I marched through the fog as a creature with an aureole might march through the darkness, only being able to see by virtue of his nimbus—but, by God, it was uncomfortable! A dusty and moldy odor insinuated itself into the depths of my torso; my teeth were chattering; my eyelids and beard were soaked; innumerable droplets were forming on my clothes. I seemed to have become a human sponge soaked with melted snow: a human sorbet. And it was no good telling myself that all of that was, after all, no more than the customary illusions of fog; a disagreeable sensation reminded me that I, too, had once been a child who cried in the dark.
From then on, I wondered whether what was happening was really a sequence of imagined events, let out by my subconscious mind—but I don’t know what might be worthy of dread, if not the intensity of an unhealthy ambiance, arctic and treacherous, in which the worst thing of all would be to get lost and fall ill at the same time.
Nevertheless, the mist closed in, indefatigably. It was an atmospheric malady. It had upholstered the void. It muffled the sound of our footsteps. It was so heavy that one might have suffocated in it, and so damp that in my place, a fish might not have choked any more. The air had become positively aquatic.
I tried to translate my anxiety into humor. “Shall we have to swim, my dear chap, as in the time immemorial when the ocean weighed upon these hills?”
I had spoken as if through a gag. Fleury-Moor did not hear, or pretended not to have heard—but the padded footfalls of taciturn phantom in front of me slowed down. Until then, I had been able to keep track of the flattened ground, the color of ash, on which my boots, shiny with dew, were treading—but I could no longer see it.
Fleury-Moor stopped. I looked down at my feet; they had disappeared. Within the surrounding fog, a second fog was rapidly rising. It was up to our knees. Its icy temperature was eating into the flesh of our calves.
Fleury-Moor leaned toward me. “I’d prefer to wait for this to pass,” he said, in the most natural tone in the world. “I believe we might go astray. It won’t last long. Very interesting, you know—extremely rare!”
His tranquil words reached me as if through a broken megaphone. They were swirling like puffs of pipe smoke, of which the fog immediately took possession.
“I’m wondering what will happen to us,” I said, effortfully. “My legs are suffering terribly…and it’s rising…”
“What do you expect to happen to us?” jeered the murky specter.
I grabbed Fleury-Moor’s arm, which offered no resistance, and we watched as we were enshrouded. We became shadow-torsos, then shadow-heads, and then nothing, before our own eyes. And while we were watching our bodies get bogged down in the invisible, those bodies were subjected to the abominable ordeal of being gradually plunged into an oppressive and icy fluid, more frightful than death. I could no longer see my fingers touching my eyelashes. Blinded by an atmospheric phenomenon, I was able to say that my every nerve was on edge.
Ah! A sudden certainty! The certainly that I might tremble in good conscience! My intuitions of a short while before had not been mistaken. Something strange had occurred. Professorial knowledge and animal instinct were agreed on that within me; both were now hoping for a marvel and dreading a cataclysm.
The geologist put his mouth close to my ear. He raised his voice placidly, in the manner of people who are speaking to one another through an obstacle. “What surprises me, you see, is that a fog as humid as this doesn’t resolve itself into rain—what am I saying? Into snow! Into hailstones! And what’s even more astonishing is that even with this dire cold, the water that’s soaking us isn’t freezing!”
I sucked my disgusting moustache then, and observed that the water of the fog, which was so very cold, was salty.
“Oh, Fleury, how horrid! One might think they were the tears of a cadaver!”
“Why yes! You’re right. It’s like sea-water.” And he added: “That’s why the fog can’t condense.”
“Tell me, then—have you ever heard mention of such an adventure? You and I might, perhaps, be the first to experience it. Don’t move away, whatever you do!”
“No, I won’t budge. We’ll make a report. Definition: an absolute but whitish darkness, a dull whiteness…oh! Hang on—it seems to me that it’s getting brighter…”
“Yes, it’s beginning to brighten up…”
Our surroundings became luminous. The impalpable padding that sealed us in lightened with a suggestion of dawn. A feeble glow spread through it, hesitantly—but transparency did not come back in a hurry.
First, I saw Fleury-Moor’s silhouette reappear, which gradually materialized in its entirety instead of reappearing bit by bit, as it had vanished. My excellent colleague was astonished. “Oh! What the Devil! Where…what…come on, come on…I’m quite certain that we stopped on the path…”
“So what?” I asked.
“So what’s that red sand doing at my feet?”
“We’ve strayed…”
“Strayed where? Where? Red sand, here! Since when?”
“Perhaps it’s the result of the salty fog…a combination of its chemistry with that of the soil. See how the appearance of the soil is still uncertain, floating…”
Fleury bent down and inspected the red sand.
“The wind’s getting up now,” I remarked.
He stood up, urgently. “What’s that you said?”
“I said: the wind’s getting up now. Can’t you hear it in the fir-trees?”
“And can’t you see that the fog is motionless, and that, in consequence, there isn’t any wind? That there can’t be any?”
“Just listen. There must be! Listen!”
“But that noise…that wind sound…it’s to the right!”
“So?”
“So there aren’t any fir-trees to the right.”
“There aren’t…but since we can hear the sound of the wind in the trees…”
“It’s not the sound of the wind.”
“What is it? What is it?”
“Don’t lose your nerve. We’ll soon find out. This accursed fog is dissipating.”
The luminosity increased with a sort of weary fluctuation. At the same time, the cold relented. The circle of visibility increased. Vague things appeared there: pebbles, tufts of grass. The geologist, having considered these grasses, exclaimed: “Come and see!”
But then a strident clamor rang out in the impenetrable depths—a raucous and ferocious trumpet-call, reminiscent of menageries, circuses and zoological gardens…
We watched one another grow pale, with dilated eyes in which an impossible conjecture was legible.
In a low voice, with a wild expression, Fleury insisted nevertheless: “You’re a botanist—look at these grasses!”
I did so. That was why I beat their air with my arms, to extricate myself from the element that was making us sticky. Possessed by the instinct of self-preservation, that rarely-salutary dementia, I was no longer anything but a creature of panic and flight. I hurled myself forward.
Fleury held me back. “Calm down! And stay here, for God’s sake! I don’t know exactly where we are…the ravine must be nearby, close at hand. You’ll fall into it…” He paused, then offered imperious advice: “Then again, remember what you are, damn it! Think about your status. We ought to be thankful for what’s happened to us. No one is better qualified for such meteorological phenomena! And tell yourself that all of it will finish up as a memoir for one of the sections of the Institute!”
That speech restored my self-possession. “Agreed,” I said, ashamedly. “But you must admit that it’s rather disconcerting to encounter tropical grasses in the middle of Champagne, and to hear…”
“Listen!” he said, extending his arm in the probably direction of the ravine. “That’s what you call the wind!”
“It’s getting louder…it isn’t the wind.”
“I told you it wasn’t.”
“The sound of a river…or a torrent…a huge river…”
“Look o
ut! There’s something new, Chanteraine!”
The tremulous daylight was still increasing, sketching out shapes in the surroundings—one of which, not far away, assumed the form of a moving column that was about to climb the slope. Behind it, others were beginning to display their slenderness. I make no claim, however, that the fog was disaggregating in the slightest degree. In truth, it was not. Let that be understood. Things were not emerging around us as if they were slowly released by the mist, but they seemed to be sketched out in grey, as if sculpted in the same fickle substance. They seemed to be constituted by the fog. More than that: even the sound of something flowing seemed to be nothing but a sonorous property of the fog, and the warmth that was now overtaking us seemed to be emerging from it, along with a resinous odor.
“Ah! Chanteraine! The tree! There!”
“Mercy!”
The top of the column emerged from the unknown. It was a bouquet of leaves. A palm tree was looming up before us! We could discern it in the false daylight and the gleaming haze that continually deformed it, making it undulate like a reptile. Further away, an entire groves of palms became manifest, stirred by the same waves, dancing like the reflection of a river-bank.
Everything that we could see was moving in a serpentine fashion in the iridescence. Furthermore, the vision was continually passing through alternate phases of light and darkness. And it did not take me long to realize that sight was not the only one of our senses to be affected in that way. The balsamic perfume was reinforced in one wave after another; the sound of the water involved a progression of loud phases followed by soft ones, and the heat increased in gusts, following a fantastic rhythm that could be described as general, for all these assertive and weakening phases coincided perfectly, whether they were olfactory, auditory or visual.
They were attenuated, however, as the environment gained in lucidity. It became more precise within the fog, like a projection on a screen when one brings it into focus, as its brightness flickers. Photography provides the best comparison: that of an image “coming out” on the sensitive plate in a revelatory bath that is agitated. From one moment to the next, that phantasmagoric location became more fixed, more positive, more profound.
The circle—or, rather, the cylinder—seemed to have a radius of about 20 meters when Fleury-Moor concluded: “It’s a mirage, like those in the desert—except that it’s a peculiar mirage that surrounds us, and instead of giving us the illusion of perceiving some unreal lake or oasis in the distance, gives us the illusion of being somewhere, in Africa or elsewhere.”
“Yes,” I added, “what’s peculiar about it is, indeed, that it surrounds us—but also that it’s produced at a considerable distance from the place reflected, and, above all, that it affects the senses of hearing and smell as well as that of sight!”
“Right. It’s a mirage that we can see, hear and breathe, which is very far away from us. It’s an optical, acoustic and osmological sympathy in space—at least in one sense—between the place where we really are and the place that is being projected on the fog around us. I know that red sand very well…let’s see: it’s Egypt, isn’t it? No?”
“No,” I repeated, astonished to the point of excitement. “Further south. I think…I think those are equatorial plants…but…there are cochineal figs…a baobab…and yet…”
“What?”
“My God, Fleury! That…that fan-palm, like a peacock’s tail, over there, appearing in the fog…do you recognize it?”
“Oh! It’s not possible. A dicot…a dicotyledon from the Cape…or Madagascar…”
“Yes: Flabellaria lamanonis. From the Cape, Madagascar, or the Tertiary epoch!”
“The Tertiary epoch? What are you saying?”
“Open your eyes! Look at those arborescent ferns near the aloes…”
“They’re osmunds. Flowering ferns…from Ceylon…”
“No they’re not! That species is extinct!”
“Are you sure? Ah! Yes. Look, look! That palm-tree! A parasol-palm. And what’s that? Laurier-roses, with camphor-trees…myrtles…a birch!”
“Vine-stocks! An oak! Walnut trees!”
“Angiosperms! We’re in the middle of the Neozoic Period!”
As soon as he had spoken, the murmur of the river became so loud that we turned round. On that side, there was nothing to be seen but the fog, and the red sand sloped gently down to disappear into it. Behind the misty curtain, the rumbling eased off. A foamy wave had just sprung forth and died back gracefully, like fizzing lace. A second wave succeeded it with the roar of a cataract. The sand became moist; the moss crackled; spray flew up.
“The sea!” I stammered. “The sea that existed here millions of years ago!”
Two black rocks sketched out their shapes on the edge of the surf.
“So it’s not only a mirage in space!” declared Fleury-Moor, transported by enthusiasm. “It’s also a mirage in time!”
“It’s only a mirage in time,” I retorted. “The space where we think we are really is the space where we are. We’re subject to the illusion of having moved in duration; we haven’t moved in extent. Look again.”
The illustration of the fog was further enhanced. Rather low now, it still weighed on things like a nebulous ceiling, but in the other dimensions the landscape was marvelously clear-cut. We could see it well enough to recognize the approximate conformation of the hill of Cormonville, with its overhanging ridge here, and its ravine there, its curvature espoused by the antediluvian beach. There was no more doubt about it: some anachronistic freak of nature was permitting us to contemplate the Marne in its prehistoric aspect. Those oaks and those maples were the first European oaks and the first French maples, and that vine—O poignant charm!—was the first vine in Champagne!
It was, I think, at that moment that a horrible screech rent the cloud above our heads. We raised our eyes, without catching a glimpse of anything but the escape of a majestic flying shadow. I could not understand why the screech had upset me to the point of knowing, as I heard it, that I would never forget it.
Fleury-Moor’s expression was distraught. We were trembling. It was in vain that we heard again, in the depths of the fog, the trumpet-call that had troubled us before. We could not be any paler. The horror of the cry put all others in the shade. The already familiar trumpet-call, however, was repeated several times in quick succession, from different points in the vastness, and Fleury-Moor, cocking an ear, interrogated me with his gaze. “Proboscidean, isn’t it?” he said.
“Assuredly. Elephas meridionalis or primogenius.”
“Damn! Is the mirage also susceptible to touch?”
He crouched down and touched a few sprigs of esparto-grass.” “Hmm!” he muttered.
“What?”
“Feel it for yourself.”
The result of my experiment was that I slid two cartridges into my rifle—at which sight Fleury-Moor said: “It’s crazy! Are we dreaming? There’s something insane about what you just did! We’re dreaming; this fog is narcotic—or it’s pestilential, and this is the product of delirium.”
“People don’t dream in pairs, and men like you and me aren’t hallucinated in the same fashion simultaneously. No, no, Fleury; since no conjurer is capable of playing such a fakir’s trick on us, this really is a mirage of a new order, a mirage integral in time. We can see, we can hear, we can smell, we can taste and we can touch a scene from the past, as one sometimes admires in the desert, with one’s eyes alone, a scene that is taking place out of range.”
The heat of a Turkish bath overwhelmed us. Our damp clothes exhaled abundant vapors. I took off my coat.
There was the sea, too, and the sky: a silver-plate sea beneath an indigo sky. The Sun, huge and pink, was climbing in a halo of mist. It was, therefore, morning, and yet…
I consulted my miniature pocket-compass. “Look at the sun, Fleury, how strangely placed it is…”
My companion could not help smiling. “You’re forgetting,” he said, “that since its b
irth, the Earth has not ceased to revolve relative to the ecliptic.”
“That’s true.”
Fleury-Moor took out his watch and continued: “Actually, it’s 4:20 p.m. Let’s make a note of that. Artificially, however—which is to say, according to the Sun in the mirage—it’s about 10 a.m. And…it’s spring.”
I confessed that so many anomalies robbed me of the greater part of my means, and I complimented the geologist on his resilience. He told me that he was only annoyed that he had not brought a notebook, or a pencil, or his fine binoculars.
We chatted, but without distracting one another from the immense magical apparition in which the infancy of the Earth was displayed. The fog-free zone grew around us. The first things to appear were now concise, material and immutable. However, the more distant view was still subject to a vibratory palpitation analogous to that presented during heat-waves. That caused us to think about animate presences. I expected that there would be movement in the distance, and I sought to assure myself that, if the occasion arose, the rocks at the edge of the sea would be able to provide us with a refuge. While doing that, I perceived a large dorsal fin garnished with spines out to sea. It had just emerged, and it plunged beneath the surface again.
The tyrannical sound of the sea swallowed us up. Its odor, combined with the resinous perfume, fortified our blood. We soon realized where the reek of gum and turpentine was coming from. The mixed grove of palms and occidental trees extended along the red beach on the same level, but further inland the embankment still existed—pardon me, already existed—steeper and a little further away, and planted with pines. Its wall of marl clay, in which the entrance to a cavern yawned, was visible through a gap in the palm-grove.
As one might well imagine, the vegetation intrigued me more than anything else. Its dimensions were extravagant. Some plants, which were not fully-developed, bore voluminous and robust corollas, bright violet in color, with golden yellow pistils. Other unknown trees of the magnolia family displayed admirable bicolored leaves, more beautiful than flowers. At the bottom of the trunks, there was an exuberant and ferocious mêlée from some fantastic hothouse, an inextricable tangle in which aloes extended and curled their thorny tentacles like octopodes; where swollen opuntia cacti brandished hairy tufts and spiny manes; where stout pale-furred caterpillars, placed end-to-end, fattened themselves on ridiculous or redoubtable plants.
The Doctored Man Page 8
