It was nothing but a lethargic riot of green and twisted limbs, a heap of lissome nudities and brunette fleeces beneath tree- ferns curling back their enormous hairy crosiers. The excess of life and the prohibition of life burst forth in the prosperity of pods, the rubicund turgidity of mucilage, the claws and horns of all those paralytic monsters, toothed and barbed into the resemblance of Jurassic dragons, some of which formed tips like Carib knives. It swarmed without moving, a stupendous winter garden in which mimosas, euphorbias and myrtles rubbed shoulders with vanished species—Dryophyllum, Doliostrobus, Callistris and Lepidodendron—and alders, aspens, oaks and chestnuts!
Pyramids projected from the half-light of the underwood, vague and bathed in blue, half-fern and half-larch, trees and plants at the same time. Baroque candelabras, singularly art nouveau in spite of being natural and prehistoric, deployed their espalier branches in the same vertical plane. Each one of them, speckled with buds, rose up like hat-stands, supporting monstrous, wrinkled, over-ripe pears which hung down heavily and gargantuan.
Sweat ran down our cheeks. The air became troubled; a hint of black was mingled with the indigo heavens. I made the observation that the atmosphere would not become any clearer, and was really that of a torrid and moist era. The moon, at the end of its course, traced a thin spectral crescent. In spite of the diurnal and radiant hour, a large round star tinted the zenith. We could see both of them at the same time. Oh, we had no need to exchange our impressions. A compassion of a great and inexpressible sort stirred in our hearts, and I thought that we were about to weep at the sight of that star: that second satellite of our planet, irredeemably lost; the ancient tiny moon of our beloved Earth!
We could not tear our eyes away from the zenith.
When we finally lowered them, the prodigy was complete. The last wisps of fog were melting in the distance like an exhalation of breath. The sea, rippled by wavelets, extended eastwards, and a rounded hillock emerged from the water as we had seen it emerge from the mist in a previous glimpse. It formed an inlet flanked by two lateral near-islands. We were on one of these promontories; the other extended in front of us. It was a reddish tongue of land, enlivened by a few lentisks and sequoias, which grew more densely the closer they approached the continent, with the result that the depths of the little gulf were already lined with the verdure that extended all the way to our position and then became sparser as it extended toward the tip of our own cape. In the middle of the horseshoe, the crest of the hill showed above the woods, bare, bad and red against the violet azure of the sky.
And it was from there that four elephants emerged, one by one, so colossal that in order to estimate the distance separating us from them—more than eight hundred meters as the crow flies—I had to recall the true proportions of the locality. At any rate, with common accord, we sought the shelter of the rocks before even being aware that we were moving.
“We must observe!” said the geologist.
“Then let’s observe.”
The titanic animals go past in Indian file, sharply silhouetted side-on. They stand out sharply. Their tusks are hard to make out. Fleury-Moor, who is short-sighted, claims that each individual has four of them. I hold out for two, curved. He maintains that they’re furry; I maintain that they aren’t. In brief, unable to decide between Elephas meridionalis, antiquus and primogenius, we can’t arrive at a conclusion as to which period of the Neozoic era the mirage has transported us. It’s not the Eocene, much less the Pliocene; the sea and the vegetation indicate that—but is it the Oligocene or the Miocene?
By chance, another incident resolves the difference of opinion.
The mammoth in the lead pauses momentarily. It opens its prodigious ears very wide, as if its skull were about to fly away, releases a loud clarion call, and gallops away over the ridge. Its comrades execute the same “left turn!” They make off. The earth trembles dully. And from the north, here comes some kind of black mountain advancing through the wood, surpassing the height of the tallest conifers. And behold!—it’s a mastodon tapir, a pachyderm with a short trunk and low-set tusks, coming through the grandiose forest as a modern tapir might stride through a meadow.
“A dinotherium!” I whispered.
“Yes, a Miocene dinotherium!”
Fleury-Moor had pronounced Miocene with an indefinable emphasis. I looked at him; I knew that he was experiencing a boundless pride and thus being able, in the blink of an eye, to determine among the myriads of centuries a particular point in eternity.
Personally, I found the dinotherium amazing. A kind of terrestrial whale, it was not at the head of an entourage. It seemed out of place, built for a much more spacious Creation, or even for the colossal ocean. One divined that it was not at home on land, but that it had nowhere else to go.
We had the good fortune to be able to examine it at leisure. It raised its stump of a trunk toward the mammoths’ retreat, hesitated, turned round, and headed for the extremity of the promontory that bounded the north like a devastation. There, it stretched itself out laboriously and started scraping the ground.
That had been going on for a few seconds when we noticed a flock of large birds—or, at least, large flying animals—over the sea. They were approaching the coast, brushing the surface of the water and sometimes even settling on it, with wings aloft, to catch fish in the manner of petrels. We counted them; there were 12, flying with remarkable elegance. Suddenly, all uttering in unison the supernatural screech that had the gift of terrifying us so completely, they fell like fletched javelins upon the dinotherium.
The latter straightened up. The great birds surrounded it with a discordant whirlwind. The screaming horde spiraled around it, persistent and malevolent. Then, one after another, its assailants settled on its mountainous back, where their company formed a sort of wriggling hydra. The animal shook itself. A quadruped palace, Notre-Dame-de-Fouvières turned upside-down, it turned tail and fled in a deafening tempest. It bellowed. Its protest resembled the vehemence of a steamboat, and its tormentors, which had taken to the air again, covered its retreat with howls. We followed it with our eyes for a long time.
Fleury-Moor shielded his eyes against the dazzling sunlight, and said: “I’d give five years of my life for a set of opera-glasses. Impossible to see! Oh, if I’d known. Think of all that I could have brought with me, Chanteraine! And all I have is my watch! What were those flying creatures? Oh, to know! What vile creatures! How horribly they sing!”
“My God yes! But I don’t know…pterodactyls?”
“No…and yet…oh, no, no…the winged lizard no longer existed in this epoch; I’d bet my head on that.” He wiped his glistening forehead and went on: “Oh, the vile beasts! That horrid cry! I can’t recall any sensation more odious…since a certain occasion in my childhood…”
“What was that?”
“Oh, nothing. I mean the first time I ever saw a monkey. That parody…well, to hear that bird cry…”
“You’re right,” I told him, struck by the justice of the comparison. “But we’d better lower our voices. We don’t know what might be hidden in there.”
The dark blue shadow of the covert protected its mysterious hostility. The foliage quivered, animated by invisible small birds. Swarms of convulsive flies were hovering in the half-light. The jungle was waking up at every instant, sensitive to furtive passages. Wakes were curving the stalks, suddenly stopping with terrible abruptness, leaving me to imagine that some invisible monster had caught sight of us.
“We have to go around that rock,” I said, “and interpose it between ourselves and the land. The ocean seems to me to be more inoffensive.”
“If you think so!” said Fleury-Moor, while we were carrying out the maneuver. He added: “But I’m expecting the mirage to vanish at any moment. You’ll keep observing, won’t you?”
“Until then,” I remarked, “we’ll be rather uncomfortably situated.” The sea was, in fact, lapping at the base of the monolith.
“Let’s stay all
the same,” Fleury-Moor said, with one foot in the water and the other lifted up. The essential thing is not to make too many movements, which might reveal our existence. Besides, it’s inherently dangerous to change position when one’s in a mirage—which is to say, in a false terrain that masks the pitfalls of the veritable terrain. Don’t forget that, Chanteraine, and whatever happens, try to avoid running away. The place we see is only superimposed on the place where we are. You might encounter a solid and exceedingly present tree-trunk in the apparent emptiness of that antediluvian clearing. That, I think, is the only danger threatening us, because…” He slapped himself on the forehead. “Yes, of course! However total a mirage may be, it’s never anything but a decoy! Echoes, reflections, chimeras! Touching it is an illusion! In consequence, my dear chap—God, how naïve we are!—the image of elephants that died hundreds of thousands of years ago can’t do us the slightest harm! It’s trapped in its own epoch just as much as we are in ours!”
His confidence infected me. “That’s excellent, my dear chap. Say, should I assume the creatures of yesteryear that we can see can’t see us, because the mirage isn’t reciprocal? African mirages are never reciprocal!”
“Of course!” the geologist confirmed. “One can quite easily have a direct impression of the past—every night, the firmament, with its more or less distant stars, shows us as many pasts as the stars it contains—but one can’t have a sensation of the future. Thus, when we stood up and cried out just now, the dinotherium would not have seen anything or heard anything!”
“That’s right! That’s right!” I affirmed, laughing in relief.
On that note, we abandoned the screen of the rock, having recovered all our casual swagger. The imprints of our shoes stigmatized the moist sand: our American shoes; the prehistoric sand…
Fleury-Moor had folded his arms across his chest. He stood there watching the waves for a little while, and finally said: “You can’t imagine the emotion I feel in facing that, which is the adolescent sea—the sea of the early ages of the world, so close to the primordial era when the Earth had only the one sea! All life came out of it! There’s nothing that breathes and feels that did not come from the maternal ocean, which seems to breathe and feel itself like a multitude of fluid lungs. This is the original sea, in something very close to its original state. This is the admirable womb of all living beings, which the filial Frenchman calls by the same name as his mother.18 This is the sea, mother of men, which already has the taste of tears, an appetite for blood and a sobbing voice. We have had the ineffable pleasure of glimpsing her in her youth!
“In the moment that has been reborn for us, she has just completed her Great Work. She has released onto continents, still very narrow, all the creatures that are due to emerge from her fecundity. The era of saurians has already been over for a long time. They have undergone metamorphosis. The bird and the mammal have surged forth from the reptile. The colossal dragons will never return. And now, someone else will soon arrive. Even now, in the obscure depths of a simian race, humankind is germinating, and Virgil is on the march in the brain of a chimpanzee…”
There was a moment of reverie, full of the sound of the sea.
“When it comes to journeys in prehistory,” I hazarded, “I’d rather have gone further back, as far as the Secondary era, which preceded this one. The dinosaurs would make a fine spectacle, Fleury-Moor! The most bizarre, perhaps, in the entire extent and duration of the Earth!”
“Bah!” retorted Fleury-Moor. “All your diplodocuses, megatheria and other iguanodons…that was a pelagic population. They nearly always lived in the water, you know, not as the books and the museums represent them to us. Don’t complain; isn’t the dinotherium you’ve seen a belated survivor of the giant fauna?”
“It’s not a saurian,” I said, regretfully.
“As for me,” he said, not neglecting to scan the sea, the palm grove, the beach and the pine forest with his eyes, “if I could choose, I’d rather not have gone back so far in the course of the ages, stopping in that season of geology when humanity finally broke through within the brute. Oh, to contemplate the first humans! The Adams and Eves of the indisputable evolutionary Genesis!”
“Excuse me!” I said, by way of contradiction. “By virtue of the theory of transformism itself—as you advanced it a moment ago—an ancestor of humankind existed in every period. In this Neozoic epoch, I grant you, our ancestors were no more human than those of the Stone Age, but they must certainly have constituted very special individuals!”19
Fleury-Moor shook his head. “I think,” he said, “that they were apes like all the rest, imperceptibly craftier, more talkative and less inclined to go on all fours. They lived in groups, having sensed that union makes for strength…but they lived far away, very far away from here…”
“In Oceania, no? I’m aware of the intransigence of your theories.”
“Yes, in Oceania, which is, in my view—and that of many others, Monsieur—the cradle of humankind, since Pliocene anthropomorphic fossils have not been found anywhere else.”
“Chance…” I ventured—but he cut me off.
“In Java, on the other hand,” he continued, “and in the Pliocene, in the terrain corresponding to periods immediately posterior to this one, you’ll recall, Chanteraine, Eugène Dubois’ Pithecanthropus!”20
“Hmm!” Was that really an ape-man, Fleury-Moor? One can reconstruct it as one wishes on the insufficient evidence of a couple of molars, the upper part of a skull and femur!”
“I’m astonished to hear you talk like that. Mantell, Cuvier, the iguanodon...”21
“And what a femur!” I continued. “What an extraordinary thigh! Knotted with osseous protuberances that no one has ever explained, except by the ingenious hypothesis of rheumatism! Ha ha! Rheumatism, Fleury-Moor! The rheumatic ape-man! Ha ha! The primitive human of the glacial caverns still passes muster, but the ape-man of the tropical Pliocene? Ha ha! Let me laugh!”
“It’s no joking matter,” the geologist grumbled. “And the Java bones are the bones of Pithecanthropus. In any case, why shouldn’t the hypertrophies of the femur bone be mechanical lesions, consequences of an accident? Reconnected fractures? It’s been suggested—you know that as well as I do. Anyway, enough—what do you expect? It’s annoying.”
He looked toward the land, and I looked out to sea. “There are the birds again,” I declared. “They’re fishing in the distance. One might suppose that their plumage is white, but perhaps it’s an effect of the distance and the light. They’re like formidable seagulls.”
“I’d really like know what they are!” snapped Fleury-Moor. “But we’ll have to give up on that. Let’s not waste precious time, and at least try to recognize what we have at hand. There are monstrous pears over there that intrigue me. Let’s try to go as far as the wood.”
He took a few steps then, his feet testing the ground and his arm groping, as if he were deprived of the use of his sight. That was because he feared the obstacles hidden in the invisible contemporary landscape. “Hey!” he said. Having stopped and straightened up, turning toward me with a hesitant and wonderstruck expression, he whispered behind the screen of his hand. “The cavern! Look!”
Mutely, I signaled to him that he had to come back. I suddenly experienced an unparalleled despair, in thinking that we might be alone in a world in which humans did not exist. Phosphorescent gleams had just become perceptible in the darkness of the cavern. They were tiny glimmers, arranged in pairs, red-green and green-red—incontestably recognizable as eyes.
“I’m going in there!” Fleury-Moor decided.
“No!” I ran toward him.
“Given that the mirage will dissipate,” he reasoned, “Wouldn’t you be eternally regretful at having missed the opportunity? Let’s take advantage of it, my dear chap! Let’s take advantage of the practicable mirage!”
“Don’t you see that those eyes are looking at us?”
“Eh? You’re crazy! They’re looking into the fut
ure?”
But I held firm, for I was governed at that moment by an internal master more powerful than common sense. He had to yield to my strength, and ended up by contenting himself with an examination at a distance.
The eyes gleamed, like pairs of somber stars, and sometimes blinked, beneath frighteningly unknown eyelids. My imagination forged behind them a family of terrible bears as large as rhinoceroses…
“Don’t you notice anything?” I asked, abruptly.
“Pardon?”
“You can’t see it? The ray of sunlight?”
“What ray?”
“The one that penetrates the cavern—that patch of oblique light…”
“So what?”
“Well, the two eyes that seem to be closest to the opening…aren’t they above that bright patch?”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“So, if they really were the eyes on an animal standing on the ground, we’d be able to see that animal in the ray of sunlight…”
“Bravo! According to the evidence, those eyes must belong to some animal that’s suspended from the vault, unless it’s hovering in mid-air.”
In the depths of the lair, which hollowed it out indefinitely, the pairs of flamboyant eyes were increasing in number.
We were out in the open, and I was careful not to interrupt my surveillance of the neighborhood, in spite of the absurdity of any such occupation. The palm grove, divided into two by the red sand clearing, plunged its undergrowth into shadow to the right and left of the cavern. I couldn’t retain a gasp of amazement: that shadow was also punctuated by the bronzed gleam of eyes! There were two at the base of every pantagruelesque pear. There were hundreds of them. And that Argus forest was spying on us with all of its fascinating eyes.
The Doctored Man Page 9
