The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  The grotto was dark and the king could scarcely make out anything except the stalactites in the vault. In any case, a disturbance so new, anguishing and charming at the same time had invaded him that he did not want to know immediately whether it really was the route that had taken the Galadian missionaries to the rest of the world.

  He went back to the palace, had supper as usual, and went to bed, putting off all exploration until the following day.

  He could not sleep. He got up in the middle of the night. He went into a room nearby where weapons were arranged. He picked up a steel pike and emerged from the room.

  An astonished guard saw him pass by; he expected the king to ask him to accompany him, but the latter, as if hallucinated, continued on his way, went into the gardens and reached the grotto.

  There, in the heavy and mute obscurity, he was gripped by a great apprehension. He knelt down and prayed to the Virgin. Then he began striking the walls of the grotto with his pike. One place resounded under the steel in a fashion different from the others. He struck it with the point. He braced himself on his young, strong limbs and struck with all his vigor, increasing his effort from moment to moment. Soon, under a more brutal thrust, a block came away. The pike went through into empty space, and the king felt so excited that his knees wobbled; he closed his eyes and stood there, holding his breath.

  Then he recovered his senses and continued his work. The wall built by Mahara crumbled beneath his pike. The old cement fell as dust to the ground; the breach was large enough to allow the king to pass through. He went through.

  The darkness and the silence were absolute. He opened his arms, and his hands encountered the walls of the corridor.

  He knew enough. He left the pike behind and returned to his bedroom. He meditated.

  Eventually, this is what he did:

  He filled his pockets with all the gold that he found in his apartments, and left a letter he had written visible on a table:

  In consequence of a vow, I, the king, have decided to enclose myself until the end of the present year in an abbey in Galade, and to lead and austere and reclusive life there in the company of monks. I do not want anyone to search for me, or anyone to attempt to trouble my retreat. For all the time of my absence I declare my Uncle Gasp, the brother of my venerated father King Georguis, regent of Galade, and my tutor Mnektes as his privy councilor.

  Written in the royal palace of Gyzir on the night preceding the twentieth Sunday of the present year, the fifth of my reign, and the nineteen hundred and fifth of the Christian Era.

  Emmanuel.

  He placed his seal at the bottom of that fine lie, went past the soldier on guard, went down to the gardens, made sure that no one had followed him, went back to the grotto and the breach, went into it, and set out along the corridor.

  Part Two

  ASTONISHMENTS

  The Orient Express

  He arrived on the other side of the mountain two days later, at dawn, exhausted. He traversed the plain. He went into Traese. He was very hungry. His costume caused a passer-by to turn his head. A child taking cows to pasture burst out laughing. He continued on his way. The early hour helped him not to attract too much attention. He went into a clothing merchant’s shop, threw a gold coin on the counter and said: “A suit of clothes.”

  The merchant picked up the coin, turned it over, looked at his customer suspiciously, and then, having weighed the coin and having turned it between his fingers again, toward the window, put it in his pocket, asked the king to follow him, and dressed him.

  Thus, Emmanuel was able to go, without attracting attention, to look around with all the thirst of his gaze. He went into an inn and ate. Nothing seemed very astonishing to him: the form of the plates, the nourishment, the faces of the diners, the innkeeper and his daughter did not appear very different from those he had seen in Galade.

  Having eaten, he emerged from the inn and wandered through the streets. Suddenly, behind him, a violent rumble nailed him to the spot. He turned around to confront the unexpected, and saw a carriage coming toward him that was moving on its own.

  Amazed, he stepped back a few paces and found himself on a sidewalk. The carriage was far away by the time he recovered his senses. Finally, he decided to make sure. He followed its direction, trying to catch up with it. He perceived it in the distance. He hastened his pace. A strident whistle rang out behind him. He turned his head swiftly and stepped aside just in time to let a young man go by who was moving without putting his feet on the ground, sitting down, balanced over two narrow wheels placed one in front of the other, moved by a chain that the equilibrist was activating by moving his legs up and down in a regular rhythm.

  The king smiled and said to himself: It’s baroque, but convenient. Then he resumed his pursuit of the strange vehicle. He perceived it, stopped in front of a monument of stone and iron, around which a busy crowd was coming and going. He went into the monument. He was in a large hall, filed by a similarly agitated crowd. Blasts of whistles, the ringing of bells and strange roars dominated the hubbub of the crowd. In the middle of the room a glazed door was open. He went through it.

  An extraordinary spectacle was before his eyes.

  It seemed to him as if someone had cut his palace in Galade into several rooms, with their furniture, their fabrics and the gold on their walls, and, with their walls and the façade, their floor, their windows, had transported them here and set them on massive low wheels. Those rooms followed one another in a file, and in front to the sequence of rooms, puffing and smoking, rumbling and shaking its entire being, as if racked by formidable coughs, was an enormous thing composed of two huge cauldrons inverted and fixed on a colossal tube, lying on a large platform supported by wheels. There was a long tapering pipe at one extremity of the tube and a kind of cage at the other extremity, where two black, sweating men were moving precipitately, turning copper levers, and in which a little low door suddenly opened, behind which the king saw a dazzling blaze, which could only be burning in the very entrails of the Thing.

  Two huge wheels under its breast were offered, smooth and shiny, to the wind and the open air, resembling the deployment of the knees of a large beast lowering itself down and turning its back. Beneath it and in front of it, and under all the beautiful rooms, stretched steel bars.

  The king went up a few steps and penetrated audaciously into one of the rooms.

  Several people were installed there, sitting down, who paid no attention to the newcomer. He traversed a corridor, went into another room, and was amusing himself contemplating the fabrics and the furniture when he suddenly heard and felt, almost simultaneously, the sound of a bell, a furious whistling, cries of adieu, and a great shaking throughout his being.

  The roaring Thing drew the rooms behind it, with their windows, their hangings, their armchairs and their occupants; in an instant, the stone monument and its crowd disappeared, and an inextricable tangle of large thin wooden stakes, ornamented at their summit by little porcelain bells from which wires escaped, and iron stalks at the top of which huge arms of glass or painted iron agitated, brushed the glass of the room where the king was.

  He threw himself backwards, instinctively, and then he felt himself carried away: carried away by an irresistible force; carried away at high speed, through he knew not what, toward he knew not what, his haggard and bulging eyes, dazzled, seeing nothing but grassy banks, trees, and then villages, and then forests, racing , it seemed, toward the windows, like night-birds toward a lighted window—but in reality, disappearing as quickly as they appeared, without even having touched anything, giving way to others, and yet others, in a vertiginous cortege...

  None of the king’s companions seemed astonished, and the king, tottering, let himself fall into an armchair, shut his eyes and fainted, with the final sensation of having been snatched from the ground, snatched out of himself, and dragged away, without any possible resistance, like a dead leaf along a highway over which a winter wind is blowing.

&n
bsp; Paris

  Grindings, stops, somersaults of the gasping machine, further leaps into the unknown, immense cities glimpsed in the hectic course, with their domes, their steeples and their towers, the multicolored vagueness of their roofs, their swarming crowds... At every stop, the desire to get down and flee, and the desire to know what there might be at the end of that race... A dolorous turbulence, and then confusion, a kind of semi-dream; then a veritable awakening, audacity and youth gripping the reins again, a bewildered curiosity, the acceptance of a temporarily ineluctable destiny... The king of Galade, standing at the window, hanging on to the curtain rail, watches the landscapes fly past and feels ablaze with life.

  Spoken words extracted him from his daze. Two travelers chatting some distance away from the armchair into which he had fallen exchanged a few banal remarks.

  “I’m going all the way to Paris,” one said.

  “Of course,” said the other. “You can’t go any further.”

  The king inferred that the name signified the destination. Unconscious effort took place in his still-torpid mind.

  Paris...where he had heard that name before? Paris…a monument…ah! It was in Zahun’s manuscript…the cathedral of Notre-Dame...

  Then he let himself slide again into a kind of nonchalance.

  Eventually, standing up, alive and lucid, he waited for the unforeseeable and unimaginable future.

  He dined with a hearty appetite in one of the rooms, brightly lit, furnished with little florid tables; night had arrived, rendering the roaring of the machine more frightful; the calm of his companions gave him confidence. Like them, he had gone to sleep, work up, still moving; a day went by, he arrived at the destination.

  A man dressed in a uniform had asked him where he came from. “Traese,” he replied, and took gold out of his pocket. The man had taken his gold and given him several silver coins. And then he had arrived; he was able to go forth and march as he pleased through the unknown city.

  He emerged from the vast edifice in which the train had immobilized and, finding himself on a sidewalk, in a vague light, divined houses in the shadow facing him, distinguishing their forms poorly, and was soon surrounded by valets, who hastened to offer him shelter. He decided that he would wait for daylight to see what was there. He followed one of the valets to a nearby house, brilliantly lit, high, vast and sumptuous.

  He was taken to the foot of a staircase. He got ready to go up…a grille opened in front of him. The man escorting him stood aside to let him pass. Ready for anything, moving into the accepted Unknown, the king went into a kind of cage fitted with mirrors. The valet followed him, pressed lightly on a copper button, and the king felt himself uprooted from the ground again, irresistibly...

  The cage soon stopped. The valet opened it. The king came out and looked around, over the ramp. The staircase had been climbed without him making a movement. A steel arm, round and smooth, had lifted him up, along with the valet—the arm of some unknown giant hidden under the staircase, whom a mysterious signal had alerted.

  Preceding the king, the valet stopped in front of a door in a corridor, and opened it; the king penetrated into a dark room. Suddenly, without him having heard any sound or seeing and porter of light come in, the chamber was inundated with brightness. A lamp hanging from the ceiling had lit up of its own accord.

  “Ho!” said the king, anxiously. “How did that lamp light up?”

  The valet shivered; he looked the king up and down, anxiously, from head to toe, and then said: “Has Monsieur come far?”

  Parenthesis

  You will doubtless be astonished that the king is presumed to be able to understand and speak the language of the lands through which he is passing and will pass. You should not be astonished. In truth, if nothing were to be astonishing in this book, there would have been no need to subtitle it a fantastic tale.

  Furthermore, illustrious examples inform us that certain voyagers understand and speak the language of countries that are most strange and unexpected to them. Thus, Ulysses saved himself from the cyclops Polyphemus by means of an unforgettable pun; hence, we must admit that the son of Laertes, in a single day, had succeeded in penetrating the linguistic subtleties appropriate to the sons of Neptune. Also, there are innumerable historical narratives, accounts of voyages, epics and beautiful tragedies in which you have read or heard the dialogue: “Be welcome to our shores, stranger. Sit down and tell us your name, your race and your beliefs,” and the stranger replies, immediately, without any mention ever being made even of any difficulty of pronunciation: “Very hospitable men, the gods that have permitted me to land on your shores enabled me to be born under other skies. I come from a distant land...” Etc.

  Let us therefore go back as soon as possible to the king and the nonplussed bellboy, who has just asked him whether he had come far.

  Paris Continued

  “Very far,” replied the king.

  The bellboy went to the door, took between his fingers a little wooden bulb suspended on a thread that was attached to the wall, went along the ceiling and connected with the lamp. He said: “Like this…,” pressed the bottom of the bulb with his finger, and everything went dark. An instant later, the lamp was shining again.

  The king looked at the valet, abruptly. He was correctly dressed; gilded braid even circled his cap and his sleeves and ran down the sides of his trousers, but his face was merely vulgar. His eyes, rather sharp were more like those of a cunning man fond of petty profits, on the lookout for them and provoking them, than a magician producing and suppressing light at a distance. One sensed, beneath his beautiful costume, his body, although straight and robust, was elastic in the spine, ever ready for bows and hasty servitudes.

  “Thank you,” said the king. “You can go.”

  “If Monsieur needs me,” said the man, after a curt bow, “press on that other button.” And he went.

  Left alone, the king played with the button in the wooden bulb, making the light go on and off several times in succession. He opened the door suddenly, and saw no one. He closed it again, and wondered whether there might be someone in the ceiling. It was absolutely impossible for him to explain by what mysterious mechanism a simple pressure of the finger had been able, a little while ago, to hoist a cage and its occupants to the top of a staircase, without any shocks, and now another simple pressure could create, annihilate and recreate light.

  He told himself that many other stupefactions undoubtedly awaited him, that six hundred years had gone by between Zahun’s voyage and his own—six hundred years in which cloistered Galade, having neither known anything about nor received anything from the external world, had lived the same life of nourishing labor, corporeal, sentimental and religious joys—and that many other amazing things certainly lay in store for him. The people he was going to see must, although they were not made any differently than the Galadians, have very different mores, activities and sentiments...

  He went to bed. Before sleep rolled him up in its thick padding, incoherent dreams laid siege to him, from which two images were detached, entangled in horrific enlacements, and dominating him alternately: the immense machine with the fiery entrails that had brought him from Traese to Paris in a few hours, and the valet with the vulgar face and servile spine, who toyed with light and weight.

  Finally, he fell asleep.

  When he woke up, he strove to recall his impressions and organize them. He decided that he was unable as yet to think or deduce, or even imagine, anything. He went to the window, opened it, and gazed at the city. It was still very early, and yet a crowd was thronging the streets, going back and forth along them in haste. The sole preoccupation of getting to where they were going was legible in their faces.

  The king conjectured that they were artisans, employees and scribes going to work. The houses facing him, although much higher than Galadian habitations, were commonplace in appearance: doors, plaster walls on the façades, windows, roofs, no decoration except for some poor moldings and a few
painted signs…but between them, and beyond the roofs, he perceived the tips of steeples, towers and brilliant cupolas.

  He was about to close the window, feeling a great desire to go and mingle with that crowd, to wander at hazard, with his eyes wide open, and therefore to hasten getting dressed, when and inexplicable noise sent the air above him, like the buzz of a giant dragonfly. He leaned out, looked up, and saw an immense, inassimilable form pass over, a kind of giant fish without gills, fins or a head, which, for a tail, had a great wing rotting under the body at a prodigious speed, and which held suspended, sat the end of slanting cables departing from the two extremities of its belly, a long and frail walkway on which two men were standing.

  It was so excessive and fantastic that he was afraid, sensing his chest tighten, and he put his hand over his eyes. The immense form drew away, advancing serenely through the air perhaps fifty meters above the roofs; then, at a certain moment, it swerved in the air and turned right.

  Into what world had the king fallen? How could he ever comprehend it? How was it possible that the pedestrians in the street, who had looked up like him, were continuing their bleak and hasty route, not uttering cries of terror on seeing men in the claws of that apocalyptic bird, which was slowly disappearing in the gray sky?

  He needed to see a face, to hear a voice. He remembered the signal that summoned the valet. He pressed the button on the wall and waited.

  The valet came in. He saw the distressed face of the king. The latter drew the valet to the window and asked him: “What passed over…up there is the air…above the roofs…and disappeared in the sky?”

  The bellboy scrutinized the horizon. “Monsieur is doubtless talking about the dirigible? But Monsieur seems to be feeling poorly...”