In A Thousand Years

by Emile Calvet

  With the aid of binoculars, the passengers were able to observe that the entire country was planted with crops. Numerous trains pulled by electromotive engines were running through the fields.

  At one o’clock the balloon was over the plain again and passed within ten leagues of a verdant lake that extended over the territory once occupied by the oasis of Koufarah.

  A few moments later, the southern horizon was entirely invaded by a vast dark blue lake, which covered the ancient Libyan desert with ten feet of water.

  The airship soon went directly over Kebbah, which had become a first-rate industrial city, connected to the Mediterranean by means of canals as broad as arms of the sea.

  At two o’clock the Arago had lost sight of the shore. At that moment, the agronomist, who had just consulted the clock, announced that it was time to sit down at table in earnest, because they would not reach Khartoum until eight forty-five in the evening. The proposition was favorably welcomed by al the passengers.

  “Now, Messieurs,” he added, “we’ll have to serve ourselves. Let each of us work to the profit of all.”

  Everyone set to work.

  While Éva set out the solid gold cutlery with which the balloon was equipped, Dryon brought out a portable cellar full of vintage wines, Antius delved into an enormous basket from which he pulled out cold meats—primarily tins of quail and partridge—which he handed to the physicist, and the historiographer abandoned his important functions to grind the coffee.

  “The ghost of Van Ostade must be quivering with joy before this interior scene,” he murmured.

  Ten minutes later the passengers were gathered around the table and delivering an assault upon the dinner with an appetite sharpened by a journey of five hundred and twenty leagues fifteen hundred feet above the ground.

  The perfumed mocha won Gédéon compliments, which he modestly passed on to the family grinder. The conversation then took the most amiable and cheerful tone.

  At three o’clock the engineer, who had left the table to check on the progress of the balloon, spotted several cargo vessels heading northwards and was able to exchange signals with one of them. The editor of the on-board journal was able to inscribe in his columns the Equator, carrying a scientific mission that was returning from the Antarctic Ocean.

  In four hours terra firma reappeared. Half an hour later, the airship was devouring space over the plains of ancient Nubia, now exploited by an army of agriculturalists.

  At six o’clock, the agronomist pointed out a narrow glittering line at the extreme edge of the horizon. “There’s the Nile, Messieurs,” he said.

  The strangers went to the windows and attached their gazes for some time to the mysterious river that had been the cradle of the old Egyptian civilization.

  Seven o’clock was chiming when the balloon flew over the high hills that overlooked the ancient desert of Bahiouda. Dusk was beginning to fall, and the balloon switched on all its lights.

  At eight o’clock, all the binoculars were focused on Khartoum, whose electric lights were illuminating the south-eastern horizon.

  Forty minutes later, the Arago, under the skillful direction of the engineer Humphrey, descended gently on to the landing-stage at Khartoum, resplendent with light.

  They voyagers disembarked and headed for the entrance to the aerostatic palace. When they left the central part of the edifice they found themselves on a broad circular promenade which overlooked the city from a height of two hundred feet. Leaning on a red marble balustrade, they witnessed a magical spectacle.

  The city of Khartoum extended before them, streaked in all directions by magnificent avenues, which divided the eastern pat of the city into several districts.

  A large number of walkers were moving toward the two quays that bordered the Blue Nile and the White Nile.

  Several monumental bridges linked the city to the surrounding country, covered with villas whose roofs were bristling with clumps of tropical plants.

  Upstream, the two rivers drew apart at an acute angle, forming two glittering lines running southwards.

  In a northerly direction, the mass of the waters, now combined, rolled its foaming waters in a vast cataract, the dull noise of which covered the entire city.

  Guillaume Dryon extracted the strangers from the ecstatic state into which the sight of that superb panorama had plunged them

  The Arago’s passengers went down a vast staircase opposite which the sign of the Hôtel du Nil was blazing—an immense and superb edifice, which, by means of a notice attached to the entrance door, informed travelers that the establishment put at their disposal apartments, a restaurant, a café, a library, bathrooms, reading rooms, gymnasia, conference rooms and concert halls.

  At the head of the caravan, the agronomist went into the vestibule and handed his card to a majordomo, who bowed profoundly.

  Twenty minutes later, the passengers, who had taken possession of several apartments, went into a dining room as big as a hall and ornamented with as much taste as luxury.

  Several groups of travelers, recently arrived and disseminated about the huge hall, were finishing their meals. From the shreds of conversations that reached them, the voyagers were able to understand that a number of engineers and chemists were among the Hôtel du Nil’s guests.

  The Arago’s passengers soon found themselves alone in the dining room and were chatting happily enough about the end of the voyage. At ten o’clock they left the table.

  Desirous, after fourteen hours in the air, of treading the ground feely, they left behind an elegant electric calèche that the majordomo had booked in advance for their use. Following a broad avenue of palm trees, they went down to the central part of the city and took a boulevard that led to the Blue Nile.

  “I’m truly surprised,” Gédéon murmured, “not to have yet seen a genuine negro.” Tormented by this apparent anomaly he moved closer to the doctor and submitted the question to him. Antius turned his back on him.

  The young man went to the physicist, who, while studying a star map of the latitude, was walking with his eyes turned toward the firmament, and asked the scientist to enlighten him.

  “Ask your uncle,” replied the professor, without taking his eyes off the constellations shining at the zenith. As an anthropologist, he’ll be better able to enlighten you than I am.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve tried that. He greeted me, as usual, with the grace of a wild boar.”

  Then the physicist, descending to earth again, explained at length to his former pupil how, with the passing of time, the characteristic traits of races tended to melt into one another and, in consequence, to disappear. He added that, by virtue of a sage law of nature, they types were gradually drawing nearer to the most perfect, without the metamorphosis having been a lamentable catastrophe.

  Adding an example to the precept, he reminded him that in the majority of the guests surrounding them in the hotel dining room, a trained eye could easily recognize the African type. The complexion was generally warm and brown, the hair black, the frame muscular—but one would search in vain, he added, for the flat nose, the curly hair and the characteristic facial angle that had once distinguished the disinherited children of the old African continent.

  The listener declared himself satisfied and promised to add to his journal a few philosophical reflections that the subject had inspired in him.

  After a fairly long walk on the quay of the left bank of the Blue Nile, swarming with an elegant crowd that became increasingly compact, Dryon and his traveling companions returned to the hotel.

  The Arago’s passengers exchanged a few goodnights and returned to their respective apartments. The departure for Tanganyika had been fixed for eight a.m.

  XXXV. The Heart of Africa

  The bed-sitting rooms that the management of the great African hotel had put at the disposal of its guests were overflowing with all the objects of interior services that the most meticulous, demanding and sybaritic rentier could have desired in his own home, an
d differed singularly in that respect from the cells of our modern caravanserais, in which the traveler, surrounded by bleak bare walls, experiences such a painful impression of emptiness and abandonment.

  The slumber of the Arago’s passengers, lulled by the murmurous sound of the cataract, was calm and profound.

  At seven o’clock, everyone was up and about.

  On the advice of Guillaume Dryon, who had gathered all his guests in the vestibule, the travelers went into the dining room, where a hot light breakfast was served.

  At a quarter to eight, the agronomist and his friends, having arrived at the top of the stairway that gave access to the landing-ground, darted a last glance at the marvelous panorama of Khartoum and its surroundings.

  Ten minutes later, one by one, the six aeronauts were crossing the mobile staircase by which the landing was connected horizontally to the departure hall.

  As eight o’clock chimed on the aerostatic palace clock the metallic hull slid on its runners and drove the aerial vessel forward. Less than twenty seconds had passed when the Arago, following a slightly oblique line, launched southwards.

  Gédéon had resumed his post and added a few observations to his manuscript that seemed to him to be of great importance. For an hour, the balloon followed approximately the same course as the White Nile as it extended toward its source, and the travelers, leaning on the window-sills, were able to observe that the countryside was subject to the intensive cultivation that habitually torments the soil in the vicinity of large cities.

  At ten o’clock, the agronomist pointed out the mountains of the Amarha to the west, which broke the circular line of the horizon. The White Nile was now following a sinuous path ten leagues to the east.

  At eleven o’clock the aerial vessel crossed the river at the point where two large rivers flowed into it. One, which descended from the north-west had bathed the plains of Darfur in its upper course; the other came directly from the east. The latter, fifty leagues upriver, curved abruptly southwards, separated from a direct confluence into the Indian Ocean by the mountains of the land of Kaffa and the mountains of Gallas.

  On the western side the region was bathed by a rich network of important rivers, and appeared to be the seat of a great agricultural and industrial movement.

  At midday, the Arago crossed the White Nile again and left it definitely to port. The ground rose up gradually toward the high plateaux, and the trajectory of the balloon was slightly deviated upwards, a direction that permitted it to maintain its progress in parallel with the sun.

  At one o’clock in the afternoon, the agronomist pointed out Gondokoro in the east, a dot almost imperceptible to the naked eye but which powerful binoculars were able to recognize as an aggregation of large buildings.

  The doctor spoke with a certain emotion about the history of that country, which had been the terminus of explorers of the sources of the Nile for mortar than a century, and had become the tomb of the most intrepid.

  “When admiring now that magnificent network of railways and those long trains loaded with foodstuffs and industrial products, pulled by rapid and powerful electromotive engines,” he added, “one can scarcely cast one’s mind back ten centuries and glimpse bare and savage country in which ferocious peoples tore one another apart or treacherously welcomed scientific missions only to murder them in their sleep.

  “We are now going into the ancient land of the Niam-Niams, cannibal hordes about whom the ancient geographers had established the most extraordinary legends, and to whom some of them attributed a tail similar to the one that ornaments a certain variety of monkeys, which those indigenes scarcely surpassed from the intellectual viewpoint.”

  The aerial vessel did indeed see unfolding before it the vast plains whose bloody history the doctor had just recalled.

  At two o’clock, the horizon to the let was broken by the chain of the Blue Mountains, which ran from north-east to south-west for a hundred leagues.

  At the request of Guillaume Dryon, the balloon was taken up to an altitude of two thousand meters within a few minutes, and the passengers were able to see emerging twenty leagues to the west the sparkling surface of Albert-Nyanza, the discovery of which, in spite of the activity of explorers, had only been firmly established in the second half of the 19th century.

  “There, Messieurs,” he said, “is the great interior lake through which the mysterious river flows whose geographical conquest, as Doctor Antius was telling us a little while ago, has cost so many disasters. Ten leagues from its northern extremity the lake receives the upper course of the Nile, which, twenty leagues to the east, curves abruptly southwards and extends back to the mountains that separate Uganda from Bunyoro.”

  At three o’clock the airship crossed the south-eastern tip of Albert-Nyanza and the great lake, sixty leagues long with an average width of fifteen, was displayed in all its splendor three thousand feet above sea-level.

  Thanks to the height of two thousand meters that the engineer had maintained, the Arago’s passengers were able to see in the distance the vague contours of Lake Victoria, which, speckled with verdant islands, covers a territory of sixty thousand square kilometers.

  For an hour, the two great lakes remained within sight of the aerial vessel.

  At four o’clock, the agronomist signaled in advance Alexandra-Nyanza, which forms an evident ellipse with closely-associated foci, with a mean diameter of ten leagues.

  The Arago, which had been flying over the crests of the Blue Mountains for an hour found itself at that moment above the inferior plateaux, and its altitude was returned to five hundred meters. The temperature climbed abruptly to twenty-five degrees centigrade.

  At half past four, the balloon passed within a league of Lake Alexandra. A few minutes later, Guillaume Dryon, who had been interrogating the horizon for some time with his binoculars, cried joyfully: “Messieurs, the Tanganyika!”

  Swiftly, the travelers drew closer to their hosts, and, with the aid of optical instruments, each of them was able to perceive a slight blue patch in the south, which represented the northern extremity of the famous central lake.

  The airship continued to devour space, and at five o’clock the passengers embraced with their gaze an immense expanse of water, whose waves formed brilliant mobile scales, resplendent in the blaze of the setting sun.

  The panorama was magical.

  The view extended simultaneously over the eastern and eastern shores of the inland sea, which had excited so much controversy ten centuries previously and on the shore of which the voyager Stanley, after four months of the most difficult and perilous travel, had found the great Livingstone, ill and devoid of resources. Numerous watercourses emptied into the lake: a circumstance that led the celebrated explorer to search for the necessary outflow, through which the waters had to run away—a problem whose solution, vainly pursued, would have been the glorious crown of an entire existence dedicated to science and humanity.

  Magnificent cities now rose up on those once-deserted shores, whose silence had only been troubled by the war-cries of enemy hordes rushing at one another, spears in hand.

  At five o’clock, the Arago sped like an arrow over the outskirts of Uvira, a superb city whose magnificent port rivaled that of Ujiji, the great city of equatorial Africa, in its extent and importance.

  Twenty minutes later, Éva uttered a cry of joy as she pointed out to her father an amphitheater of high kills, covered with forests, which broke the circle of the horizon to the south.

  The balloon was now traveling at six hundred feet above the ground, and the strangers, armed with binoculars, were soon able to perceive the profile of an immense palace of white marble standing on the summit of a verdant hill, sheltered from the torrid equatorial winds by a high mountain covered with woods, whose contour the balloon followed.

  “In fifteen minutes, Messieurs, we shall be on the landing-stage of the palace,” said the agronomist, pointing to a platform on top of the edifice, dominated by a semaphore on which
a flag was fluttering.

  As the aerial vessel approached its destination, the travelers discovered an admirable country in which Nature seemed to have spread all her riches. Farms as large as villages, established on the banks of artificial rivers, whose pure waves flowed in the mist of fields covered with flocks, displayed their pink brick roofs in clearing in the foliage of the giant trees of Central Africa.

  The magnificence of the palace unfurled progressively before the dazzled eyes of the strangers.

  The movements of the semaphore must have signaled the arrival of the masters of the house, for numerous servants of both sexes were covering the terrace of the palace, following the rapid flight of the balloon attentively.

  A thousand meters from the aerostatic station, the aerial vessel gradually moderated its speed and, moving horizontally, came to settle twenty seconds later on the rails of the landing-stage.

  The service crew raced forwards toward the footstep, and the Arago’s passengers stepped down to the ground.

  The greetings and felicitations full of frankness and sympathy that welcomes Guillaume Dryon and his daughter impressed the strangers tenderly. At the extremity of the path a broad grassy causeway opened, which led to the dwelling.

  The agronomist and his new guests started walking toward the palace and descended on to the terrace, where the masters of the house had to receive further testimonies of devotion.

  Guillaume Dryon introduced Antius and his companions, nobly, as permanent guests of the palace, and instructed his steward to have an exceedingly comfortable apartment prepared for them immediately, near the library.

  The strangers were then able to admire the edifice at close range, which presented to the east, in the direction of the Tanganyika, a front of six hundred layered porphyry columns supporting sculpted marble balconies.

  The sight of an observatory raised twenty meters above the roof plunged the physicist into a rapture of delight.

  In front of the terrace, a road twenty meters wide, bordered y trees of precious species, descended the slope of the hill, and joined the high banks of the Tanganyika three thousand meters away.