XVI. The Governor’s Collections.
Monsieur Cabrol returned to the Villa rubbing his hands and frowning, anxious and delighted at the same time. He had scarcely expected to encounter, in the mid-30th century, living specimens of the fabulous animals of prehistoric eras! He had expected to bring back a few little souvenirs of Astra, the new island still so little-known, for his collections—but what good luck and what promises!
Let’s wait and see how it comes out before rejoicing, he immediately thought, the advertised game is a little on the large side and too powerfully-armed.
The night was superb, but a trifle warm; it was necessary to keep the windows open. After two hours of sound sleep he woke up. All was calm; the gilded crescent of the Moon was rising into the blue above the somber outline of the mountains. He could not help thinking about all the animals he had once studied in courses in paleontology. There was more to them than their fangs and claws; some of those animals also possessed wings. Damn it! What if some great pterodactyl, avoiding traps and barriers, were to fall from the sky upon the Villa Beauséjour?
He shrugged his shoulders, calling himself a coward, and tried to go back to sleep. But just then, Phanor, sleeping in the open, growled dully in a dream. Sleep fled. Monsieur Cabrol got up and went to look out of the window. The bright Moon illuminated the course of the clouds. No, no nasty beasts in sight, on the ground or in the sky.
As he closed his eyes again, Phanor, in his turn, stood up and bounded toward the window, snarling and growling. Roaring burst forth in the darkness, followed by strangely-modulated yapping and ferocious barking, sharp enough to hurt the eardrums. Phanor, no longer able to hold back, leapt into the room, frightened, growling furiously at the sinister yapping. It was an authentic Stone Age concert, interesting as music by virtue of its strange accents—but how could anyone sleep, now?
The Moon, drifting through the clouds, cast suspicious shadows on the floor. Monsieur Cabrol thought about the particularly redoubtable reptiles of the Secondary Epoch. Utterly resigned, he plumped up his pillow with blows of his fist and buried his head underneath it to force himself to sleep—but it was the same all night long. Phanor continued to sniff at the window with muffled growls.
Of course! Monsieur Cabrol said to himself. It’s those wretched beasts in the governor’s Museum.
Finally, dawn arrived. Monsieur Cabrol was finally about to go to sleep when he heard his nephews get down from to the balcony and go out of the Villa to take a short walk around the garage in the fresh morning air.
“Well,” said their uncle, when they reappeared three quarters of an hour later, “did you sleep well?”
“Perfectly. We’ve just taken a look around; we were impatient to see something. Astraville isn’t much of a capital—two dozen houses, two large barracks built, like the houses, on colonnades of reinforced concrete, in order to allow free circulation beneath….bizarre constructions.”
I know why that is, Monsieur Cabrol thought. It’s in case vile little beasts try to come and eat the inhabitants.
“Oh, and there’s the Museum enclosure,” said Andoche, “surrounded by a triple barrier and formidable grilles. I don’t know what goes on behind them, but strange noises can be heard there.”
“Good—we’ll see soon enough; I have the governor’s promise.”
But Monsieur Cabrol was as impatient as his nephews. As soon as breakfast was over, he went out with them to take a walk around the town. The Governor’s Palace was not at all sumptuous, but it was constructed in the old Japanese style and was not lacking in picturesque qualities, prudently perched as it was, like the other houses, on stout reinforced concrete pillars. A dragon sculpted in wood was mounting guard in front of the flagpole. Monsieur Cabrol thought that the old dragon, with its red tongue and large round eyes, was an artistic scarecrow, and must have seen many others, just as spiky but more real, better armed and more dangerous than itself.
A stroke of a gong announced that the governor was waiting for the visitors in his study. Very amicably, he gave Monsieur Cabrol the temporary residence permit, along with a detailed map of the island to facilitate the travelers’ excursions.
“Before anything else,” he said, “you must see our little beasts; I intend to introduce them myself to the distinguished scientist who has come so far to study the zoological curiosities of our little Astra. A pretty country, Monsieur, but a little strange, as you’ll see!”
His Excellency had a few large-screen films of extremely picturesque Astralian landscapes displayed on the Tele, then a more dramatic film, taken after the arrival of the first Japanese dirigible, on the first day, amid the debris of the English and American expeditions.
Andoche, extremely interested, declared that he would have liked to have been there.
The governor smiled. “I was there,” he said. “It was a bit lively, but I’m proud to have witnessed the first encounter between modern man and those fantastic animals, those revenants of ancient eras! They have rude jaws, those fabulous monsters; I know something about that.”
The governor lifted his left arm and tapped the leg on the same side.
“Oh!” said the visitors. The left arm and leg were nothing but successful specimens of surgical technology.
“They work very well,” said the governor, “but I preferred the others. The arm had the honor of being bitten off by a plesiosaur of enormous size. As for the leg, it must have disappeared into the belly of an iguanodon, but I didn’t have time to notice—I was too busy.”
Andoche and Moderan opened their eyes wide.
The governor smiled. “Let’s go see my farmyard,” he continued. “You’ll see a few of our gluttonous beasts. They must have made it difficult for you to sleep last night?”
“A little,” said Monsieur Cabrol.
Andoche and Moderan declared that they had heard something vaguely, but had not been very certain. Monsieur Cabrol did not tell them that he had found Melanie ill because of the nightmarish night, which she had spent behind barricaded doors and windows.
The governor’s farmyard was well-guarded; poultry-thieves would have found it difficult to get inside. Narrow and solid grilles, lined with thick threads of barbed wire, strong fences and cages also rendered any escape by the inmates impossible.
In the enclosure that as so well-protected, there was an extraordinary swarm of monstrous heads, horns, long necks bristling with spikes, large paws with formidable spurs and nails, heavy hairy spines, and scale-clad muzzles in which horrible mouths opened—with teeth going all the way back to the throat.
A few animals reminiscent of toad-lizards were asleep, their open mouths resting on their paws; others were crawling between the scaly legs and carcasses clad in large plates bristling with upright spikes. In a corner, the heads of large-eyed batrachian heads with hairy necks were protruding from the shadows of cages. One strange animal attracted the attention of the youngsters more than the others: it was a sort of crocodile with a long birdlike neck, bearing a head with a stupid and ferocious expression. The massive body, with several rows of spurs starting at the shoulders and extending to the end of the long tail, stood erect, supported on thick legs armed with huge nails.
“Ugly beast!” said Andoche.
“A Dinosaur,” said the governor. “And over there, in that pool you can see, there’s a Plesiosaur.”
“I recognize that one,” said Monsieur Cabrol. “I’ve seen restored skeletons in the Museum.”
“This one’s alive, as you’ll see!”
The governor made a sign to a man in the enclosure, out of range of the claws, armed with a long rake. The employee took a few large fish from a basket and threw them toward the pool.
The Plesiosaur’s head came up rapidly, opening a serpentine maw with sharp teeth, and fell upon a fish that had fallen beside the pool. The heavy Dinosaur suddenly heaved itself clear, stood up on its hind legs and caught another fish in mid-air.
The sleeping beasts immediately woke up,
their horrible mouths grimacing and grating, each opening in a frightful rictus; the entire swarm launched itself forward, with thrusting horns, snapping teeth, swiping claws, toward the food distributed y the employee, all twisting, convulsing, jostling their neighbors and knocking them aside with blows of horns of horny beaks.
“Infernal dragons and serpents!” said Monsieur Cabrol. “One searches for the Archangel Michael pricking them with his lance, or Hercules trying to strike the multitudinous hydra with great hammer-blows! What models for a painter!”
“Personally,” said Andoche, “I hope to see them at liberty in the Astran countryside; it’s too good an opportunity to miss. When I go back, I want to be able to tell tales of interesting hunts and say: one day, at a turning on a mountain path, I found myself face to face with an iguanodon of the Stone Age, which came out of its cave, and…”
“And what?” asked the governor.
“And I ran away at top speed!” Moderan replied.
“That’s the safest course.”
“Or,” said Andoche, vexed, “here’s the head of a Plesiosaur that I shot one night from a hide. I can already see people rolling their wide eyes, and hear the flattering murmur.”
“Perhaps you’ll realize your desire,” said the governor.
“I don’t have so much ambition,” said Monsieur Cabrol. “What I want, myself, is simply to complete the paleontological studies of our scientists on the skeletons of antediluvian animas discovered in the deep layers of our soil, with a few observations made de visu of animals encountered alive and full of appetite, roaring and clearly manifesting a desire to swallow the indiscreet naturalist.”
The governor gave them a few further details regarding the island on which he had lived since its fall into the Pacific. Immediately after Japan had taken possession of it, the government had sent a small garrison and a commission of scientists, which had been joined by others sent by the majority of the civilized nations, to carry out a complete exploration of the island fallen from the sky. Naturally, the exploration had started with the coasts; it was a matter of making exact measurements, of noting all the particularities of the shore and the ground, the rocks and cliffs that had only been washed by the waves for a few weeks, and which had come so far, having gravitated through our atmosphere for years and caused Terrans such keen apprehensions; and, finally, to study the flora and fauna of the far-traveled island, which might furnish us with a few ideas as to the nature and life of the unknown planet from which Astra had originated.
“In the beginning,” said the governor, “insufficient precautions were taken in these explorations, in spite of the warnings furnished by the two devoured expeditions. From time to time, in extricable thickets, certain worrying traces were perceived, and the rumps of beasts disappearing into the undergrowth. A few explorers vanished, carried off by wild animals; others were fund half-eaten. The terrain was beaten, tracks were followed, and caves filled with animal remains found. Then, big game hunters were enlisted, to come and purge the island of those ferocious beasts; but they were too numerous, in spite of the massacres that were inflicted on them, especially in the early years.”
“Do you have the large carnivores of our tropical regions?”
“No—no lions or tigers, or any big cats; no animals that are known on Earth today. Astra comes from a world less advanced than the Earth, which has not yet reached its present era, but only an epoch corresponding to our Secondary or Tertiary Era, and the only animals that can be und there are quite similar to those of our prehistoric times. There are no big birds on our island; they probably disappeared at the moment when Astra escaped its native planet in the curse of some cataclysm; we’ve seen nothing of the family of our vultures.”
“And no creature remotely approaching the first representatives of the human family in the age of caverns?” said Cabrol.
“None.”
“And our pithecoid species, our great apes?”
“Almost nothing—a few flying creatures with something of the monkey and bird about them, a sort of monkey-bat; a few specimens of another very characteristic species, intermediate between a monkey and a cat. I’ll show you some, carefully stuffed.”
XVII. Unfortunate Encounters in the Dead Forest.
The Villa Beauséjour took off slowly for an initial trip. The governor was standing at a window of the Palace, waving in a friendly manner. In the radiant weather, the Sun was very hot, but they expected that they would soon find a breeze higher up.
When Melanie had complained of a bad migraine, due to the anguish of the night, Moderan had taken her, before the departure, to the fences and grilles of the Museun, and had made her feel the strength of the iron bars, in order to calm her down. The migraine had eased immediately. Reassured, Melanie, was able to enjoy the trip.
At an altitude of 500 meters, the Villa Beauséjour encountered a pleasant little air current. They breathed more freely. The capital Astraville seemed a very small matter from there, but the island was outlined as a whole, with all its indentations and its crown of rocky peaks around the central summit.
The volcanic constitution of Astra was clearly evident. The rocks and subsidiary peaks around the central one bordered an immense crater from the middle of which the central peak surged. The entire middle of the island, devoid of vegetation, was nothing but a stony chaos, an aggregation of blocks that had fallen into ravines, beneath the edges of sharp crests.
“It’s the crater of an ancient volcano,” Monsieur Cabrol explained.
“And is it about to erupt suddenly?” asked Moderan, anxiously.
“It no longer can; its base is resting on the Ocean bed, so there’s no more lava underneath, nothing but water and perhaps a few fish in the depths of the crater.”
“That’s true—I like that better.”
The Villa descended again and began to follow the shoreline, entering into all the clefts and tacking in order to go and look at everything that seemed interesting at closer range—ravines in the depths of inlets, encumbered by landslides, which were nothing but the beds of former torrents and dried-up cascades.
What pretty creeks they discovered in this way while flying over the shore: neatly excised coves, bordered with high cliffs or rocky crags. There was no lack of handsome pines torn up and lying in the waves, as in Provençal creeks. They saw a few trunks pointing this way and that on the slopes, amid the young vegetation; the governor had mentioned plantations, started five or six years before along the shore, but they would need time.
“It will be better in a few years,” said Monsieur Cabrol, “and it will pass from dry picturesque to verdant picturesque, embalmed with the perfume of the Japanese islands. That’s in the program, the governor told me: rid the island of its nasty prehistoric beasts, which no longer have any place in our era, then reforestation.”
As they went along a slightly wider valley, which emerged into an inlet on the southern coast, the Villa Beauséjour was allowed to gain speed slightly. There were tangles of brushwood there that did not originate from Japanese plantations; it was an ancient and unknown vegetation. Although he was a rather inexpert botanist, Monsieur Cabrol recognized vegetal species distantly related to terrestrial species.
“Look out!” said Moderan, consulting the map of the island. “We’re in a region advertised as hazardous by the governor!”
“At 25 meters above the rocks we have nothing to fear,” said Monsieur Cabrol. “I’ll keep an eye on the route; we won’t go any lower down…”
Andoche, leaning over the balcony, searched the hollow of the valley with his binoculars. He made a sign to Monsieur Cabrol and murmured, as if he were afraid to scare away some game: “Look behind that bush—something moved.”
“I can’t see anything.”
“Yes! I can see…oh, it’s gone. It was a reptile; it’s gone back into its hole.”
“I can see something else down there,” said Moderan, approaching in his turn. “Near the glittering water…”
&nb
sp; “Yes, a little pool.”
“Well, there’s something on the edge, to the right…”
“Mere toads—I can see them too!”
“Mere toads, you say,” said Monsieur Cabrol, “seen from this height—but they’re a meter wide, your toads. Let’s go down a little. Can you see them more clearly? Swollen and pustulant, with horns…and even reptilian wings. A snapshot, Andoche, quickly!”
“Look out!” said Moderan.
The Villa had descended too far; they were about to skim the bushes and drive into the pool—but the photograph was taken; they were able to go up again.
“Penguins!” cried Moderan.
On a rocky crest, penguins were lined up, holding council, seemingly looking at the Villa in bewilderment. They covered their heads with their thick, heavy wings, and clicked their formidable moustached beaks, displaying pointed teeth.
“Another photo!”
“It’s done!”
Phanor, who could not see the game, nevertheless started barking in a room—but the Villa rose up again. The landscape really was becoming fantastically picturesque. After all, while maintaining a height of 25 or 30 meters, they could not have anything to fear.
The binoculars continued to search the extraordinarily dense brushwood, or penetrated the holes in rocks that might have served as lairs for wild beasts. The latter, if there were any, did not allow themselves to be seen; they could clearly make out, among the lianas, beneath the arborescent ferns, ripples where the vegetation was stirred by the passage of some animal, but nothing more.
By following the coast in this fashion they arrived in a region of a very different character. There were still gorges and landslides of large boulders, but the slopes of the ravines were bristling with broken trees, which climbed in serried ranks up the mountain-slopes, their trunks dry and white, with no greenery—the mighty trunks of centenarian trees extending twisted and withered arms in despairing gestures, long gnarled branches or broken stumps: a nightmarish landscape.
Chalet in the Sky Page 25
