The idea that the pear trees weren’t vegetables crossed my mind like a hairy spider.
Fleury-Moor, however, gave his own opinion. “Your pears,” he said, “are simply bats. They’re giant vampires hanging head-down in their customary posture, holding on to the branches of those candelabras and the ceiling of the cavern. But they must be diurnal—because, you see, I’ll wager that your so-called seagulls are also vampires. Those that surround us are probably taking a siesta.”
“You mean they’re waking up!”
I would have preferred not to have to correct him. Bat colonies disgust me to the point of nausea, and I leave it to the imagination to judge the impression made on me by that city of vampires, endowed with a supplementary monstrosity by virtue of their gigantism.
I looked at the cavern, the palm grove and the suspended pear-shaped bats. Fleury-Moor looked at the sea and the bats flying in the distance. We stood like that for a minute, without anything moving.
By incredible and contradictory trick of the mind, that passivity, which prolonged the anguish of expectation, moved me to action—me, the most timid person in the world! Impulsively, I picked up a handful of pebbles.
“Should I?” I proposed, aiming at the dark cave mouth.
Fleury-Moor approved with an evasive gesture.
My first pebble missed the target, striking the wall and falling back on to a heap of fish-bones near the opening. The second one flew straight into the depths of the retreat.
Immediately, a frightful concert went up in the bowels of the hill, which made the hair stand up on our heads. The cavern filled with demonic howling, as if it were a tunnel to Hell. Its darkness was constellated by ardent coals—and we finally saw something move in the heart of the darkness, becoming paler with each step as it advanced toward the light beneath the incandescent gleams.
A man! I thought.
“A monkey,” murmured Fleury-Moor.
It was both, and it was neither: a frightfully thin upright biped with a wretched little rounded skull, a snub nose, a pre-eminent jaw, furry cabbage-ears and hair over its entire body. There was no doubt that we had before us a pithecanthropus, the ancestor of humankind. A pithecanthropus like the one reconstituted from the Javan bones by Eugène Dubois. The Pithecanthropus erectus of the Pliocene, here in the Miocene, in Europe, in Champagne! Alive! And which, by some abominable singularity, was the ally of the vampires, sharing their habitat!
“Bah!” I said, for my own satisfaction. “He must employ them as slaves, or hunting-dogs—or, rather, fishing-dogs!”
The ape-man stopped on the threshold of the cyclopean burrow. He opened his close-set eyes, which had been half-closed…
The most amazing thing you could ever see appeared in the broad daylight—and you’d never guess what it was! Listen: this savage among savages, who might have been expected to be entirely nude, was draped in an ample cloak of supple leather, chestnut-brown and shiny, the folds of which fell symmetrically along the body, down to the heels.
“A cloak!” said the dismayed geologist.
Civilized, already! An ape that could clothe itself! But the diabolical garment prevented us from examining the monster’s external anatomy.
The pithecanthropus furrowed its eyebrows in a simian manner, then turned its head in human fashion. The tumult inside the grotto died away.
“It’s looking at us I tell you!”
“One would think so, all the same!” Fleury-Moor conceded “But if it’s looking at us, can it also hear us? Come on! It’s impossible.” He wore an indefinable smile. He shouted at the human beast: “Hey! Grandpa!” And he burst out laughing, presumably in order to cheer me up.
I didn’t want to cheer up; I had no license to do so.
Our ancestor extended an immoderately long arm, lifting up its leather toga. Its mouth opened, becoming a maw equipped with fangs. A yapping voice—a complicated barking—escaped therefrom, making its hungry throat vibrate like those of Italian singers. It was something like: “Hallooee, tooee, tooee! Hirra-ah! Ratoh! Ratoh!” I remember Ratoh! quite well—which, after all, could be written as “râteau”22 without any impropriety. And believe me, that was a genuine curiosity: that French word, that gardening term, evocative of mallets and bowling-greens, of Versailles and the Trianon, on the scarcely-rimmed lips of an Adamic gorilla.
Now, in the Miocene era, Ratoh! obviously meant “Come here, lads!” or even “All together!” In response to that call—or, rather, that order—a band of anthropoids erupted out of the cavern. Each side of the palm-grove disgorged a troop of our ancestors into the open space, and the crest of the hill was garnished with a cordon of sentries that emerged from the pine-wood. The ammoniac odor of a monkey-house gripped our nostrils. Vile howls filled the silence. A hostile and bestial population besieged us, formed into a circle. All of them, like the leader, were clad in capes in various shades of brown, whose flaps they agitated furiously.
I tried to get back to the rocks on the edge of the sea. A flutter of wings above the waves brought a hurrying flock of those huge kingfishers, or huge bats. We were now about to find out what we were dealing with: albatrosses or vampires, they were racing to the rescue, and…
“Flying men!” exclaimed Fleury-Moor.
Word of honor, they were flying men! And the brown cloak, the uniform cape of the primates that surround us—what was that? You will already have guessed: vast reptilian wings. The pears, the birds, the bats and the pithecanthropus were but one single creature: our paternal Adam, who had reigned over the Earth as he reigned in the sky.
We were surrounded by ancestors, therefore, coming from every direction. Their flight rounded out a dome of beating wings. They had put us under a bell, and that quivering cupola obscured the daylight. There was no longer any escape.
Instinct stuck us back-to-back. Thus prepared, two in one—Janus of the double face—we cancelled out the deplorable inferiority of our rear. I clutched my rifle in nervous and spasmodic hands…
“You can see perfectly well that the mirage is reciprocal,” I said, “since we can see them and they can see us!”
I felt him shrug his shoulders. “Natural phantoms!” he explained. “Natural phantoms. Do you get it? An exquisite illusion! Let’s try to retain as much as we can. Ah! So man finally ended up losing them—his wings! By virtue of no longer making use of them! Evolution has punished his idleness, as with penguins. Ah! Let’s try to retain all that we can.”
“Yes, that’s understood. You keep going back to the same thing.”
The pithecanthropes—let us rather say, since they had wings, the pteropithecanthropes—were content for the moment to keep us under observation. We were the focal point of every gaze, which did not fail to intimidate me. Moreover, the incessant tumult, the riot of clamors and the beating of membranous wings brought on a dizziness of the eyes and eardrums. I stiffened myself as best I could against a weakness of purely physical origin. All my will-power was employed in fighting my eyelids, which wanted to close. I waited avidly for the prodigy to end.
Fleury-Moor, for his part, was thinking aloud within the mirage. In order to commit what he had observed more securely to memory, the incomparable scientist was taking verbal notes. I heard him recording them continually:
“Face Negroid. Prognathous. No civilization. No fire. Rudiments of language. The leader is the strongest, not the oldest. As among animals, equality of males and females. No weapons. The wings…oh, unparalleled…connect their arms and legs. Ha ha! The protuberances of Java! I hold the key to that enigma. In that respect, here are intermediary creatures, situated between the bat and the flying squirrel, but they’re neither insectivores nor rodents, icthyophages…yes, fish-eaters. In sum, they proceed principally from pterodactyls, and the entire terrestrial fauna is definitely descended from saurians. That’s your opinion, isn’t it, Chanteraine?”
“Everything’s spinning!” I replied. “I’m getting seasick! Everything’s spinning! What can we do? I just want t
o do something, no matter what…”
My counterpart muttered his disdain: “Stupid…a representation devoid of danger…unworthy of his status…living pictures…gallery…family portraits…”
Finally, he resumed cursing his lack of equipment.
“At least make use of your chronometer!” I told him. “Look at it! What time is it?”
“5:05 p.m.”
“Put it away!” I cried. “It’s exciting them! It’s shiny! Put your watch away! They’ll do you harm…put it away…”
Something dark and heavy fell upon us. I moved sideways. A furry claw had struck the hand that held the gilded watch…
On the ground, covering the vanished body of Fleury-Moor, a pithecanthrope was struggling, with its wings furled, as abject as a Callot devil.23 Agitated by somersaults, the brute offered me the nape of its neck, hollowed out beneath the occiput…
I put my rifle to my shoulder, and fired.
This time, the shot produced a thunderous noise. Thick smoke surrounded me, unexpectedly blowing out the immemorial Sun. It was followed by silence and cold.
The smoke was no longer there.
It could not be there, since the fog had reappeared. The detonation of my powder had shaken its heaviness and caused the astonishing retrospection that had played within it to vanish. We had come back to the 20th century.
Immediately, as a sequel to the same dislocation, the fog turned to drizzle. A tenuous and frigid rain sprinkled me…
The twilight of the twilight had arrived. In a gloom in which the night and the fog combined their negations, I perceived Fleury-Moor’s feet at my own. He was lying full-length, face to the ground.
He recovered consciousness, groaning. “It’s killed me!” he whined. “It’s killed me!” And to tell the truth, it was as if he were lamenting thus from the other side of Death.
His hands were those of a man who has perished. I rubbed them, to no avail. He looked around, his features expressionless, bewildered by terror. He had the eyes that one must have behind one’s eyelids when one is asleep.
I showed him the outline of a fir-tree in the gloom. That familiar sight calmed him down. He told me that the visibility was good enough for us to go back, and that he wanted to do so as quickly as possible.
Rapidly, I improvised a cross of branches, and I planted it in the ground in a particular fashion. Fleury urged me to get a move on.
Twenty meters away, we found the path. Another cross; more impatience from Fleury.
Further on, some stone-cutters from Nauroy-les-Cormonville, replied to my questions. They had not seen anything except the fog, nor heard anything, except the rifle-shot.
“The bizarrerie was localized in a narrowly restricted space,” I said, when we had left them. “That’s very fortunate. Otherwise, how many villages would have been submerged?”
I wanted to laugh—the attempt was vain. Fleury-Moor went down the hill as fast as his legs could carry him, making inexplicable detours and sudden halts, troubled by bats tracing their black lightning-streaks, disturbed by the green fog of an asparagus field that we could have crossed to take a short cut. The vaporous foliage of a willow frightened him like a thickening of the fog. An owl that flew away, as silent as a shadow, made him duck his head.
I followed him as best I could. We arrived at the château.
It had been agreed that we would keep the secret of the adventure that had happened to us. That was quite easy. That evening, my colleague felt weak. His hands were still corpse-like and his physiognomy was no longer able to translate the variations of his mind. He was put to bed. I watched over him, in company with his wife. All night, I had the feeling that Fleury-Moor, the celebrated geologist, was done with being a genius, and that he would henceforth be no more than a place where great things had happened.
In the morning, fortunately, his fever declined. The doctor prescribed rest, silence and sleep. Before commencing the treatment, Fleury asked to talk to me in private.
He wanted me to return to the location of the mirage, to determine the situation of the cavern. “We must find it, no matter what the cost. It must contain fossils of inestimable value.” He congratulated me warmly for have planted markers, and implored me to be quick, for fear that the wind or some vagabond might carry them off.
I left with a party of laborers armed with digging-tools.
The two crosses had not been disturbed. The orientation of the first pointed to the second, and the orientation of the second pointed to the cavern. My retina conserved a picture of the distances, and counted about 30 meters between the place where Fleury-Moor had fallen and the entrance to the cave. At present, though, the legacy of the ages had brought the embankment some 20 meters closer, with the result that it would have been necessary for us to dig a tunnel of that length if a most opportune quarry had not been set two meters to the left and in the desired direction. I measured 20 meters along its side wall. The laborers attacked it from the right, and encountered clay almost immediately.
At about 3 p.m., I stopped the work. There was no cavern. I imagine that it had collapsed, in the course of various geological vicissitudes. By digging carefully in the glutinous marl, however, we discovered conglomerates of red earth mingled with bones.
I isolated fragments of skeletons analogous to that of the Javan pithecanthropus where they lay. The arm-bones and leg-bones all presented the famous excrescences of the Malayan femur, which were neither mechanical lesions nor stigmata of arthritis, but simply natural apophyses to which the tendons of the membranous wings had been attached. These fragments, fitted together, formed an almost-complete composite skeleton, which interested parties can see at the Museum under the reputedly-fantastic label Pteropithecanthropus erectus. It is also known as Anthropopterix, or, more commonly, “the winged man of Cormonville.”
In accordance with my anticipations, the dig did not bring to light any pottery, however coarse, nor any flint tools, however crude. There were no elephant tibias, ready-made sledgehammers, nor any narwhal-horns that had served as pikes. So, it was greatly to my surprise that I exhumed an occipital portion of skull pierced by a round hole, which seemed to be evidence of the use of trepanning by the anthropoids of the Neozoic era. I was not unaware that Quaternary man, the master of fire and fabricator of axes, had practiced this precocious surgery, but Tertiary man! A mere baboon, less than the faun of legend!
I meditated upon this skull-fragment more gravely than Hamlet upon the entire skull of Yorick. That enigmatic void, that little circle of nothingness, obsessed me. I had the idea of measuring it. It had the same diameter as the bullets of my 12-caliber!
I was just getting used to the explanation that a simple numerical relationship had caused to explode within my uncertainty, when a laborer brought me something that he had disinterred: a right hand, intimately cemented to the lump of clay that molded its slender, white and fragile fingers. Its fist was clenched on something that I was determined to extricate.
For millions of years that right hand had been buried under a mountain. What it held, however, was a fossilized chronometer.
I had never seen such a disconcerting relic. Crumbs of glass, iridescent by virtue of the accumulation of several antiquities, speckled the ruins of the casing. The hinges of the watch were welded shut. I opened it with a knife, like an oyster. Nothing remained of the steel works but red granules of rusty powder—but the impenetrable gold had resisted the ravages of time. The name of the vendor was still legible on the dull inner surface of the case:
SAMUEL GOLDSCHMIDT
19 Avenue de l’Opéra, Paris.
And the hands, covered with a mineral crust, had been standing at five past five for an eternity of sorts.
I shall not try to describe the disorder of my thoughts.
Thirty minutes later, armed with the watch and the occiput, I disobeyed the doctor’s orders and went into Fleury-Moor’s sick-room. He was sitting on his bed with his arms folded.
His welcome disappointed me.
The report that I gave to him scarcely interested him at all, and when he had handled the two rarities distractedly, he said, in a loud voice and a resolute tone: “Chanteraine!”
“What?”
“You mustn’t say that about men.”
“What, my friend?”
“That the men of long ago had wings…”
“Eh?”
“It would be too sad for them, you see. You mustn’t tell them. I’ve been thinking a lot since you left… You see, Chanteraine, our need to streak through the sky, our immortal desire to fly, is no more than a hope, an impulse of the race in the direction of the best and most beautiful. It’s nothing but an ill-defined regret…regret for lost wings…regret for a paradise lost! Is that what the Old Testament tries to symbolize by the expulsion of Adam and Eve? Perhaps. Probably. Oh, believe me—all the myths of the ancients have a basis in prehistoric reality. Each of their heroes, in his turn, represents the human species. Is not Prometheus the conquest of fire? Is not the loss of flight also the fall of Icarus? An elementary tradition, muffled but tenacious, transmits the rancor or the gratitude of the flesh within itself. When we desire to acquire wings, we are mourning, without knowing it, for the wings we have lost, just as, when we experience nostalgia for the sea, what moves us so greatly, without our knowing it, is the affection of the exile for his henceforth-forbidden fatherland. No, no, we mustn’t inform men that they’re fallen angels. It would be too sad!”
“What!” I fulminated, indignant and also consternated. “You’d have the courage to remain silent? But our discovery doesn’t belong to us! It belongs to all the people of the world! And I can’t help wondering what’s sad about what we have to tell them: Long ago, men flew, but their souls crawled! Admit that we’ve gained by the exchange!”
“You mustn’t tell them.”
“And what about truth!” I cried. “The truth! Isn’t it necessary to tell that, in spite of everything, no matter what? Isn’t it necessary to sacrifice everything to it? The truth, Fleury! Isn’t that the goal of our intellectual flight? Isn’t it the truth that fits wings to our souls and enables them to rise higher than a hexapteran seraphim?”
The Doctored Man Page 10
