by Rene Daumal
Dr. Beaver had already invented clothes warmed by internal catalytic combustion, but after some experimentation, he had noticed that good down clothing with an inflatable lining conserved sufficient body heat to hike in the coldest climates. The heating devices were necessary only during bivouacs, and then we used the same heating apparatus used for cooking, fueled by napthalene. This highly transportable substance supplied a lot of heat in a small volume, provided it was burned in a special stove assuring complete (and consequently odorless) combustion. However, we did not know how high up our exploration would take us, and, ready for all contingencies, we had also brought outdoor clothing with double linings of platinum asbestos to be inflated by air filled with alcohol fumes.
Of course, we brought with us all the usual mountaineering gear: hiking boots and nails of all sorts, ropes, bolts, hammers, snap-links, ice axes, crampons, snowshoes, skis, and what have you, as well as observation instruments, compasses, clinometers, altimeters, barometers, thermometers, telemeters, alidades, photographic equipment, and other things. And weapons: guns, carbines, revolvers, cutlasses, dynamite, in short, whatever was needed to deal with any foreseeable obstacles.
Sogol kept the ship’s log himself. I am too unfamiliar with maritime matters to discuss any incidents that might have effected the course of navigation; moreover, these were few and rather uninteresting. Sailing from La Rochelle, we put in at the Azores, at Guadelupe, at Colon, and after crossing the Panama Canal we sailed into the South Pacific during the first week in November.
It was on one of those days that Sogol explained to us why we had to try and approach the invisible continent from the west at sunset, and not from the east at sunrise. It was because at that moment, just as in Benjamin Franklin’s experiment of the heated chamber, a current of cold sea air must rush towards the overheated lower levels of the atmosphere of Mount Analogue. Thus we would be sucked toward the interior; whereas at dawn, from the east, we would be violently repulsed. This result, furthermore, was symbolically predictable. Civilizations in their natural movement of degeneration move from east to west. To return to the sources, one should go in the opposite direction.
Arriving in the region that should have been located to the west of Mount Analogue, we had to proceed by trial and error. We were cruising at half speed, and just as the disk of the sun was about to touch the horizon, we steered towards the west and waited with baited breath, our eyes staring and tense, until the sun had disappeared. The sea was beautiful. But the wait was hard. Day after day passed this way, every evening bringing these few minutes of hope and skepticism. Doubt and impatience began to show their face aboard the Impossible. Happily, Sogol had warned us that these attempts by trial and error would take perhaps a month or two.
We held on. To pass the difficult hours after twilight, we often told stories.
I remember that one evening we talked about mountain legends. It seemed to me, I said, that the higher altitudes were more impoverished when it came to fantastic legends than the sea or the forest, for example. Karl explained it in this way:
“There is no place in the high altitudes,” he said, “for the fantastic, because the reality itself is more marvelous than anything man could imagine. Could anyone dream of gnomes, giants, hydras, or catoblepas to compete with the power and mystery of a glacier, even the smallest glacier? For glaciers are living creatures, their substance renews itself by a constant periodic process. The glacier is an organized creature, with a head, its permanent snowpatch, which grazes on snow and swallows rocky debris, a head neatly separated from the rest of the body by the rimaye; then an enormous stomach in which snow is transformed into ice, a stomach furrowed by deep crevices and rivulets, which act as excretory canals for surplus water; and in its lower parts, it expels the waste from its food in the form of moraine. Its life has a seasonal rhythm. It sleeps in winter and awakens in spring with boomings and burstings. Certain glaciers even reproduce themselves, by processes that are scarcely more primitive than those of unicellular organisms, either by conjunction and fusion, or by rupture that gives birth to what we call regenerate glaciers.”
“I suspect,” Hans replied, “that this is a more metaphysical than scientific definition of life. Living beings are nourished by chemical processes, while the mass of the glacier is preserved only by physical and mechanical processes—freezing and fusion, compression and friction.”
“Very well,” answered Karl, “but you other scientists who study crystallizable viruses, for example, to find the transitional forms between the physical and the chemical and between the chemical and the biological, you could learn a lot from the observation of glaciers. Perhaps nature has made them in a first attempt to create living beings by exclusively physical processes.”
“ ‘Perhaps,’ ” said Hans. “ ‘Perhaps’ means nothing to me. What is certain is that the glacier contains no carbon, and consequently it is not an organic substance.”
Ivan Lapse, who loved to display his knowledge of world literatures, interrupted:
“Nonetheless, Karl is right. Victor Hugo, returning from Rigi, which even in his day was not thought to be so high, noted that the views from the high peaks violently contradict our visual habits, that the natural there takes on the attractions of the supernatural. He even claimed that an average human mind cannot bear such a derangement of the senses, and uses this to explain the abundance of retarded individuals in the alpine regions.”
“It’s true, it’s true, although this last theory is a howler,” Arthur Beaver spoke up. “Last evening Miss Pancake showed me some sketches of high altitude landscapes that confirm what you say …”
Miss Pancake spilled her cup of tea and squirmed awkwardly, while Beaver continued:
“But you are wrong when you say that the high altitudes are poor in legends. I’ve heard plenty of strange ones. Of course, I didn’t hear them in Europe.”
“We’re all listening,” Sogol prompted.
“Hold on,” said Beaver. “I’d be quite happy to tell you one of these stories, though the people who told it to me made me promise not to reveal its source—but that’s not important. I would like to tell it as accurately as possible, however, and to do that I’ll have to reconstruct it in its original language, and our friend Lapse will have to help me translate it for you. Tomorrow afternoon, if you like, you’ll hear it.”
The next day, after lunch, the yacht was becalmed on a motionless sea, and we gathered to hear the story. Usually we spoke English together, sometimes French, for everyone knew both languages well enough. Ivan Lapse had preferred to translate the legend into French, and he read it aloud himself.
The Tale of the Hollow-men and the Bitter-Rose
The hollow-men live in the rock, they move around inside it like nomadic cave dwellers. In the ice they wander like bubbles in the shape of men. But they never venture out into the air, for the wind would carry them off.
They have houses in the rock with walls made of holes, and tents in the ice with canvas made of bubbles. During the day, they stay in the rock, and at night they amble onto the ice to dance in the full moon. But they never see the sun or they would burst.
They eat only emptiness, such as the shape of corpses, they get drunk on empty words, on all the empty speech we utter.
Some people say they have always existed and always will. Others say they are the dead. And still others say that every living man has his hollow-man in the mountains, just as the sword has its sheath, and the foot its footprint, and that they will be united in death.
In the village of A Hundred Houses lived the old priest-magician Kissé and his wife Hulé-Hulé. They had two sons, identical twins called Mo and Ho. Even their mother got them confused. To tell them apart, on their naming day the parents put a necklace hung with a little cross on Mo, and on Ho a necklace hung with a little ring.
Old Kissé had one great, unexpressed worry. According to custom, his eldest son should succeed him. But who was his eldest son? Did he even have an eld
est son?
Reaching adolescence, Mo and Ho were already accomplished mountaineers. People called them Passe-partout. One day their father said to them: “To whichever of you brings me the Bitter-Rose, I will transmit the great knowledge.”
The Bitter-Rose grew at the top of the highest peaks. Whoever eats it discovers that whenever he is about to tell a lie, out loud or only to himself, his tongue begins to burn. He can still tell lies, but then he is warned. Several people have seen the Bitter-Rose: from what they say, it resembles a kind of thick, multicolored lichen, or a swarm of butterflies. But no one has ever picked it, for the slightest trembling of fear nearby alarms it and it retreats into the rock. Now, even if a man desires it, he is always a little afraid of possessing it, and it promptly disappears.
In order to describe an impossible act or an absurd enterprise, they say, “It’s like trying to see at night as though in broad daylight,” or, “it’s like wanting to turn on the sun to see more clearly,” or even, “It’s like trying to catch the Bitter-Rose.”
Mo has taken his ropes, his hammer, his hatchet, and his iron hooks. The sun has surprised him on the flanks of the peak called Hole-in-the- Clouds. Sometimes like a lizard and sometimes like a spider, he crawls up he high red rock walls, between the white snows and the blue-black sky. Swift little clouds envelop hime from time to time, then release him suddenly into the light. And there, just above him, he sees the Bitter-Rose, gleaming with colors that are beyond the seven colors of he rainbow. Over and over he repeats to himself the charm his father taught him that protects him from fear.
He ought to have a bolt here, with a stirrup of rope, in order to mount this horse of rearing rock. He strikes with his hammer, and his hand sinks into a hole. There is a hollow under the rock. He breaks the crust around it and sees that this hollow has the shape of a man: a torso, legs, arms, and hollows in the shape of fingers spread in terror; he has split the head with one hammer blow.
An icy wind blows over the rock. Mo has killed a hollow-man. He has shuddered, and the Bitter-Rose has retreated into the rock.
Mo climbs back down to the village and goes to tell his father: “I killed a hollow-man. But I saw the Bitter-Rose, and tomorrow I shall go to fetch it.”
Old Kissé grew pensive. He could see the procession of misfortunes advancing from afar. He says: “Watch out for the hollow-men. They will avenge this death. They cannot enter our world. But they can come up to the surface of things. Beware of the surface of things.”
At dawn the following day, Hulé-Hulé gave a great cry, stood up, and ran toward the mountain. At the foot of the red rock wall, Mo’s clothing lay in a heap, and his ropes and his hammer, and his medal with the cross. His body was no longer there.
“Ho, my son!” she began to shout, “my son, they’ve killed your brother!”
Ho stands up, his teeth clenched, the skin of his scalp tightening. He takes his axe and wants to go. His father tells him: “First listen. Here is what you must do. The hollow-men have taken your brother. They have changed him into a hollow-man. He will try to escape them. He will search for light at the seracs of the Clear Glacier. Put his medal around your neck along with yours. Approach him and hit him on the head. Enter into the form of his body. And Mo will live again among us. Do not be afraid to kill a dead man.”
Ho looks as hard as he can into the blue ice of the Clear Glacier. Is it the light playing on the ice, do his eyes deceive him, or is he really seeing what he sees? He sees silver shapes with arms and legs, like greased underwater divers. And there is his brother Mo, his hollow shape fleeing from a thousand hollow-men in pursuit, but they are afraid of the light. Mo’s shape flees toward the light, climbs into a great blue serac, and turns around as if searching for a door.
In spite of his blood curdling and his heart bursting—he tells his blood, he tells his heart: “Do not be afraid of a dead man”—he hits the head by cracking the ice. Mo’s shape becomes motionless; Ho cracks the ice of the serac and slips into his brother’s shape, like a sword into its sheath, like a foot into its footprint. He moves his elbows and shakes himself around, then pulls his legs from the mold of ice. And he hears words in a language he has never spoken. He feels that he is Ho and that he is Mo at the same time. All of Mo’s memories have entered into his mind, along with the path up Hole-in-the-Clouds peak, and the place where the Bitter-Rose grows.
With the circle and the cross around his neck, he comes back to Hulé-Hulé: “Mother, you will have no more trouble telling us apart. Mo and Ho are in the same body, I am your only son Moho.”
Old Kissé shed tears, his face unwrinkled. But there was one doubt he still wanted to dispel. He says to Moho: “You are my only son. Ho and Mo are no longer distinguishable.”
But Moho tells him with conviction: “Now I can reach the Bitter-Rose. Mo knows the way, Ho knows the right move. If I master my fear I shall have the flower of discernment.
He gathered the flower, he received the knowledge, and old Kissé could leave this world in peace.
* * *
Once again that evening, the sun set without opening for us the door to another world.
Another question had much concerned us during those days of waiting. You do not go into a foreign country to acquire something without a certain amount of money. For bartering with prospective “savages” and “natives,” explorers usually carry with them all sorts of junk and cheap goods—pocket knives, mirrors, knick-knacks from Paris, suspenders and stockings, trinkets, cretonne, bars of soap, eaude-vie, old rifles, anodyne munitions, saccharin, képis, combs, tobacco, pipes, medals, and lots of cordage—not to speak of religious articles. As we might, in the course of the voyage and perhaps even in the interior of the continent, meet peoples belonging to ordinary humanity, we were provisioned with such merchandise as a means of exchange. But in our relations with the superior beings of Mount Analogue, what would constitute a trading currency? What did we possess that really had any value? What could we use to pay for the new knowledge we sought there? Were we going to beg? Or acquire on credit?
Each of us made a personal inventory, and each of us felt poorer from day to day, seeing nothing around us or in us that we could really call our own. In the end, we were just eight poor men and women, shorn of everything, watching the sun sink on the horizon.
CHAPTER 4
In Which We Arrive and the Problem of Currency Becomes Specific
Here we are—Everything new, no surprises—Interrogation—Settling in at Port-des-Singes—The Old ships—The Monetary system—The Peradam, standard of all value—The Forlorn inhabitants of the coast— Settling the colonies—Engrossing occupations—Metaphysics, sociology, linguistics—Flora, fauna and myths—Projects for exploration and study—“So when are you leaving?”—A Nasty owl—Unexpected rain— Simplifications in equipment, external and internal—The First Peradam!
A long wait for the unknown dampens the force of surprise. Here we are, settled for only three days in our little temporary house at Portdes-Singes, on the foothills of Mount Analogue, and everything is already familiar. From my window I see The Impossible at anchor in a cove, and a bay open onto a horizon similar to all marine horizons; only it rises perceptibly from morning to noon following the course of the sun, then sets from noon to evening through an optical phenomenon that Sogol, in the next room, is puzzling to understand. As I have been entrusted with keeping the expedition journal, I have been trying since dawn to set down on paper the story of our arrival on the Continent. I do not know how to capture that impression of something at once entirely extraordinary and entirely familiar, that staggering swiftness of déjà-vu … I have tried using my companions’ personal notes, and certainly they are helpful. I was also counting to some extent on the photographs and films that Hans and Karl took; but when they were developed, no image appeared on the visible layer. It is impossible to photograph anything here with ordinary photographic material. Another problem for Sogol to puzzle out.
Three days ago, as the
sun was once again about to slip under the horizon and we waited in the bow with our backs turned, a wind rose out of nowhere, or rather a sudden powerful breath drew us forward, space opened before us, an endless void, a horizontal gulf of air and water impossibly coiled in circles. The ship creaked in all its timbers and was hurled up a slope into the center of the abyss, and suddenly we were rocking gently in a vast, calm bay surrounded by land! The shore was so close that we could make out trees and houses, while above lay farms, forests, meadows, rocks, and, still higher up, the undefined ground and background of the high peaks and glaciers flaming red in the twilight. A flotilla of ten-man canoes—the rowers were certainly Europeans, their torsos naked and tanned—came out to tow us to an anchorage. It certainly seemed as though we were expected. The place strongly resembled a Mediterranean fishing village. We were not disoriented. The leader of the flotilla led us in silence to a white house, into a bare, red-tiled room, where a man in mountain dress received us on a carpet. He spoke French perfectly, but with the occasional secret smile of someone who finds quite odd the expressions he must use in order to make himself understood. He was translating, to be sure—unhesitatingly and correctly, but obviously translating.
He questioned us one after the other. Each of his questions, although quite simple—Who were we? Why had we come?—caught us off guard and shook us to the core. Who are you? Who am I? We could not answer him as we would a consular representative or a customs agent. Tell one’s name and profession? What good would that do? But who are you? And what are you? The words we pronounced—we had no others—were lifeless, repugnant, and grotesque, like cadavers. We knew henceforth that we could no longer pay the guides of Mount Analogue with words. Sogol courageously took it upon himself to give them a brief account of our voyage.
The man who welcomed us was indeed a guide. All authority in this country is exercised by the mountain guides, who form a distinct class, and in addition to their strict profession as guides they take turns assuming the administrative functions indispensable in the coastal and foothill villages. He gave us the necessary information about the country and about what we were expected to do. We had landed in a small town on the coast populated by Europeans, for the most part French. There are no natives here. All the inhabitants have come from elsewhere, from the four corners of the earth, like us, and every nation has its little colony along the coast. How did it happen that we landed precisely at this town, called Port-des-Singes (Port of Monkeys), populated by Western Europeans like ourselves? We came to understand later that this was not by chance, that the wind that had sucked us up and led us there was no natural and fortuitous wind but a deliberate blast. And why the name Port-des-Singes, when there was not a single primate in the region? I’m not sure, but this name evokes in me, not too pleasantly, my entire Western twentieth-century heritage— curious, mimicking, immodest, and agitated. Our port of call could only be Port-des-Singes. From there we would have to reach the chalets at the Base on our own, two days’ hiking in the high pastures, where we would meet the guide who could take us higher. So we would need to stay a few days in Port-des-Singes to prepare our supplies and put together a caravan of porters, for we would have to bring enough provisions to the Base for a very long stay. We were led to a very clean and sparsely furnished little house, where each of us had a kind of cell which he or she arranged to his liking, and there was a common room with a hearth, where we would gather for meals and for evening meetings.
