by Theo Varlet
The adventure had no other consequence than to make the whites conscious of their solidarity in the presence of a peril to which they had so far given little thought.
A chill reigned on the Ile-de-France nonetheless. People were ashamed, as if of a ridiculous escapade. The English and the French avoided coming together, the former aggregating in the winter garden and the latter the music room. By virtue of the suppression of its objective, the unanimity of our Mission had dissolved. Henceforth, the ships passengers were a fortuitous assembly of individuals who were merely waiting for the time to go our separate ways.
Before long, the problem of the future would be open again. A new situation would be sought—and how would the treatment of that one by arranged? Would the six months of advance we had achieved be retained?
Jolliot was expecting to make a lot of money with the films he had taken of the cataclysm, and he spent the crossing writing a screenplay in which the star had her role and Frédérique and I were featured clinging to our buoy, awaiting rescue...
As for the two of us, we were sure of obtaining a lucrative position from Rivier, but—and Frédérique was in entire agreement with me—I preferred to look for a practice somewhere in the Midi…the Midi that had once been too beautiful for me alone, but which from now on, with my wife, would be paradise...
Six months have gone by, and I am writing this in my villa at Cimiez, where I have opened a clinic, which my wife helps me to run, like the most skillful of nurses. Our participation in the story or Île Féréor ended with our disembarkation at Le Havre, and our life thereafter is of no interest to the public.
The Golden Rock—the bolide—was an insignificant episode in the planetary history of the Earth, which “digested” it within a month, but its “digestion” by humankind is not yet complete. France has become the richest country in the world; louis circulate there as before; other nations envy her more than ever. Nevertheless, in view of the exchange rate, which is presently unfavorable to them, Anglo-Saxon, German and American tourists have ceased to come here. They claim that their virtue forbids them to be led astray by the debauchery of Paris, in “the brothel of the modern Babylon.”
THE THUNDER OF ZEUS
I was outside Castelvetrano when first light thinned out the opacity of the nebulous night. The footpath on the edge of the road became perceptible. Black vegetal silhouettes were outlined. And, in the reassurance of the visible march, it was as if I woke up, after the animal fixity of the instinct brought forth by the darkness. A warm breeze was blowing softly. Gradually, colors were revealed; white clouds frayed at the edges, confusedly; on the bank of the sunken road the baroque profiles of Indian fig-trees—bushes tormented into hirsute spatulas of coarse green bronze—alternated with the sheaves of blue zinc aloes, from which sprang frail lances topped with orange flowers. Peasants mounted on donkeys overtook me, draped in their shawls as if in chlamydes. Sometimes, a cart, high on its wheels, gaudily painted all the way to its shafts, jolted along at the leisurely trot of a mule caped in red leather, while the drowsy boy driver fell under the bench.
In spite of the places offered and the lure of spicy conversations, I was fearful of the bumpy aid of the crude indigenous vehicles and I continued on foot in the matinal alacrity. The daylight brightened; long rays of glory cleaved the amorphous layer of clouds; ultramarine patches opened up. The sun had risen.
The joy of the divine land of Sicily delighted me once again with its new and light intoxication. A sensation of voluptuous heroism stirred broad communions with the familiar and benevolent soul of things. The amiable play of natural forces scratched out the mysticism of the North. I recognized the enveloping proximity of the immortal gods, and, thinking about the luminous eurhythmia of antique life, a great frisson gave me a momentary and precious intuition of that abolished grace and beauty.
Meanwhile, the countryside became distinct, flat and less fertile: a few islets of compact lemon-trees; the green dust of stunted olive-trees, mingled with the dark tufts of carobs—and sometimes, along a ditch, a screen of dry and noisy reeds. A moist wind rarefied the air in long gusts, beneath the dome of ashen cloud, which quickly closed up again; my pace slowed as breathing became more difficult.
The country became utterly desolate; the clotted black brush of the heather extended to the distant hills. A clump of eucalyptus, white whitened trunks beneath the jagged bark and limp, extenuated foliage, grew beside the crumbling walls of an abandoned farm.
The main road forked to the left and the path across the heath led directly toward the ruins displaying four isolated columns and vague tumuli on the horizon. Low dunes covered that area, infected with malaria and fever after ancient catastrophes, and the continual invasion of sand had driven broad pale moving banks through the new gravel, the crossing of which was made more painful by the insipid breeze, beneath the warm and flocculent velum of the sirocco.
A sacred horror emanated from the ruins. There was a prodigious chaos, incomparable with the bitter solitudes of Ségeste or the shores of Ostia, and more lugubrious still. The consecration of evident anathemas was imposed on that unique disaster. Risking the wreckage, I scaled the shapeless blocks and sat down in the gigantic groove of a broken column, from which the formidable ensemble was visible.
The stout Doric columns had fallen in a block, projecting their capitals, their bases crushes by the fall of the massive entablements; other scattered their unequal stubs; and those at the corners had spilled out their dislocated cylinders in titanic vertebral chains. The temples were unrecognizable; the marble beams had been shattered, naos,23 friezes and frontons mingling their broken debris, and sections of architrave had staved in the triple steps cut into the rock like battering rams. There was not a single ridge that had not been chipped, slashed and hacked or a molding not bitten into by saws, and everywhere the stone was eroded, hollowed out and vermiculated by cavities in which green salamanders nested. Further away, other heaps overflowed the cyclopean walls of the Acropolis, the ravine of which opened an inverted delta over the glittering mercury of the Lybic Sea.
The strange character and the special malediction of those ruins penetrated me. Obstinate earthquakes had been requires, and inhuman determination. Neither war nor conflagration, and no assault by savage hordes, could have brought about that definitive and perfect subversion. Only the irritated violence of the gods could have cast down, crushed and leveled that vigorous architecture; then, with the vengeful monument abandoned to a land henceforth sterile and mephitic, the patient shroud of the secular sands had buried the remains, and the recent exhumation of archeological digs had not diminished the accursed solitude, far from railways, tourist itineraries and honeymoon voyages.
My meditation deepened, closing my eyelids to the density of the narcotized past. In luminous fragments, antique evocations appeared: profiles, against the sky, of sunlit temples, extensive walls; and the bright town; and the polychromatic streets, and the undulant and youthful rhythm of peplums and chlamydes. A sharpened and silent intuition projected, in living and fleeting colors, the thousand parcels of that history, animated by the presence of its debris—and that full comprehension of the plastic beauty initiated me to the joy of a harmonious and dionysiac existence: a full and graceful generosity of supple energies, by comparison with which our sad and complicated civilization appears a valetudinarian poverty and a pitiful senility.
Rendered lyrical by these evoked splendors, I restored the heaps of shapeless ruins to their legitimate maters: beneath the glory of the frontons and colonnades, in the depths of the temples, the Olympians of ivory and gold were enthroned amid clouds of perfumes. And with the attentive slowness of respect, the august and all powerful Majesty imposed itself: the marmoreal Face of Zeus.
In the distance, over the Acropolis, with hoarse cries, an eagle rose up vertically into the sky. And the sudden instinct of my recognition rose up with the bird toward the God, who thus acknowledged my tribute to Barbarism.
The complace
ncy of an amiable torpor was pursuing the play of that illusion when I was awakened abruptly by a reverent greeting. The inevitable custode delle rovine,24 with his red clay pipe in one hand and the other tugging at his silver-braided cap to offer me his services. The miserable and feverish face, which the over-waxed points of his black moustache tried in vague to reinvigorate, augmented the annoyance of the intrusion. I felt incapable of the energy necessary to reject the loquacious and tenacious harassment of an Italian cicerone. It was necessary to resign myself, to go down and follow the individual, who led me back to the road in order to observe the immutable itinerary of his demonstration.
He reminisced about “the excavations that had finally brought to light the debris of that town, of which even the veritable location had been forgotten”; he launched into a fantastic chronology of its first “kings”—but a noise, a rude buzz that was getting closer, made us turn round. A clear-cut silhouette appeared at the far end of the road: an automobile.
At the speed of an express train, the noisy machine, lacquered in vermilion, with a sharp spur between its locomotive headlights, bounced along, skidded in a swerve at top speed, and stopped dead in front of us with an exasperated gurgle of detonations. Amid the reek of benzene and oil, a giant completely armored in sealskin leapt out of the shuddering machine and, pulling off a kind of diver’s helmet with his hairy hand—which unmasked his broad red bull-like face, set a long way above his huge boots—he roared in a stentorian voice, in English: “By Jove! One might think they were factory chimneys, those columns. Very curious indeed!”
Then he called to me: “Sir...”
I introduced myself.
“Charmed, Sir. Colonel William Klondyke, Chicago. What do you think of it, Sir? There’s a famous capitolade of temples!”
And, his red and radiant beard gleaming like a copper-wire brush, he shook with satisfied laughter, the cyclopean spasms of which inflated the sealskin overcoat. Although the rictus of his bushy face immediately seemed odious, curiosity prevented me from abandoning him alone to the explanations of the custodian. I submitted meekly to his abrupt exordium.
William Klondyke turned back to the automobile, whose chauffeur, equipped with a set of tools, was checking the nuts and bolts. From the trunk he took a guide-book bound in bull’s-blood shagreen, and a voluminous photographic apparatus, and he began comparing his text with the custodian’s speech, and taking note of the viewpoints that were ratified by the resonance.
My instinctive animadversion was not based on the grotesquerie of his appearance; I devoted a profound seriousness to the assurance of his brutality, and by virtue of his arrival and conduct, I abominated the individual.
“This,” said the cicerone, “is one of the largest temples that the Greeks ever built. It was 113 meters log and 54 wide.” His expectation required the customary exclamations at the announcement of such figures.
With the metallic hoarseness of a phonograph, William Klondyke said: “And that’s why they throw Antiquity at our heads! These people were civilized because they built temples! Well, it’s not too bad—for the era. But let’s be serious, Sir; compare their primitive building with modern construction: reinforced concrete, chrome steel, fiberglass, eh? They had marble and gilding. So what? All for décor, nothing serious, not a shadow of comfort. Look, these famous temples, in order to provide them with light, there was a hole in the ceiling, which also let the rain in. And don’t talk to me about grandeur; a very ordinary railway station—Omaha’s, for example—is worth half a dozen of them. Tell me, Sir, would they have been capable of building, not Brooklyn Bridge or a Big Wheel, but a Machine Hall? What would they put inside it, to start with? Gods? Yes, of course—their stupid anthropomorphic gods, for who they stupidly squandered their time in festivals and their produce in sacrifices. Do you want to know what I think? Well, these Greeks weren’t practical people!”
He completed his vituperation with that vehement insult and sat down on an aluminum folding chair whose ingenious mechanism he had taken out of his pocket.
I have certainly been subjected some absurd conversations in my time, and the vile comments of tourists are familiar to me in their diversity, but I was unable to anticipate those enormous extravagances, and the bitterness of that tirade, which had no humor or wit in it, disconcerted my refutation.
I launched into a banal appeal to common sense. “For even in America, Monsieur, one concedes the ancients the role of the precursors—distant, I admit—of modern civilization, and even the most subversive thinkers can’t deny the genius of equilibrium, harmony and proportion...”
He cut the foolish platitudes short. “Yes, Sir, I despise all those transcendentalists, those idealists. Imbecility, your Greek genius. What did it produce? In politics, anarchy and dementia: then again, Sparta, Syracuse and the rest, microscopic States that couldn’t even unite, envious and peevish populations that spent their lives devouring one another. Their philosophy? A mess of contradictory and anti-scientific hypotheses; every one of Aristotle’s affirmations is a howler; Diogenes was a crackpot, Plato a humbug. All artistes, I tell you!
“And not only were they not practical, they weren’t moral. Their conception of Olympus ought to nail them to the pillory of history. A whorehouse, that Olympus! Godly debauchery! Their ignoble Zeus merited hard labor or the electric chair a hundred times over, and as for their Aphrodite...”
He ejaculated the most formidable blasphemies. His wild vehemence horrified me; I sensed that he was the fanatic devotee of some occult power, and his frenzy seemed to me to be a kind of posthumous revolt, a vengeful intrusion, into that divine necropolis, of some incompletely-crushed Titan.
Understanding the vanity of any response, the futility of any attempt to rein in that brutal and ferocious hatred, I suffered the confused terror of being implicated in the transcendent adventure of a forbidden spectacle.
Meanwhile, the cicerone, unaware of what was being said, sponged his brow—for the atmosphere was becoming stagnant and unbreathable—and, taking advantage of the pause, resumed his function. In a monotonous and inexpressive voice, he told the story of the siege by the Carthaginians, the pillage and the burning, the curse of the malaria sent to the region by the demon Jupiter—il diavol Giove—to which the city was condemned.
“For it is in this place, Signor miel, that Giove took refuge when our good savior Jesus Christ”—he crossed himself—“threw the pagan gods into the Inferno. And here he has conserved his power. When the monks, expelled by the Moors, came to establish themselves in the temples, which were still standing then, the demon Giove, offended by seeing them pray to God, made the stones crumble and slew them all—li uccide tutti! Today, he has his domain watched over by an eagle—and that is certain, Signori, for no other eagles have ever been seen on this coast. But that one was discovered in the diggings...”
A comminatory “Stop!” gagged the nonchalant speech of the nonplussed custodian.
“That’s not in the guide-book,” proclaimed William Klondyke, brandishing the volume, less scarlet than his apoplexy. He was foaming at the mouth. “As if it weren’t enough, Sir, to be poisoned on every page by classical stupidities, without this imbecile boring us to death with apocryphal legends about that devil Zeus—that damned diabolical Zeus!” And again, he heaped his reproaches on the petrified cicerone, in Italian.
This invective against a folk-tale was not the absurd outburst of a loose-lipped maniac, nor was the relentlessness with which he attacked the episode of the eagle mere dementia. The very excess of brutality revealed more than the rancorous chicanery allowable in a modern individual; the man was in mysterious proximity to Antiquity; the organic depths of his being, his very essence, was rebelling against the Gods, and he was impugning the one and only Zeus with an impetuous and personal aggression.
“Show it to me, then, your eagle!”
Standing erect, his arms crossed, his massive stature displayed the provocation of obscure and mighty powers
By a
necessary coincidence, for whose reply I was on the lookout, there was a raucous cry, and among the ruins, the eagle rose up with great wing-beats, in an ample revolution of regular spirals.
“Eccolo!” cried the cicerone, triumphantly.
I felt a pang of anguish.
A “Hah!” of ferocious joy drew back the giant’s jowls over his fangs, and, disclosing the tragic completion of an infallible ambush, coughing up a magma of congestive blasphemies, he ran to the motor car.
“E matto!” interjected the bewildered custodian.
Yes, of course he was mad! Stirred by that surge, my anxiety blossomed, and in order to react more aptly, I blamed the atmosphere of my nervous irritation, prescient of extraordinarily grave events.
Heavy clouds, the color of sulfur and antimony, were welling up, completely filling the lurid sky. The cicerone offered me shelter, and even a meal, in his cabin over by the Acropolis. I accepted the opportune diversion; we took the sunken path that cut through the ravine...
Behind us, however, the staccato roar of the horrible automobile went up, and the ferocious blast of an imperative horn drive my companion back, shouting in vain to alert William Klondyke to the danger as he stood on the hood of his machine, moving off at top speed.
“Piano! Piano! Signore, per Dio!”
A terror gripped me, uncanny and absurd—not that it would crash on the way but, on the contrary, that it would reach the acropolis, where the eagle was soaring in circles.
It went forward, shuddering, veered across the bridge and launched into an exasperated climb. One final bound projected it on to the acropolis. Anguished, we waited. From a cyclopean wall surged a bust like some rude Hecatoncheire25 emerging from Chaos. William Klondyke shouldered his rifle. There was a puff of smoke. Convulsively, the eagle spun…and the abrupt detonation echoed in the first rumble of thunder as the bird, beating its wings, fell…toward the man, immobile with his head raised and one hand on his weapon.
