhâ were pregnant. The latter, submissive to ancestral instincts, lived with me as a sister; I respected her wisdom. Touanhô also led a continent existence; even so, one day when we were alone in the winter caves, where I was assembling documents, she suddenly remembered the foreign caress, and her lips sought mine. It was her only awakening until the summer.

  It soon seemed probable that my cereal crop would be abundant. At the end of May, it had put forth innumerable stalks. I had some difficulty in preserving our fields from the appetite of the mammoths and wild herbivores, and, in spite of everything, they devoured a substantial fraction of the barley. Luckily, it happened that other plants, which they preferred, were more abundant that year in pastures sufficiently distant from my fields.

  The mammoth’s education proceeded apace. The colossus allowed itself to be put in harness and we made a few excursions by sled into the polar desert. It drew the heavy contraption along without difficulty, seemingly indefatigable.

  At first, Wanawanoûm and Awah observed this new form of my activity with a jaundiced eye; they anticipated obscure perils arising from infractions injurious to millennia-old customs. It was necessary to invent confused pretexts and incessantly to remind them of the engraving of the man perched on the mammoth. As they had little imagination and their logic was obtuse, I easily overcame their objections, to the extent that, the annoyance of reflection coming to my aid, they eventually shut up. The earthquake and the evident imminent extinction of their race had rendered them somewhat inert; they sensed formless threat around them, and, in their better moments, understood that it was not futile to think about salvation. Besides, the women, now convinced, acted with cunning, subtle and effective patience.

  One day, when I had taken my excursion further than usual, Awah was particularly irritated. “Does Alglâ want to make the mammoth die?” he grumbled, with an anger that needed little encouragement to become furious.

  “It’s not Alglâ who will kill the mammoth,” I replied, softly. “It’s the Earth’s depths, which will open up for him, and for us too.”

  He shook his head, obstinately. “The Sons of the Mammoth will die if Alglâ makes the mammoth die. The white plain is our enemy. The ancestors never went there!”

  I turned to Wanawanoûm and asked: “Have the Sons of the Mammoth not been masters of a land greater than this one?”

  Wanawanoûm replied, emphatically: “The Sons of the Mammoth have been masters of a land ten times larger than this one!”

  “They hunted out there, then?” I went on. “They lived in the direction of the Sun. The land there is no longer white; it is as green as these leaves and this grass. That’s where the Sons of the Mammoth lived to begin with. That’s where they will find their hunting-grounds and become a numerous tribe again.”

  Wanawanoûm listened to me in bewilderment; Awah was attentive, and seized on a confused hope.

  “Alglâ is right,” Touanhô affirmed, impetuously. “There are lands with other animals—animals like those engraved in the winter caves.”

  That was an excellent idea; I took possession of it. “I’ve seen vast herds of those animals!” I affirmed. “Do Awah and Wanawanoûm not want to hunt them, as their ancestors did?”

  Wanawanoûm nodded his head, conviction dawning. Awah’s anger had decreased; a thought had been planted in him that took several days to take form, but which rendered him inoffensive in the meantime.

  In June, Touanhô brought into the world a boy of the pure prehistoric race, while Namhâ gave birth to a daughter in whose veins a partly-modern blood ran. At the end of July, we had an abundant harvest of barley, a part of which was put in store, while the other furnished us with our meals and new seed for sowing. We lived more happily than ever. The mammoth was perfectly tame. I had consolidated the sled in such a way as to protect it from the rudest shocks.

  Awah, ever taciturn, made no further objection to my singularities; in fact, he ended up no longer seeing them. It was, however, necessary not to think of the voyage until a further cataclysm had demonstrated its absolute necessity. I could, in truth, have risked the adventure alone, but that would have seemed a betrayal. Then again, powerful bonds retained me among my comrades—firstly my daughter, whom I loved ardently, and then Namhâ and Touanhô. Will moralists complain if I confess that I cherished the one almost as much as the other?

  In the month of August, Touanhô, who had been absorbed until then by her maternity, became familiar again. She remembered. She found me in the wilderness and in the half-light of the caves; my love was rekindled, as sweetly as in the days when the young prehistoric woman had made my exile an enchantment…

  As the polar night approached, the salvation plan became less practicable; toward the end of the month, however, we discovered a new peril.

  The weather having been unusually mild on the exterior plains, a few Arctic animals had ventured as far as our latitude. One day, Awah, Wanawanoûm and I headed for the breach, in the vicinity of which there was a great abundance of edible roots and mushrooms. While we were gathering our harvest, we heard a growl. I straightened up, and perceived two fine polar bears. They had crossed the zone separating their territory from ours; they were advancing slowly, with a certain prudence. The configuration of the place had revealed them before they had been able to perceive us. When they did see us, they hesitated, perhaps astonished by our form.

  Wanawanoûm and Awah were certainly more surprised than the wild beasts. The bear, very rare in the region, into which they only strayed in consequence of misadventure or exceptional circumstances, had never penetrated into the habitat in which my companions lived. The ones that had pursued me into the corridor the previous year, and which the mammoth had put to flight, had not returned.

  “Waô! Waô!” cried Wanawanoûm, in whom legendary memories were waking up. “They’re snow bears!”

  Awah had his axe and his harpoon ready. Wanawanoûm had his spear, and I waited with my harpoon in one hand and my revolver in the other. After a moment of uncertainty, the bears retreated. Their obscure consciousness perceived danger. The larger of the two—the male—calmly turned to its right and started trotting toward a little clump of ash-trees. The female followed, and within a few seconds they became invisible. The peril had been deferred; it nevertheless remained redoubtable.

  “The women!” I cried.

  Fear, which I had not felt for myself, gripped my
guts at the thought of Namhâ, Touanhô and my daughter.

  X.

  Wanawanoûm and Awah remained impassive, but they did not waste any time, and we were soon on the bears’ trail. The pursuit was not very difficult. We were delayed in the middle of the wood, however, where we were first made to pause by the tracks of a group of hinds that crossed those of the bears, and then by a clearing of hard ground. When we emerged from the wood we could not see the fugitives; they had doubtless gone over a hill that rose up 400 or 500 meters from the edge of the wood, toward which we set our course. When we reached the crest, I released a cry of alarm, while Wanawanoûm uttered a dull exclamation: the bears were chasing Touanhô!

  We were too far away to reach her in time. Awah bounded forward like a red deer and I, being an experienced runner, kept pace with him, but he was too late. The male bear seized Touanhô and knocked her flat. With a wild growl, it began to tear the young woman apart.

  At that moment, a massive silhouette appeared at the edge of a wood: a mammoth. Unfortunately, it was the old one. At the sight of the bear and the recumbent Touanhô, it came to a halt. Its ancient mummified brain undoubtedly had a vague understanding of what was happening, for it trumpeted, and the male bear, raising its head, was gripped by such amazement that it released its prey. Its mate, which had advanced a paw to seize Touanhô’s child, recoiled. Then we howled frantically, brandishing our weapons. The old mammoth came forward—at which sight the bears made off at a tangent. Only Awah thought about pursuing them; Wanawanoûm and I rushed toward Touanhô.

  She was losing blood from two long cuts. I thought at first that she had been mortally wounded. She was almost unconscious. A summary examination revealed that the wounds were superficial and only involved unimportant veins. Wanawanoûm made a dressing with aromatic herbs, which was better than any I could have contrived. The young woman came round.