by Gustave Kahn
The atmosphere was still. The peris did not show themselves in that raw daylight, in which only the leaders of caravans stayed awake, waiting in the shade of walls until it was time to get under way again.
The natal house seemed even grayer to him; once, a few flowers had appeared at the barred windows; now heavy shutters supplemented the stone in the upper part of the house. Down below, his brothers were supervising slaves, counting money, filling orders.
Alone in the interior courtyard the father was now dreaming alone, and thinking: “Those, by their presence, and the other, by his absence, have rendered me more solitary than death.”
The old man understood that he was worn out, that the best of his dreams now looked forward to a sealed tomb, devoid of care, devoid of hope, devoid of regret, devoid of confidence and devoid of movement.
Things no longer had any of their natal appearance. They were old and sullen, attentive to the avaricious dreams of three new masters. The old man’s head was slumped on his breast. The things around him did not recognize him, and he had forgotten them. Momentarily, he had the presentiment of a divine presence, but as he was very old, and his thoughts often followed the same course, he thought he saw Azrael and shivered from head to toe.
And the traveler’s heart ached. “Let’s go,” he said. “I see, dear goddess, that there is no natal house for a man, but only a banal corner of a city that is everywhere the same, that only a child naively believes that he is discovering. And I see that a man soon forgets the tree that he had planted himself, if it does not produce basketfuls of fruit every season. My father’s fig-tree is desiccated, and its bark is hollowed out, and my father is growing old beside the fig-tree like a decrepit, exfoliated tree. There is nothing beautiful in human life but the memory of some dream that fills us with joy and even that is the memory of the beginning of a dream. Oh, when you came to find me in my near-mortal fatigue, when I perceived your eyes, which are divans for a god, and the ebony forest of your hear, and the scintillating plume of your eternal youth, I thought I was seeing the battens of Heaven opening, in order that beauty and truth could explain to me what the dream of happiness as, and the meaning to the dogged pursuit of life. And the bells of beautiful adventure rang out for me—but it was only the consolation and remedy of a single day. Peri, beautiful Peri, is there no longer any happiness?”
And the Peri replied: “Your rose-bushes are flowering again, and I like your misfortune enough to save you from it. My love, made of pity for the children who weep at ground level will save you. In a land that I know, where the dawn is perfumed and the evening full of fans, we shall live; the water of the profound spring will make you forget who you were, and I shall be your beloved and loving guardian, and only smiles will illuminate your face, for, no longer recalling suffering, you will no longer remember your life.
“Would you like to come with me to the land without mirrors; the noisy springs there are invisible, the valley resounds throughout with an indolent concert, and the shady corners are so profound that one might sleep for years without perceiving a hint of the sky between the trees...”
“But what about you? Won’t you be losing anything?”
“I will be like a dream enchained for long years yet, before your breath expires in blessing me. The matrix of my mortal love will deprive me of my wings, but later, ennobled by a regret and a dolor, I shall joyfully travel through the air again in quest of some new unfortunate. As generous as the evening breeze, momentarily captured, I shall come back beautiful, like the free and errant evening breeze.”
And the man replied: “That will be my whole life, then—the murmur of the stream that I can hear, cheerful and rhythmic because it is scarcely larger than the breadth of the basin in my father’s house? I prefer my troubles and cares. Let’s go.”
And he woke up in front of the humble shop in the market.
The next day he left that city. As he knew old chronicles and new songs, and could draft documents, he made a living. When he grew very old he stopped in a humble side-street of an even more distant city, and awaited the final slumber in a low room. He wished that the Peri would return to him, to show him one more time he perfumed Heavens and his father’s house, but he was so tired that when she brightened the air he shivered from head to toe, as if he had seen Azrael.
When one has traveled too far one can no longer see one’s father’s house, one’s natal house, ever again.
“But another lesson might brighten our solitude,” said Joseph. “And you, Sire, do you think the same as the Doctor of Kindness?”
“I will tell you the faith of my old age,” said the King, “but before then, the Sun is setting and my old slave Dares will set food on our table. Perhaps he will tell you his life-story, and you will find therein some echo of things that astonish you here.”
Chapter Three
DARES
“To the south, well to the south of the castle,” Balthazar said, “beyond the fields, the flowers and rice-paddies, beyond the sands that are excessively mobile in the swirling of violent winds, lands commence that are defended against penetration, so it’s said, by thick tangled forests and overly shallow lakes, where monsters crawl in the mud of the shores.
“Old tales relate that those who contrived a passage thereinto would find themselves within a circle of high hills formed from colossal statures. Suspended on the breasts of these granite forms were silver necklaces whose plates were engraved with the meaning of the future. To put a hand on these necklaces, however, it was necessary to climb the unstable and fractured pedestals of the statues, and if the stones of the pedestal shifted, the stone statue crushed the unfortunate seeker of destiny as it fell.
“The old counsels retained by tradition told that the route was traced by white ossuaries, for many caravans had been destroyed there by the wind and fire of the sky, far from wells and verdure. The ancient sayings warned people to avoid the vast ruins of long-deserted cities, their stones crumbling away, one by one, in the immense silence, until the stagnation of the ruins buried them under the perpetual thrust of tall weeds.
“In those ruins, it was said, the extenuated voices of ancient sorcerers whispered faintly, and singular gods were manifest, shadowy tresses curling above excessively profound gazes. Unknown plants distilled poisons with no antidotes. Furthermore, those plains were the abode of giants, as tall and broad as towers, who stopped armies and devoured their prisoners. It was a land of incessant miracles, and I wanted to attempt its uncertainties.
“It did not take long to reach the first ossuary on the road of oracles. We entered the empire of a harsh sun—not the nurse who swells the grapes and warms the wheat, but a bitter tyrant whose blades prohibit the horizon. Beside crumbling dunes of sand, with forms reminiscent of giant mastiffs, skeletons lay, and there was nothing as funereal as that solitude and those vestiges of death beneath the ardent and cloudless sky.
“There was no sign other than that memory of tragic death in all that isolation; its implacable message was the idea of limitation; solely by the force of existence, unrolling a shroud of sand, sick beneath the luminous hammer, the landscape indicated every deterrence, every failure, every abandonment—and my cavaliers hesitated. The land, studded with the appearances of monsters, uniform in the color of the sand, oscillated endlessly in hostile powdery flames. There was not a blade of grass, not even the shadow of the wings of a hawk, and no other voice than ours, which died away by mutual accord—and we marched thus for ten days, drinking the water that our camels carried and killing the sheep of our flock.
“The eleventh day displayed before my eyes an entire city with vivid waters; men were building, draped women bearing jars, and heaps of green and gold seemed to be gardens of orange-trees. Full of hope and anxiety, we headed for that distant city; but it seemed to retreat before us incessantly, and when the Sun was not so high above the horizon, the hopeful décor vanished. Late in the day, however, we halted near a small stream flowing beneath coarse grass.
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br /> “Fatigue had overtaken my cavaliers—fatigue caused by the loss of their chimera of discovering a beautiful city of shade and perfumes; fatigue determined by a measure of fear. Who had deployed before our eyes the city of promises, only to withdraw it, as if into the folds of a cloak? Were they true, then, the old tremulous legends, and was the southern land a realm of redoubtable spirits, architects of despair and disillusion? And what new torture would be imagined tomorrow by the malevolent djinn?
“No one, apart from myself, had any other explanation for the sudden elevation of the cupolas into the azure and their abrupt disappearance; and even I, attained by the contagion of my men’s dream, with all their fever of anxiety, was not far from believing, when the hour of weary slumber came, that powerful giants were closing the defended territory. For we had seen that city!
“Was it an image momentarily set before our eyes by the subtle mirrors of the Empyrean? Was it a sign and an encouragement, or ought I to believe that a deceptive city glimpsed in the morning will always collapse that evening in the gloomy dusk?
“According to the sages of the men with yellow complexions, who come in light ships to pillage and devastate the florid cities and opulent ports of our seas, the divine world covers the terrestrial world like a delicate and mobile arborescence—and the spirits of evil are powerful enough sometimes to prevent perception of the blue and serene Heavens, the refuge of providences, save through a gap in thick branches. The ray of sunlight is seized by the demon of fevers, which straddles it and makes use of its rapidity to propagate death. On the shores of rivers, spirits give rise to pestilences, so that the boats the glide thereon pass before terrified villages on the banks, filled with decomposing cadavers. They are the ones who cause the sleeping pilot to fall from his bench and lead the vessel on to the reef, and even pirates dread the southern land at whose frontier we had arrived.
“The night spread forth its violet tints. The men of my retinue, grouped by their horses, were conversing in low voices and the lips were repeated those nursery tales, so powerful that they return, with their procession of naïve fears, at the anguishing moments when one dreads everything unknown. The water that sings and the water that dances; the trees with the fruits of eternal life, guarded by formidable chimerical lions; the hero raised up by the gods to destroy the trap set by the evil demiurge; the young hero whose shield predicts with its polished steel the dangers his master will run; the hero who triumphs because he has taken pity on an old and crippled woman, who reveals herself to be a beautiful and powerful fairy and can give him a talisman—all of that was circulating in their tales.
“They entertained one another with tales of great rings of iron that a foot trips over in uncultivated lands; a trapdoor opens and the privileged individual descends into the realm of marvels. Sometimes there is the forgotten treasure of an ancient king and the magical ornaments that give supreme power, sometimes a loud noise is heard originating in the bowels of the Earth, which is that of the redoubtable forges where the divine dwarfs fabricate precious metals, gold and colossal stones, of which the slightest splinter, the tiniest fragment, will recompense the audacious adventurer if he can conceal himself prudently. And the lull of the legend, the heredity of all the tales babbled by all the ancestors, was bedding them down them in softness and sleep, when the man on watch uttered a cry that brought us all running.
“A strangely beautiful woman, with powerful magnetic eyes in a thin, dark face and a double wave of black hair covering her shoulders, wearing a helmeted and armored, had suddenly emerged from the ground in front of him. He had not been able to cry out nor make any movement while the magnetic eyes were drinking his strength and his courage, and the tall form had gazed at him for a moment, as if to see clearly who these new occupants of her familiar ground were. The face of the apparition had remained severe, almost terrible, and the man’s knees had trembled, knocking into one another, causing him to kneel down involuntarily. The vision had immediately disappeared; his strength had returned, and he had called out.
“The superstitious cavaliers started searching; they took inventory of the ground, expecting with a terror full of hope that their feet might encounter one of those iron rings by means of which the trapdoor opens that invites a descent into the realm of dreams. It was in vain.
“I wanted to keep watch during the night on the place from which the apparition had surged. Nothing came; I heard nothing more than the weary sleep of my companions, the glimmer of words in their dreams and the sound of the immensity of the plain, comparable to that of a calm sea, and saw nothing but the twinkling of starts, punctuated by the sudden brief blaze of shooting stars.
“My mind searched until daybreak, wondering what the mysterious apparition could have been: a glimpse of a goddess, or a chimera analogous to that of the distant city glimpsed under the burden of the Sun; the puerile dream of a man or a warning from the guardian of horizons to halt the march toward forbidden discoveries there.
“The next day, we set off again. Sometimes, distant violet-tinted hillocks among the sands seemed to be watching over our passage, and then long narrow ravines barred the route. Heaths of light ashy grass extended, bushes crawling along the ground in acute clumps, from which we built our evening fires. There was no trace of humankind, nor of animal life, save for a few insects, or the circling flight of some great bird in the distance.
“The power of the Sun became harsher, the water-holes became a little more frequent; in the evening, next to a stream flowing over a stony bed, we unsaddled our weary horses and unloaded our camels. Lassitude was written in every face, and the words ‘go back’ circulated among my companions. Go back, go back before we had lost the memory of our route; fear gripped us at the thought of wandering for a long time in plains without issue.
“Finally, one morning, as we resumed our march, we perceived horsemen in the distance. We hailed them, but they fled; we pursued them, but their speedier horses escaped ours, already weary. Soon, we perceived nothing more than the cloud of dust that their flight raised.
“For several days we sensed that we were being watched from dawn onwards. My companions were no longer murmuring; to reach these people was to know—to know something, since the old explorers’ texts were mistaken and we had perceived neither tangled forests nor shallow lakes nor giants as tall as towers casting shadows around their cemetery, and the distant city had only been an irony of the gods.
“Finally, in a heavy midday, while we were nearly falling asleep as we progressed, we saw the horsemen again, in large numbers, coming toward us, and arrows notified us of their hostility. Hazard gave us victory; then, their thick curtain having dissipated, we perceived their herds drawing away rapidly in disorder, the women shaken by the trot of donkeys, the dogs baying and the frightened camels running across the plain. That was our trophy, and we liberated prisoners who had been enchained or shackled.
“All those we had vanquished maintained a grim silence; the women wept and talked, but no one understood their language. Only Dares, on hearing our language, spoke in terms of gratitude and welcome. He was brought to me and he told me his story while we made camp after having buried our enemies, holding on to our booty until I was able to formulate a plan.
“Dares had been captured while very young, near a big city, about which he knew nothing except that ivy covered the breaches in its wall and that those walls were full of the songs and fluttering of birds and the hum of insects, He had a memory of loving faces associated with is earliest awakenings. He remembered having seen, a long time ago, a profound barge, a glaucous river in which leaves as large as shields had hundred the prow of the boat. His terrors reminded him of enormous beasts swimming after the vessel, against which the pillagers, his masters, had to defend themselves.
“When he grew older, however, he recalled carrying burdens in a spacious city, with small low houses the color of thatch, and whips sometimes began to lacerate his shoulders. Then he was made to row on the sea; the voyages wer
e long, without anything to be seen but playful dolphins or ferocious sharks. When the crews finally reached land, they sought to lie in ambush in deep inlets that sheltered all the ships and concealed their presence from the land. The masters then chained their slaves to their oarsmen’s benches; a party of them set forth and soon returned, rich with spoils and captives. Then they set off again across the vast sea in order to return to the spacious city with the low houses.
“One day, that city was attacked; black hordes pillaged there for several days, killing the inhabitants and taking away those they spared, leading them into slavery in their wilderness. It was these new masters that we had just defeated.
“I questioned Dares about the marvels of the southern land; he seemed to understand, after explanations, since he had come from far away in the south. He knew very little. There too, in the land from which he came, tales were told of a distant country guarded by sands and forests, of routes marked by ossuaries, but it was far way—very far away. No one among the masters of the deserts had ever attempted to go there.
“I spoke to him about the city that had fled before us and the apparition of the warrior woman. He told me that, far away, there was an abandoned and devastated city that everyone avoided, because it was thought to be inhabited by demons. The pillagers that we had defeated did not go near it, deterred by superstitious terror. He had heard it said that sometimes, in the night, mysterious forms emerged from the ground, but he knew no more, the fatigue of his evenings having always been too heavy.”
THE RUINS
“One evening, after a long march, we reached the deserted city, the sleeping city to which Dares knew the way. It appeared to us lying beneath a pale light, propped up beside bright waters. Our companions camped some distance away. I took Dares with me, in haste to penetrate those alleys of dead stone.
