by Lord Dunsany
“I got nearer and nearer, I was no longer weary now; and suddenly, closer than I had dared to hope, was a little puff of smoke above the rushes. I stopped for one moment to steady my breath, and got my rifle ready. In that moment I named him; yes, I called him Prometheus Jorkensi. There was a patch of dry land ahead, and the rushes still protected me. I moved with ten-inch paces so as to make no ripple, but I couldn’t keep the rushes quiet; perhaps the north wind blew stronger than I thought, for he never seemed to hear me. And then, oh so close that it couldn’t have been ten yards, I saw the little fire on a patch of earth; and the rushes still hid me completely. I saw a patch of brown fur and a huge body crouching. I could only guess what part of the body I saw, but a vital part I thought, and I raised my rifle. Still it had no idea I was anywhere near it. And then I saw its hands stretched out to the fire, warming themselves by the edge of those bleak marshes. I don’t cut much ice, you know; I didn’t then; no one had ever heard my name, or, if they had, it meant nothing; and here was I on the verge of this discovery, with the proof of it ten yards away just waiting for a rifle bullet. I’d shoot a monkey, I’d shoot an ape, I’d shoot a poor old hippo; I wouldn’t mind shooting a horse if it had to be killed, though lots of men can’t bear that; but those black hands stretched out over the fire were the one thing I couldn’t destroy. The idea that flashed on me standing amongst those reeds I have been turning over in my mind for years, and it always seemed sound to me, and it does even now. You see, of all the links in the world that there are between us, and of all the barriers against those that are not as us, it seems to me that there is one link, one barrier, more outstanding than any other you could possibly name. We talk of our human reason, that may or may not be superior to the dream of the dog or the elephant: we say it is; that is all. We say that we alone have belief in an after-life, and that the lion has not: we say so; that’s all. Some of them are stronger, some live longer than us, many may be more cunning. But there is one thing, gentlemen, one thing they haven’t got, and that is the knowledge of fire. That seems to me the great link, the great bond between all who have it and the barrier against all who have not. Look what we’ve done with it: look at those fire-irons, that fender, the bricks of which this house is made, and the steel structure of it; look at this whole city. That’s our one great possession, knowledge of fire. And, when I saw those dark hands stretched out to that fire on the edge of the marshes, that is what I thought of all at once, not at such length as I have told you of course; it flashed all through my mind in a moment; but during that moment I hesitated, and the abu laheeb saw the sun on the tip of my rifle or heard me breathing there, for he suddenly craned his great neck over the rushes, then stooped again and scattered the fire with his forepaws with one swift jerk into the reeds all round me. They were alight at once, and through the flame and smoke I only dimly caught sight of him leaping away, but, above the crackle of the burning reeds and the thump of his hind legs leaping, I heard him uttering gusts of human-like laughter.”
He paused a moment. We were all quite silent, thinking what he had lost. He had lost a famous name. He shook his head, and seemed full of the same thoughts as the rest of us.
“I never went after him again,” he said. “I had seen him, but who’ll believe that? I have never quite been able to bring myself any more to try to shoot a creature that shared that great secret with us.”
There was silence again; we were wondering, I think, whether his scruples should have prevented him from doing so much for Science. I suppose that the too-sensitive and overscrupulous seldom make famous names. A man leaning forward, and smoking a pipe, took his pipe out of his mouth and broke the silence at last.
“Mightn’t you have photographed him?” he said.
“Photographed him!” said Mr. Jorkens, straightening himself up in his chair. “Photographed him! Aren’t half the photographs fakes? Here, look at the Evening Picture; look at that, now. There’s a child handing a bouquet to someone with its left hand, so that both of them may expose as much of their surface as possible to the camera. And here’s a man welcoming his brother from abroad. Welcoming indeed! They are both of them being photographed, and that’s obviously all that they’re doing.”
We looked at the paper and it was so; they were almost turning their backs on one another in order to be photographed.
“No,” he said, and he looked me straight in the eyes, and flashed that glance of his from face to face. “If Truth cannot stand alone, she scorns the cheap aid of photography.”
So dominant was his voice as he said these words, so flashed his eyes in the dim light of the room, that none of us spoke any more. I think we felt that our voices would shock the silence. And we all went quietly away.
Our Distant Cousins
I was elected a member of the club to which Jorkens belongs. The Billiards Club it is called, though they don’t play much billiards there. I went there many days before I met Jorkens again; and heard many tales after lunch, when we sat round the fire; but somehow there seemed something missing in all of them, to one who was waiting for one of Jorkens’. One heard tales of many lands and of many peoples, some of them strange enough; and yet, just when the story promised to grip one, there was something that was not there. Or perhaps there was too much; too many facts, too impartial a love of truth, that led so many of them to throw everything into their tales, apart from its interest, merely because it was true. I do not mean that Jorkens’ tales were not true, as to some extent his biographer I should be the last to suggest that; it would be unfair to a man from whom I have had so much entertainment. I give the words as they fell from his lips, so far as I can remember them, and leave the reader to judge.
Well, about the fifth time I came in, to my great delight there was Jorkens. He was not very talkative at lunch, nor for some time after; and it was not till he had been awhile in his usual arm-chair, with his whiskey and soda at hand on a little table, that he began to mutter. I, who had made a point of sitting beside him, was one of the few that heard him. “There’s a lot of loose talk,” he was saying, “goes on in clubs. People say things. They don’t mean them. But they say things. A lot of loose talk.”
“Yes,” I said, “I suppose there is rather. There oughtn’t to be.”
“Of course there oughtn’t,” said Jorkens. “Now I’ll give you an instance. Only to-day; before you came in; but only to-day I heard a man saying to another (they’ve both gone out now, so never mind who they were) I heard him saying ‘There’s no one tells taller tales than Jorkens.’ Merely because he hasn’t travelled, or, if he has, has kept all the time to roads and paths and railways, merely because he has never been off a good wide path he thinks that things that I may have seen hundreds of times merely weren’t there.”
“Oh, he can’t really have meant it,” I said.
“No,” said Jorkens, “but he shouldn’t have said it. Now, just to prove to you, as I happen to be able to do, that his remark is definitely inaccurate, I can show you a man not a mile from here who tells very much taller stories than I do; and they happen to be perfectly true.”
“Oh, I’m sure they are,” I said, for Jorkens was distinctly annoyed.
“Care to come and see him?” said Jorkens.
“Well, I’d just as soon hear one of your own stories of things you’ve seen,” I said, “if you’d care to tell me one.”
“Not till I’ve cleared myself,” said Jorkens, “of that loose assertion.”
“Yes, I’ll come,” I said.
So we left the club together.
“I’d take a taxi,” said Jorkens, “only I happen to have run out of change.”
Though Jorkens was once a great traveller I was not sure what training he was in to walk a mile just then. So I hailed a taxi, Jorkens insisting that he must owe me the money, as it was he who was taking me. We went eastwards, and soon arrived at our destination, Jorkens generously placing himself in debt to me for the fare.
It was a small lodging house bey
ond Charing Cross Road, and we were shown upstairs by a maid to a carpetless room; and there was Jorkens’ friend Terner, a man probably still in the thirties, though he obviously smoked too much, and that made him look a bit older; and besides that he had pure-white hair, which gave a queer venerable appearance to a face that seemed somehow unsuited to it.
They greeted each other, and I was introduced.
“He has come to hear your story,” said Jorkens.
“You know I never tell it,” answered Terner.
“I know,” said Jorkens; “not to sneering fools. But he’s not one of those. He can tell when a man’s speaking the truth.”
They looked at each other, but Terner still seemed uncertain, still seemed to cling to the reticence of a man that has often been doubted.
“It’s all right,” said Jorkens. “I’ve told him lots of my tales. He’s not one of those sneering fools.”
“Told him about the Abu Laheeb?” asked Terner suddenly.
“Oh, yes,” said Jorkens.
Terner looked at me.
“A very interesting experience,” I said.
“Well,” said Terner, taking another cigarette in his stained fingers, “I don’t mind telling you. Take a chair.”
He lit his cigarette and began.
“It was in 1924; when Mars was about its nearest to the earth. I took off from Ketling aerodrome,8 and was away two months. Where did they think I was? I certainly hadn’t enough petrol to fly about in our atmosphere for two months. If I came down, where did I come down? It was their business to find out and to prove it; and, if not, to believe my story.”
1924, and Ketling aerodrome. I did remember now. Yes, a man had claimed to have flown to Mars; had been reluctant to say much at first, because of some horror that he had seen, would not give cheery interviews, was too grimly solemn about it, and so encouraged doubts that might otherwise not have been, and was soured by them, and overwhelmed by a rush of them.
“Why, yes, I remember, of course,” I said. “You flew to . . .”
“A thousand letters by one post, calling me a liar,” said Terner. “So after that I refused to tell my story. They wouldn’t have believed it in any case. Mars isn’t quite what we think it.
“Well, this is what happened. I’d thought of it ever since I realised that aeroplanes could do it. But about 1920, with Mars coming nearer and nearer, and 1924 the only year that would be possible, I began my calculations. I worked at them steadily for three years; I have the figures still: I will not ask you to read them, but the whole point of my work was this, that there was only one motive power that could possibly get me to Mars before all my provisions gave out, and that power was the pace of the world. An aeroplane can do over two hundred miles an hour, and mine got up to nearly three hundred by means of the propeller alone; and in addition to that I had a rocket attachment that gradually increased my pace to an enormous extent; but the world, which is ninety-three million miles from the Sun, goes right round it in a year; and nothing we know on its surface has any pace like that. My petrol and my rocket were merely to pull clear of the earth’s attraction, but my journey was made by the force that is moving you in that chair at this moment at something like a thousand miles a minute. One doesn’t lose that pace merely by leaving the earth; it remains with one. But my calculations were to direct it; and I found that the pace of the earth would only carry me to Mars when Mars was a bit ahead of us. Unfortunately Mars is never straight ahead, but a bit out to the right, and I had to calculate at what angle I was to aim my plane away to the right of our orbit, in order that the combined pull of my little plane and my rockets, and the vast pace of the earth, should give me the right direction. It had to be as precise as aiming a rifle, with this slight advantage on my side, to make up for all the forces that grudged my journey, that the target would attract any missile that was going a little too wide.
“But how to get back? That doubled the complexity of my calculations. If the pace of the world sent me forwards, so would the pace of Mars. Mars would be ahead of the world when I started. Where would the pace of Mars send me?”
I saw a flash of doubt even on Jorkens’ face at that.
“But it was fairly simple,” continued Terner. “Our world has the inside berth, a much shorter journey round the sun at ninety-three million miles than Mars at an average of a hundred and thirty-nine million. It consequently soon passes its neighbour, and I found that just as I was to shoot forward from Earth to Mars, so, by leaving at the right hour, I could shoot forwards from Mars to Earth. As I said, these calculations took me three years, and of course my life depended on them.
“There was no difficulty in taking food for two months. Water was more cumbersome; so I took the great risk of carrying water for only a month, and trusting to find it in Mars. After all, we have seen it there. It seemed a certainty, and yet it was an anxiety all the while, and I drank so sparingly that, as it turned out, I had ten full days’ supply when I got to Mars. A far more complicated matter was my supply of compressed air in cylinders, my method of releasing it for use, and my utilisation of exhaled air to the utmost that it could be utilised.”
I was about to ask some questions about those cylinders when Jorkens interrupted. “You know my theory about Jules Verne and the men in the moon?” he said.
“No,” I replied.
“So many things he describes have been done since, and have become commonplace,” said Jorkens; “Zeppelins, submarines, and one thing and another; and are described so minutely and vividly; that it’s my theory, I don’t know what you think, that he actually experienced these, especially the trip to the moon, and then told them as fiction.”
“No, I never heard that theory,” I said.
“Why not?” said Jorkens. “Why shouldn’t he? There are innumerable ways of recording events. There’s history, journalism, ballads, and many more. People don’t believe any of them very devoutly. They may disbelieve fiction too, now and then. But look how often you hear it said ‘That’s Little Dorrit’s home, that’s where Sam Weller lived, that’s Bleak House,’ and so on and so on. That shows you they believe fiction more than most things; so why shouldn’t he have left his record in that form? But I am interrupting you. I beg your pardon.”
“Never mind,” said Terner. “Another thing that perplexed me greatly, and gave rise to immense discomfort, was the loss of the pressure of the atmosphere, to which we are accustomed. I shall always regard this as the greatest of all the handicaps that anyone has to face on a journey from Earth. Indeed without the most careful and thorough binding with bandages one’s body would be crushed, by the pressure within it working outwards when the weight of the air was gone. I should have published details of all these things if it hadn’t been for that outbreak of disbelief; which would not have occurred if I had had a publicity agent.”
“Most annoying,” said Jorkens.
Terner got up and paced about the room, still smoking as always.
There certainly had been an outbreak of disbelief. It was just one of those things that the public had turned against, like Epstein’s Rima,9 only far more so. Some men are unlucky. It was largely his own fault. It was as he had said; if he had had a good publicity agent, the outbreak would not have occurred. They would have believed him without his troubling to make the journey at all.
He paced up and down, a few long strides, in silence.
“I spent every penny I’d got,” he went on, “on the aeroplane and the outfit. I had no dependants. And if my calculations were wrong and I missed the red planet I shouldn’t want the cash. If I found it and got safely back to Earth, I imagined it wouldn’t be hard to earn all I needed. I was mistaken there. Well, one never knows. Achievement by itself is not enough. The necessary thing is for people to admit your achievement. I had not thought of that. And the bigger the achievement, the less ready people may be to admit it. Lear was recognised much quicker than Keats.”10
He lit another cigarette, as he did throughout his st
ory as soon as he had finished one.
“Well, the planet came nearer and nearer. It was quite large now every night, distinctly coloured. Orange perhaps, rather than red. I used to go out and look at it at night. The awful thought occurred to me more than once that that orange glow might well come from a waste of deserts, yellow sand without a drop of water for me; but I was consoled by the thought of those vast canals that had been seen with our telescopes, for I believed like everyone else that they were canals.
“I had finished all my calculations by then, by the winter of 1923; and Mars, as I said, was coming nearer and nearer. I grew pretty calm about it as the time approached. All my calculations were done, and it seemed to me that any peril that threatened me was all decided months ago, one way or the other. The dangers seemed all behind me; they were in my calculations. If they were right they would take me through; if they were wrong I was doomed two or three years ago. The same way with those tawny deserts that I used to think I saw. I gave up worrying about them too. I had decided that the telescope could see better than I could, so that was the end of them. I wouldn’t tell anyone I was going; I hate to talk about things I am going to do. Apparently one has to on a stunt like that. Any way I didn’t. There was a girl I used to see a good deal of in those days. Amely her name was. I didn’t even tell her. It would have soon got out if I had. And there would I have been, the silly hero of an adventure that as yet I was only talking about. I told her I was going in my ’plane on a long journey. She thought I meant to America. I said I would be away two months; and that puzzled her; but I wouldn’t say more.
