The Master of Light

by Maurice Renard

  Those openings, in fact, which were similar to cave-entrances, were not barred; no obstacle appeared to oppose the passage of anyone entering or exiting—which had already surprised the prisoner. But there was more. César opened his eyes wide, fearful of a trap, and he looked at each of the sunlit openings in turn, beyond which landscapes extended…

  Bizarre landscapes. Sunlit, yes, but nevertheless darkened in a strange manner. In addition, the trees and the plants that were framed therein gave César a surprising notion of the vegetation of the island. In these regions, there was nothing reminiscent of the first sight of the luxuriant forest in which the natives had just captured him. What he saw now formed a monstrous confusion of roots, green and hairy stems and vegetable tentacles. It was a forest of stout, baroque, giant, terrific and utterly abnormal plants.

  “What does this signify?” César murmured.

  He had no time to reflect any further. Something happened that deprived him momentarily of the capacity for discernment: an unimaginable thing, frightful and splendid, unparalleled and bewildering.

  Outside, the gigantic green thicket became agitated. The tubers, hairy branches and thick leaves swollen with sap were violently parted, broken, split apart like a massive curtain—and an enormous animal emerged, suddenly standing still, moving its frightful head from side to side.

  There was something dragon-like in it, and lizard-like; its head was that of a boa, its neck that of a tortoise, its tail that of a salamander, its posture that of a kangaroo, but from one end of its spine to the other it bore a formidable crest armed with spikes and its stature was not comparable to anything ordinary in the animal world. The tallest elephant would not have attained half its height by raising its trunk vertically.

  The frightful creature retained its vigilant attitude for a few seconds, though. Then, heavily and slowly, it drew away, hopping on its tail and its colossal hind feet, touching the ground occasionally with its forepaws, excessively small but armed with menacing claws. César watched its interminable, slanted back rising and falling for some time, while the bristling crest undulated and the stupid but attentive head at its tip kept turning from side to side.

  César only had extremely restricted notions of a science that had just been born at that time: paleontology. However, he could not doubt that the monster was a survivor of an epoch that he called “antediluvian” and he was certain that he had landed on an island where, by some extraordinary hazard, animals and plants that had disappeared everywhere else continued to exist—prodigiously.

  He was in a cold sweat. Fear, just now, had made him shiver. He had regretted that the openings of his prison were not fitted with solid bars. For a second, he had wondered whether the indigenes might have intended him to make a meal for the titanic lizard.

  He collected himself, and approached another opening to see whether the creature had veered off in that direction…and then made several observations that precipitated him into a cascade of astonishment.

  The Sun was shining on one side, but in the other opening an abundant rain was streaming over a window.

  Through a third lateral opening, birds of some sort, which resembled huge bats with horses’ heads, were passing by in swift flight—but César could no longer see them in the sky by looking through the middle bay.

  The landscapes in the various places were not concordant. Their heights were different. There was even one that was tilted, like a badly-hung picture. What they showed offered inconceivable dissimilarities; one might have thought that there were different seasons, different times of day, even different ages.

  Those openings were not open at all, but—as the streaming rain had revealed—furnished with windows that had a slight darkening effect, without any supporting frames: huge single pieces of glass.

  Finally, the prisoner’s eyes having become accustomed to the obscurity of the cave, he discovered that the shadows on the walls, between the lighted views, were not absolutely dark, but that vague moving glimmers were retained there. There were, in fact, three new marvels there of the same kind as the others. They were three nocturnal scenes, three nights: two landscapes and a cloudy sky; a sky with nothing but clouds and pale stars—as if César had raised his eyes to the ceiling instead of looking straight ahead of him.

  Our captain was beginning to understand certain things. He was no longer amazed to see, from underground, views of the surface in broad daylight, or nocturnal views of an open sky, or even perspectives on an infinitely distant past. His lively and sure intelligence had immediately grasped that all of this originated from the vitreous objects mounted on the walls of the subterranean room. When they were rapped with a hard object, such as a knife, each one rendered a dull sound, giving an impression of thickness, of an exceedingly dense and resistant mineral block.

  These blocks, contrary to appearances, were not interposed in any fashion between the interior and the exterior, like the panes of a window. They were encased in the blind and insensible walls of earth that rimmed the cave.

  But why had they been placed there? Why were these walls paved in this fashion with these huge pieces of some unknown quartz, which enclosed vertiginously ancient visions? The walls of a cave in which, moreover, the enclosed silence and space had helped César do justice to the illusion—was it, then, a sort of museum? A scarcely probable hypothesis.

  César put his finger on the truth when dusk fell over some of the views, one after another, while day broke successively in the three nocturnal ones. The natives had simply found an economical and infallible system of lighting for their subterranean dwellings. It could even be supposed that the possession of such convenient luminous sources had provoked them to lodge themselves thus, partially underground, where they found a perpetually-illuminated refuge from the heat of their island.

  In the days that followed, César became acquainted with the mores and customs of his hosts, and the ways in which they made use of the marvelous substance to which they had given the name mong-tio—which is to say, the stone that remembers.

  They not only used the blocks to see clearly by night in their little lodgings, but to make signals from the summits of mountains and to scare away ferocious beasts; and they contrived something akin to thick curtains in order to veil their singular lamps—which, not content with illuminating them, showed them all sorts of incredible scenes—should the need arise.

  As to how the corsair learned all this, and many other strange things that have no relevance to our story, it was quite simple.

  When their captain did not return, the sailors in the landing party set out to search for him. Following the trail of the little troop of kidnappers, it did not take them long to discover the village at the foot of the mountain. They laid siege to it, being men familiar with that sort of amusement—but, fearing for César’s life, they began with a thunderous demonstration of rifle shots fired into the air.

  As they had foreseen, the indigenes took fright at that sustained fusillade, supported by appropriate howls, with which the coastal brethren habitually accompanied their boarding onslaughts when the grappling hooks had seized an enemy boat and the drums were bating in a sinister manner. César’s few rifle shots had not prepared the natives for that diabolical charivari, evocative of lightning, thunder and volcanic eruptions. They thought they were doomed, and could think of nothing better to do than go in quest of César in his enchanted cave.

  The captain understood immediately what was required of him. He calmed the racket without delay, and had his rifle returned to him along with his powder-horn and game-bag, which had been confiscated—and, immediately liberated, returned to the Finette with his saviors. He had not been in any great danger.

  The thought of the mysterious material never left him, though. Once back on board, he reflected profoundly, still marveling at the sojourn he had spent underground, illuminated by the light of prehistoric days. His curiosity was still unsatisfied—and furthermore, he was certain that there was a fortune to be made by means
of the secret of the unknown isle. That was why he had prevented his men from entering the enclosure of the village. That was why he reappeared before his attackers’ eyes on the threshold of that enclosure on the following day, alone and unarmed, but with a provision of objects calculated to flatter the instincts of a simple and naïve population.

  He was greeted with all the respect due to his honesty—and for several days he lived amid the indigenes, gradually gaining their friendship and winning their confidence. They allowed him to occupy himself as he wished, and informed him about everything, teaching him as best they could the elements of their language.

  The blocks of mong-tio were found in a natural state on the island and the islets, on the surface of the ground, but especially in the earth. They quarried it and mined it. There were always masses that were more-or-less smooth, the rough and unequal edges of which clearly indicated its multilayered structure. It had many analogies with slate, but it was quite rare to disinter a block or a plate of mong-tio that was not “impressed”—which had not yet seen daylight. Many of them were exhumed without their smooth faces being illustrated with a moving image, but that did not mean that daylight had never struck them. Sometimes, an ancient image was secretly making its way through the plate in question, and an examination of the edge revealed the fact by permitting the sight of one or several luminous lines on the march, some toward one side and the others toward the other side. That was the light advancing slowly—very slowly—through the thickness of the substance.

  Every evening, Captain Christiani went back to his ship, carrying a package wrapped in black cloth. The sailors who came to fetch in him in the launch in response to his signal counted 12 evenings and 12 packages. César thus transported a few virgin plates, extracted by feel from the darkness at the bottom of a mine, and a few others extracted from the surface of thick blocks—too voluminous to be carried away—and which restored the exciting spectacles of the eras of the giant saurians, flying lizards and, much later, the ape-men who were our first ancestors.

  These latter plates, by the panoramas they exposed and the upheavals to which they testified, revealed a fact to which César attached little importance at the time, but which, a few years later, came back to his memory. That fact was that in ancient epochs, the island and the islets had been part of a vast land, perhaps a continent, and that, little by little, that continent had been swallowed up piecemeal. By 1814, a series of cataclysms had left only the sparse fragments visited by Captain Christiani: a few isles that were vestiges of an archipelago that had been a mere vestige itself.

  On the 12th evening, César got ready to sail for the Ile de France. A party of indigenes had accompanied him to the beach. As the Finette put out to sea, he saw them waving spears that had been decorated with colored rags in order that they could be seen from a distance, and hurling them into the air as a gesture of farewell.

  That evening, a dark cloud sprang forth from the mountain, and the fumaroles were powerful.

  The crew of the Finette manifested the joy of their return in song. Among those rough men, there were usually some to be found to murmur protests against a port of call prolonged without reason or—which came to the same thing—for their captain’s pleasure. They had grumbled all the more because he had forbidden anyone to go ashore. Some had permitted themselves observations contrary to discipline. César had had them put in irons or sentenced to receive a few vigorous strokes of the lash. It was always the same ones. The names of the same hotheads were to be cited frequently in the captain’s memoirs of that campaign in the Indian Ocean.

  We cannot insist too strongly on this point: the Memoirs make no mention of the adventures we have just related. In addition, the secret manuscript reveals the fever with which César Christiani envisaged the rewards that he anticipated obtaining from the optical glass, making a fortune worthy of Croesus. He projected several practical applications for it, and did not doubt that the substance would command fabulously high prices in Europe and the New World. He had a practical mind, and in his view, the most precious property of optical glass was not that of bring testimony to the century of Napoléon of the Age of Reptiles, the Ice Ages and the Stone Age; he saw it above all else as an instrument of everyday use, destined, in many circumstances of life, to serve as proof and to demonstrate how some event or other had occurred. Was not a piece of optical glass enough to ensure, in fact, that a scene could be recorded as durably as the thickness of the glass that contained it? And once that was done, it only required the plate to be split up, like a block of rigid sheets, to recover the living image of the scene in question, making its way slowly through the interior of the prodigious mica.

  When we say “prodigious,” though, it must be understood that were are putting ourselves in César’s shoes and employing his own expression—for, to our modern eyes, accustomed to the marvels of photography and cinematography, the effects of optical glass are, after all, merely a sort of natural cinematography, which remains extremely curious for us but does not strike us with the amazement by which César remained flabbergasted.

  The Finette had been at sea for two years. It had been agreed that its captain would head for Saint-Malo that year and undertake a sojourn in France necessitated by the management of his personal affairs. César did not think that he ought to modify his plans. He was fortunate enough to complete the long journey without any notable incident. His intention, relative to the optical glass, was to come back the following year and drop anchor off the island, with a carefully-chosen crew and a few reliable companions, in order discreetly to embark large quantities of the inestimable commodity. Until then, he had resolved to maintain silence.

  The prizes that he had taken since the Emperor’s enthronement ensured his wealth. He concluded his business with the bankers and the lawyers, converted his booty into investments and real estate, spent a few weeks in Paris, saw Napoléon beset with immense difficulties and foresaw nothing good coming therefrom, but went nevertheless to take a rest in Savoy. It was at that time that the plates, after several months at sea and transportation of every sort in a sealed crate, reached the little top room at Silaz and the hiding-place behind the bookcase that the suspicious César had personally contrived.

  The Emperor’s fall, the return of the Bourbons and the disgrace that followed for the captain upset all his plans. There could no longer be any question of setting out to sea again in a corsair ship. César did not hesitate to charter a seaworthy yacht, rigged as a schooner, at his own expense—and in spite of the expense of such an enterprise, he set off one morning from Bordeaux for an unmysterious destination: Madagascar.

  You will have guessed that Madagascar had nothing to do with it, and that the island of the optical glass was the true goal of that so-called pleasure cruise—but whether an earthquake had completed the annihilation of the remains of the archipelago, or whether César had measured his position wrongly, that goal was not attained. The island and the islets could not be found. The yacht cruised in vain through the ocean region in which César expected to reach them. There was nothing there but the dismal and deserted expanse of the waves.

  César was grievously disappointed. His sharp and honest temperament led him to accuse himself of incompetence. In his manuscript he returns incessantly to the error he might have made in taking his bearings. He prefers to attribute his distress to his own fault rather than to an earthquake, probably to preserve in his mind some hope of one day rediscovering that treasure island, which he called the Ile Christiani, and which he would have offered to France. Today, though, every inch of the surface of the globe is known, and the maps do not indicate anything resembling an island, however minuscule, in that zone of the Indian Ocean—so we must believe that the captain’s sextant functioned correctly, that his calculations were accurate and that all the harm was done by a seismic cataclysm that was only to be expected sooner or later.

  As for the lieutenants and sailors of the Finette, there is nothing surprising in the fact that
they never said anything about the island. The first mate and the senior lieutenants had departed with the prizes sent by César to Port-Napoléon; the others trusted their leader when he assured them, deceptively, that the territories in question had already been discovered by obscure navigators. If one bears in mind that no one aboard the yacht had any suspicion of César’s plans, he being as cunning as any good corsair, there is no difficulty in explaining how the mystery was perpetuated.

  After various vicissitudes, the yacht was sold on its return to Bordeaux and César, disappointed and anxious about the sums he had spent, unwelcome at court and not very sociable, retired entirely to Silaz with his monkeys, his parrots and his exotic birds, of which he had a full aviary resonant with twittering and birdsong. It was 1816.

  There was certainly a kind of miserliness in the care that he took to hide the existence of optical glass—a sort of egotistical enjoyment. He had to recognize, however, that if he wanted to reserve the privilege of using the material in his own interests, it was necessary for him to keep the secret. A witness as reliable, as mute and as above suspicion as optical glass might be a great help to him in many instances, especially if he were to judge it worthwhile to enter into one of the conspiracies in which the partisans of the exiled Emperor and the Duc de Reichstadt15 unfailingly tried to involve him.

  Was he waiting for the right moment to involve himself? Nothing indicates that—which did not prevent him from passing, in eyes of the Bourbons, for a passionate and dangerous Bonapartist.

  The end of the manuscript reports a few relatively uninteresting experiments that he made with the optical glass during his years at Silaz, and some inconsequential considerations regarding an idea that he abandoned—to send specimens of the material to chemists in order that they might attempt to analyze it and then replicate it. Finally, he explains why, before going to Paris, he had thought of replacing two window-panes in the little top room with two plates of virgin optical glass. It was simply to leave an invisible observer there. When he returned to Silaz, he would only have to take out the plates and split them up; by that means, everything that happened in his absence, in the grounds and in front of the château, would appear to him sequentially, and if any incident seemed worthy of examination, he would only have to observe its course in comfort.