The Aerial Valley

by Brian Stableford

  “What are your honest men saying and doing while waiting for their day to come? What, in sum, is your public spirit?”

  “There is none any longer, and that’s quite natural. The inhabitants of a country in which the most violent earthquake has just burst forth, remain nonplussed, immobilized by far and terror on the edge of the abyss that has engulfed thousand of their fellow citizens, for a long time.”

  “I understand,” said the governor. “Your nation is enfeebled; the revolution has accelerated its final phase, and now everything there is exhausted.”

  “Everything except for the military spirit.”

  “That is an admirable thing. The end of empires is generally announced by softness and cowardice. Yours, on the contrary, after twelve centuries of existence, is returning to the point from which is departed. If that is sustained, France will become a second Roman Empire; the entire world will be submissive to her. Can the sciences and literature also be regenerated in her bosom? Without that, her glory will be sad and catastrophic.”

  “Don’t worry. The man who is renewing the political bases of Europe will be able to reignite the torch of genius. Already, crowns of glory are suspended in the arena, soliciting in all parts the competition of athletes; the first combats will doubtless not be signaled by a great celebrity, but soon the favorites of Mars will become those of Minerva, and literature, after long days of sadness and mourning, will reappear more brilliant than ever.”

  While I was speaking, the governor was observing the height of the sun. “Now,” he told me, “it’s time for today’s council meeting. I’ll leave you in order to go to it. Continue your walk; I’ll come back to join you as soon as I’m free.”

  As I went up the hill I saw several groups of children, who appeared to be hunting for strawberries, and who ran toward me as soon as they saw me. As they came close to me, they reached out their hands in a suppliant manner.

  I thought at first they were requesting alms, and, although somewhat surprised to find beggars here, I gave them a few coins, but on seeing them smile and throw the money away, I reflected that they had no idea of its value, and that, in consequence, it could not be money but sugary sweets, of which I had already taught them the value, that they were requesting from me.

  All the children combined with the grace of their age a generosity that does not always accompany it. Several of them could scarcely walk, some had been taken from their cradles; the strongest took turn carrying the latter, the others being led by the hand. The most amiable benevolence animated all of that charming youth. It was the spring of a year of the Golden Age.

  Baskets full of perfumed strawberries were presented to me by the boys; the girls were behind them and scarcely dared allow themselves to be seen. Gradually, their childish modesty vanished, and those timid Galateas, after hiding behind the willows, gradually became emboldened and ended up giving lessons in boldness to their little companions.

  When the children had become more accustomed to me, I wanted to obtain from their ingenuity some enlightenment regarding domestic mores. No sooner had they understood me than they hastened to compete in satisfying my curiosity. The chatter, often interrupted but never disputed, passed from one mouth to another, merrily. It was unending on the love that they had for their parents, the evidences of tenderness that they received every day, their veneration for the Supreme Being that they were already beginning to perceive above them, and on their profound submission to His sage laws.

  I was moved to tears by the naïve expression of those sentiments. In the middle of the touching scene the governor arrived. His face changed when he saw the children surrounding me, and in a severe tone he ordered them to go away.

  Astonished by such a sudden alteration, I thought I glimpsed the reason for it, and I could not hide it.

  “You’ve come from the council,” I said. “Is my presence here beginning to cause them some anxiety?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “They can be reassured; I’ll leave today.”

  “I hope, Monsieur, that you won’t refuse us a favor in return for the hospitality that we have accorded you.”

  “What is it?”

  “That of not saying, when you return to your own country, that you have found us—or, at least, remaining silent as to the geographical location of our refuge.”

  “For fear, apparently, that we might come to conquer it. I can’t help laughing at your terror.”

  “I warn you, in any case, that the first balloon that appears over our heads will be received with a volley of arrows.”

  “Would you like me to inform France of your declaration of war?”

  “Whatever you please, if you are indiscreet. Observe, however, that we have no intention of attacking, but only of defending ourselves if we are attacked.”

  We were at the bottom of the hill when he finished that remark. I suppressed the emotion that it excited in me, thinking that Monsieur Renou’s conduct justified that of the council. At first I had been received with open arms, and I would doubtless still have enjoyed the same confidence if my hosts had not recalled the lesson of experience. That lesson had been terrible, and it would have been inexcusable for them not to profit from it. However insulting to me the council’s decision was, therefore, I could only approve of it, and hasten to submit to it by going to work on the preparations for my departure.

  A good deal of gas still remained in the balloon; I could easily augment the volume with air rarefied by fire. While its ascension was being solicited by that procedure, I put into the nacelle the plants that I had discovered in the Valley, with the manuscripts and a few curious objects that had been give to me.

  I could not take my leave of my hosts without bursting into tears. They were equally emotional, and expressed to me several times how distressed they were by the harshness of the law that experience imposed upon them.

  Without that terrible lesson in misfortune, I might perhaps have settled among them. Oh, with simple and placid tastes, how would I not have cherished the only place on earth where a man has no need of a fortune to be esteemed and where all hearts, strangers to hatred, are only full of benevolence and love?

  Oh, without a doubt I shall keep the secret that has been imposed upon me of the location of that last refuge of innocence. It is only to convert it to the Christian faith that its conquest would be undertaken, for it possesses only virtues, without a particle of gold or silver, but by announcing themselves to study the mores of its inhabitants, our learned missionaries would infect them with theirs; they would spread in the source of the generations of that Elysium the terrible poison that devours the population of our modern Babylons.

  Those reflections accumulated in my bosom at the moment of quitting my hosts, and I shouted:

  “Adieu, worthy inhabitants of a celestial land; adieu, people truly cherished by God. Persist in your sage severity, reject without pity the reckless who attempt to violate your refuge. You deliver yourselves now without fear to the desires of nature, regulated by reason; your chaste spouses know no other pleasures than their duties; your modest daughters listen to no other lover than the one who is to be their husband; you have neither masters not slaves, and you are exempt from pride as from baseness.

  “Everything would be overturned if you permitted a stranger to establish himself among you, No more mores, no more innocence, no more happiness: a vain babble, a sterile display, external impostures replacing that which is most precious in the world, probity among men, honesty among women.”

  I rose into the air before the astonished eyes of the inhabitants of the valley. Cries of admiration mingled with wishes for a fortunate voyage, expressed in harmonious song. I had ceased to be visible to their gaze while that delightful melody was still ringing in my ears. I descended again still pursued by those celestial voices.

  Everything marvelous that I had seen and heard delighted me so much than when I touched the ground I thought that I was waking up and emerging from a dream that had trans
ported me into the heavens.

  My first concern was to write down an account of it; that is what you have just read. It is very imperfect in several respects, and it would be much less so if I had had the liberty to make a second voyage to that terrestrial paradise. I confess that my love of science would not have been my principal motive for undertaking it. When the heart is fully satisfied, the mind has no desires; and there has been no moment in my life when I was as completely happy as in the Aerial Valley.

  Since I cannot hope to see it again, I can at least maintain the happy memories that the enchanting sojourn has left me, by rereading the annals that I shall copy out after this record.

  The Annals of the Aerial Valley

  I

  I am writing the annals of the Aerial Valley. These annals would be devoid of interest for the men of our former fatherland; they will not find in them any bloody wars, any violent revolution, nor any overturned throne. They would say: “What does the history of a people who made no noise upon the earth matter to us? For it is by the noise they make that people and sovereigns alike are appreciated down there. But our readers will be as peaceful as we are; they will be touched by the happiness that we shall have enjoyed, the great examples of fathers will serve as models for children, and successively, from age to age, our virtues and our felicity will be handed down to our ultimate posterity.

  Ought we to hope for a posterity, though? Perhaps the rarefied air we breathe in this Valley is not appropriate to human life; perhaps the population that inhabits this place, isolated between heaven and earth, will disappear without leaving generation. But if this population is perpetuated, it is at least probable that the little knowledge it possesses will be lost for the want of means to maintain it. Enlightenment has made a tour of the world; it is now fixed in Europe within a certain latitude; but, communications having become easier than ever before, and all men being in contact mentally, the countries that are presently in darkness will perhaps be brilliant with light tomorrow. There is no hope of that here. If the seeds of knowledge that we cultivate in this Valley perish, it is forever; the soil will become rustic again, as it was before we settled here, and there will be no return.

  That future of darkness and death is, however, inevitable, for the history of all peoples proves, incontrovertibly, that the sciences and the arts have a period of growth, a stationary period, and then a period of decadence; that succession is as general, and seems to be as natural, as the life and death of everything that exists on earth. This writing will therefore one day, perhaps in a small number of years, be buried in the eternal abyss of forgetfulness.15

  That is a pity, for I think it will be truly curious, in a few centuries, to know the origin of the settlement of this elevated region. But how curious, too, would that knowledge be for the earth from which we are forever separated! What an incredible romance our history would appear to all of Europe, if it succeeded in becoming known to it! The poor author would be treated as an extravagant visionary! However, I am only telling the simple truth; my brothers in this Valley, the only ones who will read this script, would not allow it a moment’s existence if I permitted myself to mingle the slightest fiction in it. I shall tell that truth about things as about people, without, any more than Tacitus, being stimulated by the desire for praise or held back by fear of criticism.

  I shall begin by making known the motives that led me to this Valley. That event derives from the story of my life, which will find its place elsewhere, but so long as the Aerial colony subsists and has a posterity, will that posterity understand me if I speak about the world I have quit and which they will never know? Will they be able to form any idea of that other world, physically or mentally? Will not the bounds of the Valley be, for them, the limits of the world? Will they understand that this Valley is only one imperceptible point in the vast extent of the globe? Geographical maps only present sensible figures for those who are able to compare the real object with its representation; it is necessary to have traveled a little, over some distance, visited a few countries, in order to relate to the different objects on the map; and it is only then, extending by analogy the positive knowledge that one has acquired, that one can succeed in understanding clearly all the parts and divisions on the earth.

  Even supposing that our posterity is not stopped by that obstacle in the study of the description of the globe, the maps that we have brought, whatever care we take of them, will perish under the effects of time, along with our printed books. Then, that posterity will be like La Fontaine’s Mouse; its hole will be the entire universe. But let us leave the future there, which will take care of itself; we have done our best to enlighten it and render it happy. Our means are feeble and limited, but those of Providence are omnipotent; let us hope that it will take as much care of the children as it has of the fathers.

  After that digression, which will not be the last, and which my brothers will surely be disposed to forgive me, I shall come to the story of my establishment in this Valley.

  I am not one of its first founders; the colony had already been commenced three years before I came to join it. This is how that came to pass.

  A cruel malady had brought me to Barèges; for two years I had been spending the winter in Tarbes and the summer close to my salutary urn. The water in this corner of the Pyrenees enjoyed great favor since the still-recent voyage made by the Duc de Maine, accompanied by Madame Scarron.16 Fashion, more than necessity, were attracting, along with the brilliant society of the court, the rich people of the neighboring provinces. But to the same extent that Louis XIV’s court was brilliant with wit, grace and elegance, the provinces were obscured by ignorance and gaucherie.17 That line of demarcation disappeared, and another was formed by the mixture. The change was not for the better, for provincial ignorance was compensated by a good deal of frankness and simplicity. Those good qualities gave way to preciosity and affectation. Brilliant vice caused innocence to blush; people became ridiculous in trying to imitate the manners of the court, and art only succeeded in disfiguring nature.

  I rarely went to the assemblies where a brilliant swarm of young courtiers made a game out of making fools of a few simpletons, cheating them at lansquenet or abducting some novice beauty from her mother or her husband. I preferred to wander in the beautiful mountains, which present, as in a painting, a variety of crops, productions and colors that is scarcely seen on the surface of the most extensive and diversified plain. What completed giving a magical aspect to the picture were the light vapors that, rising continually from the valleys, enriched it with a varnish that never seemed so brilliant in the most beautiful landscapes by Poussin.

  The season of the waters was approaching its end, however; already the fir-trees of the mountains were raising their somber pyramidal verdure in the midst of the yellowing foliage of the beech, the hornbeam and the birch, seeming as many blackened spikes half-consumed by the fire of the thunder. The brilliant carriages had departed; all that still remained were a few inhabitants of the locality and its surroundings, who, either because of the humidity of their valleys, the salted meats on which they nourished themselves, the dirtiness of their dwellings and garments or the habit of walking barefoot in waters as cold as the snow from which they came, were afflicted by goiters, rheumatism, paralysis and other similar maladies. Fortunately for them, nature has placed the remedy close to the evil.18

  Before communications were cut off by the snow, and humans ceded their places to wolves and bears, the only inhabitants of Barèges during the winter, I had a strong desire to meet two hermits who, it was said, lived in the middle of the Pyrenees, on the almost-inaccessible summit of one of the mountains. Everyone was talking about them, but no one knew where they lived, nor what road led there.

  I was told that I could obtain reliable information on that subject in a little village that was rarely visited, situated three leagues from Barèges. I resolved to go and establish myself for some time in the village, in order to win that the confidence of the inhabita
nts more easily, and obtain by that means the information I sought. I colored my journey with the pretext of seeing some of the land that was for sale in the vicinity, and I introduced myself in the simple costume of a mountain man who enjoyed a little ease in his fortune.

  That ease furnished me with the means of giving the inhabitants a few good dinners, and I was soon admitted to their familiarity. I learned then that they were all of the reformed religion, and when they knew that I professed the same faith, they no longer had any secrets from me. That of the hermits was confided to me. They were two Protestants persecuted for their beliefs who had taken refuge with their families in that unknown location. They had been established there for three years. During the first two they had maintained frequent relations with the village in order to procure the necessary means of subsistence, but as soon as the soil had assured them of a sufficient harvest and they had been provided with a few indispensable objects they had apparently renounced society entirely.

  “It has been a year,” one of the inhabitants of the village added, “since any of us has been to see them, and only once has their servant come to see us on their behalf. He reiterated on their behalf the offer they had already made to us to go and share their refuge, and we shall infallibly be forced to that emigration if the persecution continues. We invite you to join us when the time comes. In the meantime, we will give you a letter of recommendation to our common brethren and a guide to their dwelling.”

  I refused the recommendation but accepted the guide, who was indispensable to me, and we departed the following morning.