by Gustave Kahn
The crowned man was at the edge of the forest. He tried to go into it, and his arms reached out toward the bright jewel of the horizon. Stray radiance lit his face vividly, and his body was deducible in the green shadow. He climbed long banks, sometimes upright, sometimes helping himself with his hands; brambles rose up like springs to lash his face, and thickets bristled before him, as if hurled by an abrupt gust of wind. At the crest of a slope, he perceived the solar palace, far away from him, at the end of an immense tree-lined driveway, and he raised his arms to the Heavens, his face painted with discouragement. His beard became gray in that livid moment of melancholy. He seemed to Samuel to be someone of his own race, who might have known his father.
The crowned man sat on the ground and sighed dolorously; then he got up with a gesture of sudden determination—but water splashed around his feet. Reed-beds slowly stretched their tall gladiolar stems toward the sky, and ululating black wading-birds circled overhead. He set off again alongside the reeds and skirted the barrier of water. Sometimes, a small advancement of the ground gave him the illusion that the obstacle had ended, but it began again, and in the depths of the horizon the wall of light drew away, without becoming paler. Regretfully, the man retraced his steps. He came back, he went on.
He bent down to pick flowers. The shock he gave the plant was excessive; nothing remained in his hands but exfoliated stems. He beat the air with his hands, and a butterfly with crazy colors escaped him and bounded into the bright sky. Hares sprang forth beneath his feet, and rain fell in fine leaden networks—and the man fell to the ground and sobbed. An olive-tinted mist, in which it seemed that one could make out arborescent hollows, covered everything.
Then Samuel saw the brown heath again, with reddish hills on the horizon; a pale moment, a cold midday. The crowned man was marching alone. The servants were asleep near firebrands that were going out, and the man leaned over them to wake them. With a broad gesture he showed them the entire plain, and with a straight upwardly-inclined gesture seemed to be indicating some great objective—but they remained seated on the ground, and stretched out their hands full of blisters and wounded feet. The man wrung his hands. The caravan’s animals were lying down, deprived of movement, and the man went from one servant to another, ardent and anxious, pointing at the river, the animals, the ground.
Finally, one of them men stood up, painfully, and went to draw water from the river; and slowly, one by one, the others joined him. Picks and spades dug into the ground. Soon, Samuel heard through his slumber the heavy blows of hammers and the screeching of saws, and rafts came along the slow river, and a nocturnal veil enveloped them.
The somber and splendid sunset! The star’s blood flowed in scarlet waves, dense and profound waves; gilded stars plunged into it, swirling as if in an eddy of the red gulf. From an immense, open heart the warm and abundant blood flowed in a thousand bubbles—from an immense and lacerated heart, in a pale torso, generally ivorine, green in places—and one might have thought that a head crowned with a ruddy brown clouds was leaning over, hanging on to a shoulder by virtue of excessive weariness.
The veins of the dying, vacillating God, unable either to stand upright or to fall, with no support within range of his wounded hands, irradiated in every direction the crimson semen of life and light, and from the terraces of distant Babels, very tiny by comparison with his stature, crowds and races watched death invade him, and the shadow prepare its hordes and somber horses for the sudden invasion of his plains.
At ground level near the river, however, by the blood-colored reflection, and in the hills where furnaces lit up, there were half-built walls of brick, wooden towers remained in framework, fragments of mosaic sank into the dusty soil, waiting in vain for a nearby paving-stone to support them, and futile flagstaffs awaited standards. There was the entire groundwork and foundations of a city—shards of wall, scattered materials, recumbent columns—but already, a curt and sterile forest of mallows and nettles was growing around them.
In the midst of scarcely-traced roads, all the servants were reloading the animals of the caravan; they were getting ready to leave. In vain, the crowned man showed them the melancholy of the deserted building-sites and skeletal scaffolding, the sadness of the abandoned materials, the sacks slit open on the ground, and the rafts run aground near pontoons full of green moss, flat tresses and violet viscosities. The servants shook their heads; they held out their hands full of blisters, their wounded feet, and while the crowned man tried to persuade one of them to stay, another, not far away, departed—and the man, discouraged, sat down at the foot of a column, and let them leave, defeated.
He raised his eyes toward the Heavens; the last rays had bled away, and the paleness of the twilight rose up like a liquor of ashes and fire. The river was the color of lead, and only the grey canvas of clouds was reflected therein. He went to the trap-door he had lifted up that morning and opened it again; he called out, he moaned, he begged; a black, level silence remained in the bowels of the Earth.
The crown that the dwarfs had offered him still lay close to the opening, still throwing off a few fires. He passed it over his arm then, and his desolate tread was kicking the sparse pebbles pensively, when he saw a bizarre individual, sprung from a heap of stones, advancing toward him. The face was that of a man; a dry bushy beard, the color of dust, framed a flat visage aged by a thousand wrinkles, with dull eyes the color of lead. The browned torso seemed to be hairy; the creature was supporting itself on the ground with two hands, splayed and enlarged toward the thumb, like the hands of a man placed on a flat surface, and its legs, folded beneath the knee, were hopping instead of walking, like the legs of a batrachian.
The crowned man spoke to it. The creature did not reply, but came toward him. The man recoiled, and saw that similar hideous beings were coming toward him from every direction. Fear gripped him, and he fled into the total silence—and the sullen chimeras followed him, silently.
Abruptly, Samuel saw him again, at the corner of one of the city streets. Pale, he was marching rapidly, murmuring words. He retreated from populous streets and went into back streets, only to withdraw from them immediately. He searched among the lights of the shops at ground level; finally, he spotted a money-changer’s shop. An old man with a bald head was weighing, behind a counter laden with little ingots and coins.
It seemed to Samuel that he went in behind the crowned man, in the shadow, and that he later removed the heavy forged crown from his head and the dwarfs’ crown from his arm, and held out both of them: the one of solid gold and the other of luminous flowers, and he spoke. He wanted to sell the last vestige of a splendor.
The old money-changer smiled at first, and then seemed to become irritated. Gazing at the haggard aspect of his visitor, however, and the dolorous eyes and the cloak soiled with the mud of the road, he said, also in a sad tone: “But these are leaves, mere dry leaves.”
And Samuel woke up.
Some distance away from the great city, toward the north, is the Ashen Tower. Its square mass emerges like an islet carved in the land by four canals, all rectilinear, which depart toward the sea and the land. Green grassy dikes, devoid of trees, extend beside these tranquil slumbering waters, and are mirrored in them. Into the motionless mirror, their slopes plunge so clearly that the canal-beds sometimes seem to be filled with a powdery green substance, of solid air or ductile earth.
A few grazing sheep, moving in flocks, are the only moving forms in these solitudes, with a few shepherds leaning on their staffs and occasional soldiers on the iron shafts of their halberds. In the plain, willow-groves surround a few buildings arranged in a regular square.
From the platform on the tower, further away, the uniform bulges and parallel lines of the sea-dunes were visible. Black hollows, green-tinted hollows, hollows bright with white dust—and beneath the clouds in the form of anvils, giant fish, monstrous dogs, the long fleece of the sea, limitless and devoid of islands, the perpetual mad arrival of long white lines that run
forward to break and retreat, and rebound.
On the other side, the huddled presence of heather-clad slopes, chased by the sea-wind from the interior lands, fugitive trees twisted out of the reddish earth, and a meager terrain cut by dusty and disorderly paths, joined the dunes and the sea to encircle the sad and deserted tower. The calls of marine birds rose up from large pools covered in marine vegetation, from the gray crust of variegated mosses of the sea, streaked by the flight of herons and curlews, saddened by the approach of evening, and the crepuscular clouds lingering there in expanses of shadow.
At midday, from the platform of the tower, there was all that echoless solitude, frightened by being so vast, overwhelmed by the harsh flat light, lying low, and by the terror of so many ardent arrows, without refuge; and in the evening, the sad partitions of the night came to close all the roads, and mourning bands veil the pathways and mask the entire unknown of the networks of thorns, potholes and perfidious tall grasses.
On fine days, to be sure, the eye cheered up at the thought of departing in dream in the direction of the sea, with the ships passing by in the open water like towers with sails, and in the direction of the land, on the thin rim of the horizon, there were blurred houses near bell-towers, and the vague lines of distant towns bathed in glittering pulverulence.
On both sides there was life, distant and improbable, for the ashen tower was a sort of prison, and at close range, the sentinel’s halberds, the canals serving as a moat, and the playful barking of dogs trained to chase fugitives, harshly recalled the purpose of the massive square tower, gray and dolorous—and all that Samuel knew, for days on end, of life and the horizon, was that which could be seen through a narrow loophole. He saw guards pass by over the grass, or on a circular path.
The heavy fall of colorless hours into oblivion, the duration of a time that nothing could any longer measure! A captive’s minute is as long as the day, and his days are like years, and when his soul, wearied by the immobility of the body, becomes feverish and takes flight, into what rough skies it soars! And after the fatal return, what fatigue. And the gray minutes recommence their trickle from the coarse pitcher of captivity, so slow, so extensively menacing, and stalactites take root in the grottoes of ennui.
In the inactivity full of daydreams, the nightmares of the night and the clammy and tormenting apprehension of insomnia crawl, inevitable caterpillars among the weeds of thought. The mind, like a beautiful mechanism robbed of some essential movement, turns and turns in the void, while the body lies on its pallet, while the body turns in its cage, where it has yielded to so many enervating hours. Sleep is nothing but the expansion in fear of the bitterness of awakening; the captive soul folds itself up, gnawing itself for nourishment; it consumes itself, it bumps into the four overly-restrictive corners of the prisoner body, and plaques of oblivion harden in the mobile walls of the imagination.
The silence was profound. Samuel turned over on his pallet, and somnolence and dreams took told of him again...
THE SLAIN FOREST
There is a high forest. The trees are straight, dense, united by enormous tangles of florid ligaments whose leaves are almost black. The man is walking; it seems to him that there are muffled whispers all around him; when he stops, the whispering stops, fading away from the plants underfoot. The whispering seems to him a little more distant; then it propagates, and swells, is almost a voice. The man goes on, and no longer hears anything but a distant murmur, from high above. The lianas in front of him unfurl, as if frightened, retreating to more distant trees. Nearby, creepers run from right to left like fearful animals, twisting, stretching themselves out to their full length, sprawling, as if attempting awkwardly to increase their length slightly, twisting back and falling limply.
Thorny bushes flagellate his legs; when he steps back, the bushes resume their normal aspect; when he goes forward, the bushes extend toward him and direct their needles at him; when he moves sideways and goes around them, the bushes collapse. The green grasses on which he treads turn yellow and shrivel, and as he plunges into the mobile thickness there are sighs, agonized squeals, tremors, fears.
The man speaks, and a kind of long plaintive voice exhales and replies. He arrives in front of an immense tree, from whose foliage agile lianas descend; their protruding flowers seem to be looking at him. One might think that they were suspended serpents, darting their heads toward him, but well above his own head. It seems to him that a form detaches itself from a large crevice in the heart of the tree and looks at him. He runs toward it; there is nothing but the profound black cavity. He continues going forward.
The whispering, murmurous voice resumes, analogous to the passing of the wind through the leaves. In its slow and melancholy intonation it resembles the voice of the wind, but it is not. It also resembles a human voice, by virtue of its tremulous suffering, but it is not that either; the vibration is too indecisive. It is not a animal cry; it is too sustained, too slow, too personal for that. It modulates itself, dies away, reverberates, swells, and ends up in short breaths, little sobs.
Here is a clearing; the man goes in, and it is as if faces that appeared momentarily have vanished; branches brush one another and rustle, but no noise of footsteps is perceptible, and the long sob becomes more accentuated, swells and swells and them calms down. The plants on the ground before his feet have fallen back toward the Earth along their entire length.
He breaks a branch; there is a dolorous sigh. He plunges his knife into a crevice in a tree; blood spurts, and a human form falls forward, displaying its punctured breast, and falls down in front of the tree with a loud scream—and an entire angry clamor rings out.
Frightened, the man steps back, terrified by the explosion of sound—but everything is limited to that loud noise. The being he struck is still lying at the foot of the tree. It is pale; around its face there is long hair—or, rather long green filaments like suspended blades of grass; its staring eyes are green-tinted; hair-like protrusions cover is torso and its legs are fused with the bark of the tress. The man drops the knife and runs away, fearful of having immolated a god.
But the regular cadence of sounds, like a drumbeat, leaps from tree to tree not far away, and a trenchant refrain accompanies the strenuous efforts of woodcutters. An oak falls with a dry thud, the dolor of stricken plants, and the axe-wielders march on. The man speaks to the men; he tells them his story, about the animate tree and the stricken wood-nymph—but they smile.
“We’ve been told already,” says one of them, a robust fellow with frizzy hair, “that that’s the way of things in great forests; beings live here that are neither entirely plants nor entirely people. Some priests recommend that we look after them, like poor helpless brothers; other priests order us to extirpate them, because they’re people whom divine vengeance has attached to trees. Our own destiny, having been exiled from cities by poverty and driven far away from owned land by men-at-arms, is to take what remains of their land from them. So much the worse if they’re brothers; so much the better if they’re miscreants; too bad if they’re only the souls of trees.”
And the axes resumed their regular cadence.
“But haven’t you heard the voice?” said the man. “The great, slow and flexible voice that rises from the stricken thickets?”
“Of course,” the woodcutter replied. “We hear it as we begin our assault on the branches and leaves, but afterwards, it becomes submissive to us; woodcutters tame the voice of the forest, and teach it to repeat their own words.”
He provoked an echo. He was very proud of making it repeat his words—but he did not notice, although it seemed obvious to Samuel, that it was the vanquished Echo, modulating her repetitions with the inflexions of an infinite sadness.
Samuel, or the man that he glimpsed in his stead in the dream, was marching rapidly, as if harassed, without any visible cause. He had turned his back on the vanquished forest. It seemed to him that he had escaped an ancient islet of the old world, miraculously preserved for a long t
ime, but where new footsteps were resonating in a new triumph.
He was in the hollow of a path bordered by living hedges, where reckless grass disputed with the dust. He saw a little bent old man, who was picking wild flowers and immediately throwing them away, and asked him what he was doing.
“I’m looking for flowers,” the little old man replied. “Once, there were many of them, they were everywhere, in all the paths and all the fields—the whole Earth was a garden. Then it became more difficult; one only found them in the market, but one could still find them. In every city, the most beautiful square was selected. A fountain marked the center, like the angular pillar of a temple to the open sky; care was taken that all the houses around the designated square were beautiful and neat and uniform, in order not to spoil the beauty of the flowers, and the rare ornaments that were allowed there were made of wood, and imitation foliage, in order that the flowers might find themselves in their preferred environment—and then every city, every village, had its temple to flowers, and the perfumes sang to the music of the colors. It’s all over now; there are no longer any to be found anywhere; all the flowers are hardened; all the flowers are false; they’re unperfumed wax, even on these unknown roads. They’re modified like that in all their transitions. Everything that they carried, everything that comes near them, becomes that colorless substance. What are they? Only women—everything has changed since this new religion of womanhood.”
Suddenly, Princess Marie stood up before Samuel’s dream, high on the great silver cart drowned in white roses, and the pain woke him up.
THE TWO EPHEMERAL PRINCES
