“Here, Schmidt—come here!” he shouted.
The old servant let himself slide down the declivity of the crag, collecting a few grazes. He found his master pale and wild-eyed, his hair in disorder, with his hand on the edge of an enormous boulder placed on the rim of a precipice, the sight of which induced vertigo. It was an irregular block with rounded corners, probably brought into that strange position by one the inexplicable prehistoric revolutions with the aid of which nature has turned almost all of Scandinavia upside-down.
“This is it—yes, this is definitely it,” the young man murmured, in a low voice, as if he were afraid of being overheard. “The spirit of the sage, and all his science, is about to be mine.” And he darted a boastful glance into space.
“Help me overturn this rock,” he suddenly said, in a loud voice, to Schmidt.
“Oh, Master, Master! What do you want to do? It would need superhuman strength.”
“Help me,” Franz repeated, in a harsh and severe tone, which he was using for the first time on the poor servant who had cared for him since his childhood. “Combine your efforts with mine, and may Vidar protect me!”
Smith imitated his master, and bent down beneath the rock.
For a few moments, they made futile efforts—and for anyone able to see them, the strange spectacle would have been offered of two men struggling against nature, whose work of destruction had stopped before that mass. Suddenly, however, the rock quivered on its narrow based, oscillated momentarily as if it wanted to bury the pygmies who were attacking it, and, losing equilibrium, was precipitated down the mountain with a terrible noise, which awoke a thousand sonorous echoes.
They could hear it for a long time, breaking everything in its passage, drawing an avalanche in its wake of everything that in encountered on its route, uprooting trees, staving in soelers, then bounding into a torrent, where it sank with a thunderous rumble, after waking up the eagles sleeping in their eyries, which took flight, uttering their shrill and lugubrious screeches., and bears which fled their lairs howling.
Terrified, Schmidt collapsed on the ground. Franz pushed back his hair, which a cold sweat had stuck to his forehead. The guide, thinking the travelers he had led had just fallen victim to their curiosity, and that the entire mountain was crumbling, ran away uttering screams of terror.
A few moments later, a profound, harrowing silence replaced these multiple, horrible, indefinable noises. After having darted another prideful glance at the nature surrounding him, all of whose mysteries he was about to know—at the pale blue sky unfurled over his head and which, for him, would no longer have any secrets, and over the immense horizons that he was about to fathom to infinity—Franz recovered a fraction of his calmness and looked down at his feet.
In being displaced, the mass of granite, had uncovered a cavity that it had sealed for perhaps 2000 years. Without worrying about his servant, who was no longer showing any signs of life—what was one man to the person who was about to know everything?—he sat down, dangling his legs over the edge of the gaping hole, trying to see into its gloom.
There, involuntarily, the past suddenly appeared to him: the years of his childhood, with their insouciance, their naïve joys, passed before his eyes again; all his youth came back into his heart: the memory of that pure and devoted love, which he had refused in hastening his heartbeat to breaking-point. As if by means of a memory anterior to himself, he recalled his mother, whom he had never known; it seemed to him that a white form, with a smile on her lips and an aureole about her forehead, but with a broken, bleeding heart, was extending her arms to him.
He wondered then whether he was the plaything of a dream, if it was really him on this desolate peak, to which the genius of evil had transported him, as Christ had once been transported, in order to tempt him. And he stood up fearfully, to extract himself from that somber gulf, which seemed to be his tomb—but his foot collided with a sonorous object.
The Moon had risen into the sky; its tremulous rays showed him, at the bottom of the cavity into which he had gone breast-deep, an iron box corroded by rust. He remembered, and, chasing away the holy thoughts that had stopped him momentarily on the brink of the abyss, he reached out a hand.
On contact with the damp and icy metal, his fingers clenched around a closed ring on the lid of the box, with such force that he could not detach them. It was with fury, then, that he strove to draw the mysterious box toward him.
Schmidt, who had recovered his senses, had dragged himself to his master’s side on his knees. “Oh, my dear Master,” he said, in a faltering voice, “that’s the work of the Devil—let’s flee this place!”
Franz, who was not listening, did not hear. He dug his fingernails into the earth in order to extract his treasure therefrom.
It was a horrible hour, that hour of hard labor in the midst of the lugubrious silence, only broken by Schmidt’s sobs, the curses of the seeker and the quivering of the air beneath the wings of the eagles that were multiplying the concentric circles of their flight around the mountain peak.
Franz finally succeeded in hoisting the box up to the platform. He made one last effort then, and hauled himself out of the hole. In the course of that final movement the box opened, and a mummified head rolled out of it, with sunken eyes, prominent cheekbones and cracked, partly open lips. It came to a stop at the feet of the young man, who had hurled himself in pursuit of it.
“What shall I know?” he demanded of the head, kneeling down.
“Everything!” it replied, in a strange voice that seemed to emerge from the bowels of the earth.
Schmidt, who was following what was happening in front of him with haggard eyes, screamed and fled. Franz, bruised breathless and exhausted, fell forwards, wrapping his arms around the head, as he might have done to a beloved woman, for fear that she might escape him.
Rising slowly into the sky, the Sun began its work of resurrection; the stars paled before the splendor of its rays. The clouds of mist extended over the valley were dissipating; red deer were belling in the forest; the tops of the fir-trees were shivering under the kisses of the breeze; the flowers of the soelers began to open their corollas; all the echoes of the mountain repeated the joyous murmurs of the nature that was waking up to the first fires of the day, and the ringing of the hamlet’s church-bell, calling the faithful to prayer, rose up clear and sonorous toward the Heavens, repeating: Fiat lux!
We have passed over two years in a single bound, and we find Franz unrecognizable, even to those who had been his intimates. His cheeks are hollow; his complexion, once as fresh as a young woman’s, is marbled and livid; his eyes are hollow and vitreous; his figure is bent; profound wrinkles are already furrowing his brow; his mouth is twisted into a bitter smile. Doubt has crept into the most secret recesses of his soul; pain has imprinted its cruel stigmata on his face; his youth has fled; at less than 30 years of age, he is already an old man.
And yet, he is knowledgeable! Science has lavished him with its most impenetrable secrets; his knowledge has astonished the entire world; his name is on everyone’s lips, with admiration, but all forms of affection have deserted him—his oppressed heart no longer understands them. His proud and jealous mistress, science, has chased them all away.
One alone endured until the last moment: Marguerite only died of grief a few days ago, already aged, no longer the brilliant child of yesteryear. After these two years, during which she had given all her youth, all her soul and all her love, without receiving anything in return, she died without complaint, showing Franz the Heavens with her diaphanous and trembling hand.
He is on his deathbed in his turn, alone and isolated; he is holding Mimer’s head between his thin fingers.
“But what is death?” he croaks, gathering the strength of the last breath that remains to him.
“Death, for the proud, is punishment, the end of folly and doubt,” replied the head. “For those who have loved, it is the beginning of life in eternal love.”
Fr
anz uttered a scream, and expired.
When they came to take away the body, the gravediggers recoiled in fright. The cadaver was holding an embalmed head in its clenched hands, which could not be removed therefrom. They were obliged to seal it up with him in the tomb of the Heberghems.
Alphonse Daudet: Wood’stown
(1873)
It was a superb place to build a city. It was only a matter of clearing the banks of the river and felling a part of the forest—the immense virgin forest, rooted there since the birth of the world. Then, sheltered on all sides by wooded hills, the city would descend to the quays of a magnificent harbor, established near the mouth of the Red River, only four miles from the sea.
As soon as the government in Washington had granted the concession, woodcutters and carpenters set to work—but you never saw such a forest. Clinging to the soil with all its lianas and all its roots, when one felled it in one place it grew back in another, rejuvenating itself in its wounds, and every blow of the axe caused green buds to emerge. The streets and squares of the city, scarcely sketched out, were invaded by vegetation. The walls grew less rapidly than the trees, and crumbled as soon as they were built under the efforts of still-living roots.
To overcome that resistance, which blunted the blades of axes and hatchets, they were obliged to have recourse to fire. Day and night, thick smoke filled the dense thickets, while the tall trees above burned like candles. The forest still tried to fight back, hindering the fire with floods of sap and the airless coolness of its clustered leaves.
Finally, winter arrived. The snow came down like a second death upon the large areas full of blackened trunks and burnt roots. Henceforth, it was possible to build.
Soon, an immense city made entirely of wood, like Chicago, extended along the banks of the Red River, with its broad streets lined up and numbered, radiating around squares, with its bank, its markets, its churches, its schools, and an entire maritime apparatus of sheds, customs-houses, docks, bonded warehouses and boatyards. The city of wood—Wood’stown as it was called—was rapidly populated by new occupants. A feverish activity circulated in all its districts, but in the surrounding hills, overlooking the streets filled with crowds and the harbor cluttered with vessels, a dark and menacing semicircular mass was displayed. It was the forest, which was watching.
It watched the insolent city that had taken the place of three thousand gigantic trees on the river’s edge. All of Wood’stown was made with its own life. The tall masts that swayed gown there in the harbor, those innumerable roofs descending toward one another, all the way to the last and most distant suburban hut—it had furnished everything, even the instruments of labor and the furniture, its services only measured by the length of its branches. What a terrible rancor it nurtured, therefore, against that city of plunderers!
For as long as winter lasted, no one noticed anything. The people of Wood’stown sometimes heard a dull creaking in their roofs and items of furniture. From time to time, a wall cracked, or a shop counter noisily split into two—but new wood is subject to such accidents, and no one attached any importance to them. At the approach of spring, however—a sudden, violent spring, so rich in sap that one sensed it underground like the running of springs—the ground began to stir, lifted up by invisible but active forces. In every house, the furniture and the partition walls became boated, and long swellings were seen in the floors, as if moles were passing through them. Doors and windows alike could no longer be closed.
“It’s the humidity,” said the inhabitants. “It will pass, in the summer heat.”
Suddenly, the day after a great storm that had blown in from the sea, which brought the summer in its scorching lightning-bolts and warm rain, the waking city uttered a cry of amazement. The red roofs of public monuments, the bell-towers of churches and the floors of houses, all the way to wooden bed-frames, were sprinkled with a green tint, as thin as mildew and as light as lace. At closer range, it was a quantity of microscopic buds, or the unfurling of leaves already glimpsed. The bizarre abundance amused people without causing anxiety, but before dusk, clusters of greenery were blooming everywhere on the furniture and the walls. Branches were visibly growing; lightly retained in the hand, the increase in their size could be felt, and a fluttering as of wings.
The following day, all the apartments looked like greenhouses. Lianas followed the ramps of staircases. In the narrow streets, branches came together from one roof to the next, setting over the noisy city the shade of forest glades. That became worrying. While scientists met to deliberate upon this extraordinary case of vegetation, crowds gathered outside to see the various aspects of the miracle. Cries of surprise, and the astonished rumor of all those inactive people, gave a solemnity to the strange event.
Suddenly, someone shouted: “Look at the forest!”—and they perceived with terror that, in two days, the verdant semicircle had drawn much closer. The forest seemed to be descending toward the city. An entire advance guard of brambles and lianas reached as far as the first outlying houses.
Then Wood’stown began to comprehend and to be afraid. Evidently, the forest was coming to reclaim its place at the river’s edge, and its trees, felled, dispersed and transformed, were liberating themselves in order to precede it. How could the invasion be resisted? With fire, there was a risk of burning the entire city—and what could axes do against that incessantly-renewed sap, those monstrous roots attacking the ground from below and those thousands of airborne seeds that were germinating explosively and causing a tree to grow wherever they fell?
Everyone set to work bravely, however, with scythes, harrows and axes, and there was an immense carnage of foliage. It was in vain, though. From one hour to the next, the confusion of virgin forests, in which the interlacing of lianas is combined with gigantic shoots, invaded the streets of Wood’stown. Already there was an irruption of insects and reptiles. There were nests in every corner, and huge fluttering flocks of birds, and masses of little chattering beaks. In one night the city’s granaries were exhausted by all the newly-hatched broods. Then, like an irony amid all that disaster, butterflies of all sizes and all colors flew over the florid clusters and provident bees in search of safe shelters in the hollows of the trees that had sprouted so rapidly installed their honeycombs, as evidence of duration.
Vaguely, in the noisy surge of foliage, the dull blows of axes and hatchets could be heard. On the fourth day, however, all labor was recognized to be impossible. The grass had grown too high and too thick. Climbing lianas clung to the arms of the woodcutters, strangling their movements. Besides, the houses were becoming uninhabitable; the items of furniture, laden with foliage, had lost their shape. The ceilings collapsed, pieced by the lances of yuccas and the long spines of mahogany-trees—and instead of roofs, the immense domes of catalpas were displayed.
It was over. It was necessary to flee.
Through the network of plants and branches that was growing increasingly dense, the terrified people of Wood’stown raced to the river, carrying as much as they could of their wealth and precious objects. They had difficulty reaching the riverbank, though; there were no more quays—nothing but gigantic reeds. The boatyards, where timber was kept, had given way to forests of fir-trees, and in the harbor, where everything was in flower, the new ships looked like green islets. Fortunately, a few armored frigates were found there, on which the crowd took refuge, and from which they were able to see the old forest join victoriously with the new forest.
Little by little, the treetops became confused, and under the sunlit blue sky, the enormous mass of foliage extended along the riverbank to the distant horizon. There was no more trace of the city, neither roofs nor walls. From time to time, a muffled noise of collapse, the last echo of a ruin, or the axe-blow of an enraged woodcutter would resound in the depths of the foliage. Then there was no longer anything but the vibrant, rustling, buzzing silence, clouds of white butterflies spiraling over the deserted river, and downriver, toward the open sea, a fleeing ship, wit
h three great green trees looming up amidst its sails, carrying away the last emigrants from what had been Wood’stown.
Camille Flammarion: Love Among the Stars
(1896)
“What up with you this morning?” I exclaimed, on seeing André arrive in my study, with a disconcerted and desolate expression. His face was very pale, his eyes haggard his hair unkempt and his step weary, as if he had come back from a long-distance run. “You obviously haven’t spent the night stargazing, although the sky was as clear as I’ve seen it for a long time.”
“On the contrary—yes, I spent a long time observing the sky last night; but I’m emerging from an unparalleled astonishment, and I certainly haven’t slept a wink this morning. I’m still flabbergasted. But what you mistake for terror was only an agreeable and charming surprise, followed by a boundless regret—a surprise so great that I haven’t recovered from it.”
“Have you discovered a new star with a fantastic spectrum, a nebula of extravagant form, a comet with hectic tresses? Is it only the insomnia that succeeds a vivid excitement?”
“It’s an adventure more extraordinary than any you could imagine. I dreamed about Dora—yes, Dora, my deceased beloved.”
“Oh, your imagination! What tricks it plays on you! You’ve become the victim of hallucinations—you, whose mind is so calm and ponderous. Don’t trust yourself! I’ve already told you that. It’s a dangerous slope. You’re too much a poet. I prefer mathematics—it’s safer.”
“I’m not arguing. Hallucination, dream, whatever you like; but I’m still overwhelmed by what I’ve seen and heard—and that’s not unreasonable at all.”
“Well, tell me your story. I don’t doubt that it will be very interesting.”
My friend André was a young man of 25, an excellent observer of the sky, describing with great exactitude the planetary aspects of Mars, Jupiter or Saturn—to which his studies were preferentially devoted—but a trifle dreamy and mystical. A great and unforgettable distress had struck him, and since that time, which was still quite recent, he had been plunged into a constant melancholy.
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